Will not be voting for Barack Obama. In his recent speech he states:

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.

How dare Barack suggest that welfare might have had a deleterious effect on poor minorities. Does he not understand the importance the state plays in redistributing the wealth to those that, through no fault of their own, are poor?

taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Does Barack understand that the poor are indigent not because of a lack of responsibility but because of circumstance way beyond their control? Poor people are not only the hardest working, but they are also make the wisest financial choices. Despite this, circumstances way beyond their control put them in a state of poverty from which they can not recover. It has absolutely nothing to do with personal responsibility.

If Barack keeps up this kind of rhetoric I might just vote for him. Of course my vote comes at the cost of the liberals who, to stay consistent in argumentation, must reject this kind of rhetoric. I’m not sure if Barack comes out with more votes if he adopts a rhetorical theme of people taking care of themselves instead of having the state do it for them.

George McGovern, the 1972 democratic candidate for president has this to say:

Since leaving office I’ve written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I’ve come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.

Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don’t take away cars because we don’t like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don’t operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.

Here is to hoping that in time some of my left leaning reader will also come to the realization that liberty means letting people have the freedom to make and be responsible for their mistakes.

Thanks to Dan’s astute observations regarding communism, I now know that America has been very lucky avoiding any of those magic variables that cause massive civilian death. For example, China’s policy in the 1950’s called the Great Leap Forward had absolutely nothing to do with 40 million people that starved to death.
Rather, China was unlucky to have some magic variable that had nothing to do with their Communistic policies that cause all the death. America truly is lucky going 200 plus years without one of these random magical variables befallen us and kill millions of our people.

Unfortunately the same can not be said about Zimbawe. Apparently Zimbawe was well on its way to affluence.

In the years following independence, Zimbabwe had the second largest economy south of the Sahara and the third highest per capita gross domestic product. In the first two years after independence, the economy grew by 24 per cent. This was followed by 5 per cent annualised growth in the next 15 years. The highest inflation rate was 12 per cent.

But then, some random variable befallen this fine nation, a variable that, according to Dan, is completely independent of government or economic policy. Look at the carnage this magical variable has wrought on Zimbabwe.

Since then, and especially since 2000, Zimbabwe has gone from being a promising country, full of committed, highly literate and skilled people, to a basket case with a population broken by years of neglect and numerous assaults on their ever-dwindling liberties.

Today, 70 per cent of the country’s commercial agriculture has been destroyed by government mismanagement. Only 10 per cent of the winter food crop was planted due to lack of fuel and fertilisers. More than four million Zimbabweans are in need of food aid, 45 per cent of the population is malnourished and unemployment is over 85 per cent. One in four of the population has HIV-AIDS and 350 children in Zimbabwe are orphaned every day due to the disease.

Zimbabwe has the lowest life expectancy in the world. Women can expect to live to 34.

Inflation is running as high as 150,000 per cent. The price of a carton of milk taken from a supermarket shelf can be higher by the time it reaches the checkout.

It should come as no surprise that Zimbabwe has the world’s second highest per capita diaspora, following only Palestine.

I used to think that such outcomes were largely the result of government oppression and poor economic policy. Dan has certainly disabused me of such silly notions and viewing Zimbabwe’s current situation I am ever more grateful, not of democracy, or free markets, but that America has not had this magic variable randomly visit us. Hopefully, god willing their will never be a time when the magic variable comes and ruins millions of American’s lives.

Since these magic variables are beyond our control I can only pray that God will banish this magic variable from Zimbabwe and the people can rebuild and achieve the affluence the US has been lucky to attain.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

I absolutely love Barack Obama’s logo. Check it out.

Seriously, it really is an awesome logo.

Diatribe endorses Mitt Romney. Cato-at-Liberty suggests caution is warranted with this canidate.

And, while he now talks a good game on taxes, his record as Massachusetts governor was mediocre at best. The Cato Institute’s annual governors’ report card gave him only a “C,” noting that he raised business taxes and fees by some $500 million.

Perhaps most disconcerting:

And, one would expect the putative conservative alternative to want to cut government spending. But Mitt Romney has called for spending an additional $20 billion in corporate welfare to bail out the auto industry. He wants to increase farm price supports. He supports George Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit and calls for more federal education spending. Indeed, he wants the federal government to buy a laptop computer for every school child in America. Like George W. Bush running in 2000, Romney has not called for cutting or eliminating a single government program—and we know what that meant for a Bush presidency.

Personally, I’m pulling for Fred Thompson. He is the dark horse of this race now that he has officaly pulled out of the running. GO FRED THOMPSON.

From Bidinotto blog:

But what of Ron Paul? He is arguably the most philosophical of all the candidates except Kucinich, and thus he must be judged not by his various specific positions and votes, taken in isolation, but by his overall guiding philosophy. That is what he has put at issue, front and center; so that is what I therefore believe we must assess.

And that philosophy is a complete mess. In principle, it weds the following: the economics of laissez-faire capitalism (which I emphatically endorse); a religious-based conception of individual rights that leads him to appalling positions on the separation of Church and State, abortion, immigration, and certain other social issues; and, most dangerous of all, a platonic, utopian notion of “noninterventionism” in foreign policy: a view derived directly from his philosophical misunderstanding of the implications of individual rights, which would render America completely vulnerable to its enemies, destroy the security infrastructure at the foundation of international trade, and thus impoverish the nation.

This last bit is really what I mean by crazy.

