For Whom Should I Vote in 2014?

For Whom Should I Vote in 2014?

NY State Congressional District 18

NY State Senate District 41

Eric Paul Nolte

Here we are again in Looter-Moocher Land for the mid-term elections! 

Is there anyone for whom can we vote, whose election might stand a better chance of improving the world than that of a snowball's chance in the Sahara?

I hear P. J. O'Rourke's words ringing in my ears again: Don't vote! It only encourages the bastards!

This encouragement manifests itself as the politicians' tendency to believe that our votes grant them a mandate to go full speed ahead with their plunder and their tyranny. It is maybe more likely that your vote is not a ringing endorsement, but rather the case that you pulled the polling lever with one hand while holding your nose with the other hand. We often vote not for one of these meatheads, but against the more despicable one.

Nevertheless, I am indeed going to vote today.

Now, this year the biggest difference in Looter-Moocher Land will be the result of the US Senate races, because the Republicans stand a good chance of winning the six more seats that will grant them control of the Senate. 

However, neither of the US Senate seats from New York State is up for re-election this year. Chuck Schumer comes up for re-election in 2016, and Kirsten Gillibrand in 2018, so in this important matter of the Senate races, my vote will make even less of a difference today than the vanishingly small difference one's personal vote ever makes. 

The biggest difference in my neck of the woods will be in the vote for the House of Representatives, where NY State Congressional District 18 is in a red hot race between Democrat Sean Maloney and Republican Nan Hayworth.

Now, yes, Hayworth held this office for the term that began in 2010, and was battered by the lefties into defeat two years ago. In the liberal Daily Kos, I read that Hayworth was denounced as being aligned with "Tea Party thugs." Of course, nowadays the left calls anyone a thuggish, selfish bastard if one so much as mentions the US Constitution, or believes that the purpose of government should be limited to the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property.

While Sean Maloney has started a business and says that he believes the "economy succeeds when the middle class succeeds," he says that the road to this success must include raising taxes on the wealthy so that they "will pay their fair share" and thereby give some relief to the middle class. In the same spirit, he also advocates raising taxes on corporations. This view displays a stunning ignorance of the elementary fact that corporate taxes are just another factor of production, baked into the price of those goods and services, and paid for ... by whom? Like every other factor of production, it is the customer who pays for every factor that goes into the prices they pay. So it is the customer who pays corporate taxes, over and above what these customers already pay in income taxes. Moreover it is the poorest customers who are hurt the most by these hidden taxes, these taxes which are "hidden" to the customers, anyway.

I will be voting for Nan Hayworth for Congress because she is at least the slightly better representative for freedom.


In the NY State Senate District 41 race, Republican Sue Serino is running against Democrat Terry Gipson.

Every day, my mailbox overflows with flyers from the Democratic party in which Sue Serino is depicted in reptilian shades of green with drool dripping off her fangs, and her eyes narrowed to little yellow slits. You must think I'm kidding, but my description is pretty close! 

I think that if I were depicted by an opponent in such a graphically loathsome manner, I might want to wear this as a badge of pride because it would indicate that my opponents have so little of substance to hurl against me!

Now I don't know much about Serino except that she is in real estate and appears to be championing policies that sound less harmful to freedom than those of her opponent, Terry Gipson.   

Gipson strikes me as your garden variety liberal, whose innocence of any deep knowledge of sound economics and history leads him to write that he is "proud" to be a big champion of the minimum wage, when history and economics are crystal clear on this point, namely that like every other price control, the minimum wage creates shortages of the thing controlled. A shortage here means unemployment. In other words, the minimum wage causes unemployment among the very people it is designed to help, and hurts them more than anybody else. 

I will vote for Sue Serino for the NY State Senate.

*   *   *

So here we go again... everybody knows that freedom works. Freedom works to unleash the creative energy and imagination of humanity. And yet freedom is denounced left and right. 

Freedom works better than bossy bureaucratic central planning of everything, and you can see this fact  beyond any possibility of refutation in such nearly laboratory conditions as in the contrast between the two Koreas, north and south, and the two Germanies, east and west, before the fall of the iron curtain. 

Here we have the very same culture, the same people with the same sets of beliefs, talents, and the same everything except that one side of the country was run by a totalitarian dictatorship, and the other side enjoyed a significant measure of freedom. 

In the dictator's side of these countries, there was mass murder, oppression, unending poverty, fear, outright terror, suspicion, mistrust, and relentless misery. In Berlin, nearly half a century after the war ended, there were still bombed out sections of the city that had never been rebuilt. 

In the freer side of these countries, there was an ever-expanding prosperity, driven by the creative energy, ambition, and intelligence of a people who knew that their efforts could normally be expected to result in success. 

But, of course, freedom is selfish, according to all the dominant codes of morality and ethics, so freedom is reviled, and we are rendered blind to the fact that profit-seeking free market capitalism (not to be confused with fascist crony-capitalism resulting from the unholy marriage of big government and big business) is responsible for the most astonishing improvements in the condition of humanity ever seen in history.

So, while I detest the social conservative side of the Republican party that works against women's reproductive rights, or gays' rights to marry and decide what a family should look like, I nevertheless find the Republican party as a whole, to be a much smaller threat to our social and economic well-being than the dangers posed by liberal democrats. This is ironic and hard to believe, but it's true. 

I do not believe that dark ages biblical injunctions against gays, or socially conservative efforts to ban abortion can be widely imposed on the world today. 

I believe that the libertarian wing of the Republican party would steer the country in a less threatening direction than the policies purveyed by the Democratic party.

By the same measure, I detest the beliefs of liberals and progressives who work assiduously against free markets, and purvey the crazy idea that the source of all good things is the government's largesse and its bureaucratic central planning of everything. 

I do believe that the policies of progressives are tyrannical and are succeeding to an ever more appalling degree in America, and pose a clear and present danger to our freedom, which is the very basis of a good life.

I find these liberals and progressives to be well-intentioned, but unwitting (sometimes even witless) crusaders for all those policies that, when implemented undiluted, lead us down what Friedrich Hayek called the road the serfdom, which is the condition in which peaceful citizens are transformed by their governments into something like feudal serfs. Down this road lies the condition of North Korea and the former East Germany.

*   *   *

Now, back to the minutia of my little District 18 voting:

I would be voting for more libertarians, because they are clearly the more principled advocates of freedom, but they stand no chance of winning any offices.

Republicans do stand a chance of winning office, so voting for one who is not godawful stands a chance of making at least a little difference for the good. 

Those Republicans who are in the libertarian wing of the Republican party are without any doubt far less threatening to our general well being than the wholly destructive, control freak policies of big government, top-down, tax-and-spend, freedom-bashing progressives and liberals, whose ignorance of sound economics is exceeded only by their righteousness, their belief that they have claim to the moral high ground as they assert their ever growing power over the economy. 

Often, the Republicans are only a little better, but they do tend to be better and less threatening here.

So, here is my ballot:

*   *   *

*  United States House of Representatives, NY State District 18: Nan Hayworth

*  NY Governor: Rob Astorino (whose education policies in particular seem to be much better than the destructiveness of incumbent Governor Cuomo's.)

*  NY State Lieutenant Governor: Chris Moss

*  NY State Attorney General: John Cahill

*  NY State Comptroller:  Robert Antonacci

*  NY State Senate District 41:  Sue Serino

 - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

There are three Proposals on the ballot:

*  Proposal 1, on redistricting, 

Cuomo will vote Yes; Astorino, No. 

I'm not entirely sure about this one. We would like to avoid political gerrymandering that can be artfully arranged to favor whomever can grab those levers of power, but I can't be sure that Proposition 1 will either restrain or empower the would-be gerrymanders! Astorino will vote no on the proposal because he believes the proposal does not go far enough. I distrust Cuomo more than Astorino, and Cuomo is voting yes, so this tips me over into voting no.

*  Proposal 2, on creating a largely electronic and paperless system of distributing legislation to the lawmakers for them to study (which grants them the benevolent, if perhaps unwarranted, assumption that any of them ever read anything they vote on.)

This proposal should save money. Both major candidates will vote yes, and I shall too.

*  Proposal 3, on borrowing yet another $2 billion to improve school technology with such features as paying for wireless classroom technology, tablets, and smart boards. But this enormous amount of borrowing will pay only for the purchase and construction of these things, and provides not penny for the staff to run the equipment or to pay for its maintenance. Servicing the debt on these purchases will run another $130 million per year. The NY State debt is already up to something like $63 billion, and Albany's plans to reduce this debt are dubious. 

Moreover, we're talking about yet another government program, and we know from experience that damned near all government programs wind up costing vastly more than estimated, they often fail to accomplish what they were intended to do, and frequently achieve precisely the opposite of their well-intended goals (even when those goals are indeed well-intentioned.)

So I say vote no on Prop. 3.

*   *   *

All righty, folks, that's it for this year.

E   P   N

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