From the standpoint of personal character, Ron Paul is an unusually principled man, who boasts of his unwillingness to compromise. That is an admirable trait in a leader when he is right — but ominous in a leader when he is wrong. Precisely because he is unwilling to bend or change direction, Ron Paul is the kind of man who — facing the prospect of imminent disaster or altering course — would fanatically drive the nation right over some cliff, in the name of “principle.” That his irrational conglomeration of half-digested principles would aim the nation toward the cliff, I have absolutely no doubt.

This kind of reminds me when I was taking a class on existentialism and we were reading about the philosophy on Jean Paul Satre. Satre seemed to be arguing that each person must take responsibility for the entire world. Upon realizing he meant it, I laughed out loud, because the first thing I thought was how I used to believe that when I was eighteen. At the time I would tell people how to live their lives, and oftentimes they would tell me problems in their life that was stopping them from doing what I was telling them to do. As a consequence, I adopted the principle that you must assume responsibility for everything in the world such that you can no longer use that as an excuse for why you are not doing the the things you should be doing.

I realized not much longer afterwards that such a silly position was hard to maintain because there really are many things in the world that one can not be responsible for, and to expect otherwise, was simply unrealistic. In a way, I became wiser realizing that some outcomes you assume responsibility for and others you just roll with knowing there was not much you can do. But to read this extremly ‘intelligent’ fifty year old philosopher espousing a philosophy, that I, as a 22 year old, knew was impossible to obtain made me laugh. How does a fifty year old lover of wisdom lack the extremly basic wisdom that there are some events in a person’s life that you simply are not responsible for?. Satre was lacking a very basic wisdom that signals to me that he was a man not meant to be taken seriously.

This is precisely the signal Ron Paul sends me. When he speaks it does not feel like he sees the wisdom of capitalism but like a child, rigidly sticks to the principle of free markets. You never read it on this blog, but there are times when the free markets must be constrained and regulated. I look to leaders who actually understand the power of free markets but also have the wisdom to know that at times the markets must be constrained and regulated. Ron Paul clearly lacks that wisdom and, was sagely pointed out, a Ron Paul presidency could ride us off the cliff just for his cursed principles.

Principles are magnificent things but they must be tempered by wisdom.

Club for growth has done a fine job throughly analyzing Ron Paul’s voting record and gives a fine summary judgment.

When it comes to limited government, there are few champions as steadfast and principled as Representative Ron Paul. In the House of Representatives, he plays a very useful role constantly challenging the status quo and reminding his colleagues, despite their frequent indifference, that our Constitution was meant to limit the power of government. On taxes, regulation, and political free speech his record is outstanding. While his recent pork votes are troubling, the vast majority of his anti-spending votes reflect a longstanding desire to cut government down to size.

But Ron Paul is a purist, too often at the cost of real accomplishments on free trade, school choice, entitlement reform, and tort reform. It is perfectly legitimate, and in fact vital, that think tanks, free-market groups, and individual members of congress develop and propose idealized solutions. But presidents have the responsibility of making progress, and often, Ron Paul opposes progress because, in his mind, the progress is not perfect. In these cases, although for very different reasons, Ron Paul is practically often aligned with the most left-wing Democrats, voting against important, albeit imperfect, pro-growth legislation.

Ron Paul is, undoubtedly, ideologically committed to pro-growth limited government policies. But his insistence on opposing all but the perfect means that under a Ron Paul presidency we might never get a chance to pursue the good too.

While Ron Paul supporters will deny it, Ron comes off as an isolationist to me, both in foreign affairs and free trade. Besides, for whatever reasons, I don’t feel like Paul really understands free markets completely enough to convince me he supports them on a very basic level. It seems like he is pro free markets because for him, its the thing to do, and not because he realizes and see the transforming power free markets has on any group that allows them to do their work. Both Guilani and Romney have done better at convincing me that they truly appreciate the power of markets then Paul has.

Its interesting to note also that my voting choices are not completely dictated by fiscal policy. I really dislike Paul’s foreign affairs policy and that in of itself is a deal breaker for me.

Oh yeah and also Ron Paul is crazy. That does not help either.

I thought the democrats had a majority in both houses.

This much is clear: Democrats in Congress buckled under pressure from the White House to hold spending near the administration’s specified limit, and they’re poised to give the president more war money with no strings attached.

But the buckling didn’t stop there.

Democratic policy priorities that liberals hoped would be included in the omnibus spending legislation were also left on the cutting-room floor.

Under a veto threat, Democrats removed the reversal of a long-standing anti-abortion provision, abandoned long-sought provisions that would have loosened travel and trade restrictions on Cuba and deleted a line item demanded by unions that would have required federal contractors to pay union wages in disaster areas like New Orleans.

The one groups of people I do not blame is the citizens that make up the constituency of these Democrats. I have no doubt the citizens wanted all these things and if not for the corrupting influence of these special interest groups the democrats would of had enough votes to pass these laws even if the president vetoes the bill.

Link here.

For the common good.

If we went back to the obesity rates that existed in 1980, that would save the Medicare system a trillion dollars.

Said Barack Obama at today’s Democratic debate. That sounds absurd to me. But let me be fair. He prefaced that assertion with the phrase “it’s estimated.” Oh, estimated. Well, then. He wants to “emphasize how important prevention and cost savings can be.” I get it. The plan is to get the government to pay for all sorts of routine health care for everyone, and we’re supposed to think it will actually save money. But the truth is that going to the doctor more is not going to solve our fatness problem. If it did, we’d be paying now for the treatment (not that we wouldn’t like the government to reimburse us). The false hope of a solution to obesity and a promise of illusory savings is being used to soften us up for massive spending on health care. I’m estimating.