Our Vote for President in 2016

Our Vote for President in 2016

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Without rehearsing every issue being stated by all the candidates here, let me discuss a few matters that I believe are most important to my decision on whom to vote for today.

First, I try never to talk about politics before establishing the philosophical basis for the subject.  Politics is, after all, a late and derivative branch of philosophy, and these matters rest on a foundation of one’s ethical or moral beliefs.  One’s politics is the social embodiment of what one believes is right and wrong.  One’s ethics can only be rationally formed on the basis of what one believes to be true and false in the universe.  One arrives at these views based on the nature of reality, the human place in the world, and on the nature of how we come to know anything at all.  In short, one’s view of metaphysics leads to a view on epistemology, which leads to views on ethics and thereby to one’s opinions on politics.  Postmodern philosophy denies all these views I just stated.  I derive my views from the Aristotelian stream of philosophy which culminated in the thought of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

So, in short, the standard by which I judge politics is rooted in Objectivism.  This means that human beings are endowed with rights which are inherent in our nature.  We have a right to our own life, liberty, and property, and it is right for us to pursue our own happiness, guided by reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience.  So long as we are self-responsible, productive, peaceful, and respectful of every other person’s equal rights, it is the ultimate good to put together lives by our own lights for our own happiness.  No one has a right to use you against your will for any predatory purpose.  You are not an expendable cell in the greater organism of the state, to be disposed of according to the judgment of your country’s leaders and against your own opinion.  You are not a sacrificial animal to be slaughtered on the alter of the lives of others.  Socialism is therefore bad, not to mention that it is also impossible to implement fully for a variety of problems.  Reason, purpose, and self-esteem are the ultimate values to pursue.  The chief virtues, corresponding to these values, and the means by which one can hope to achieve those values, are: rationality (logic), independence (of mind), integrity (walk your talk), honesty (recognition of the facts of reality), productiveness (self-responsibility), justice (treating others as they deserve), and pride (a well-earned pride for achieving one’s rational values by means of putting these virtues into practice.)

Now, this philosophy implies an ethics of dealing with each other by good will and the peaceful, voluntary exchange of goods and services to mutual benefit.  Force wielded against others is wrong.  Coercion is wrong. Using other people against their will for predatory advantage is the fundamental evil, and every bad thing in society is an example of this terrible policy: murder, genocide, rape, slavery, theft, and the predatory, fraudulent use of others against their will.

So, again, all individuals are endowed by their nature as human beings to the right to life, liberty, and property.  Rights precede the formation of governments.  Rights are not goodies handed out by generous governments.  Government therefore should have the purpose of protecting the rights of every individual.  Governments which stray from this principle are therefore bad.

By this standard, all socio-political systems now existing in the world are bad in varying degrees.  All governments today use other people against their will for predatory advantage.  The worst governments have been the brutal totalitarian socialist dictatorships of the last century: Communist, Nazi, Fascist, and then the assorted nasty, ruthless one party dictatorships like Uganda’s Idi Amin and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.

Liberty and individualism are the supreme values; without these, everything else is compromised, which is why the world is in such a mess.

Now, how do the current American presidential candidates measure up to my standards?  Not very well at all.  

Four candidates stand a theoretical chance of winning the Presidency on the basis of being on the ballot in enough states to garner enough electoral college votes.  

There are other candidates who are on the ballot in more than one state, among whom is Alyson Kennedy, the Socialist Workers Party candidate, who is on the ballot in only seven states and therefore does not stand even a theoretical chance of winning the election.  

Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate is on the ballot in 48 states.  In my opinion, Jill Stein represents everything wrong with socialism—it is the elevation of good intentions over outcome and the facts of reality and history.  Good intentions count for everything, given how ruinously the idea of socialism has played out in the world.  Everywhere the socialists have actually gotten their hands on the levers of power, they have created not their socialist workers’ paradise of heaven on earth, but a stinking slaughterhouse hell on earth.  The so-called social democracies of Europe are in reality mixed economies, partly free and partly government controlled.  They are financially in trouble today because of their armies of unelected bureaucrats who boss everybody around and pursue stupid policies that drag them down in many ways.  (Footnote: Sweden ran into terrible financial trouble about 20 years ago, and so scaled back on government spending and  promoted more economic freedom for business, with the result that today they are doing much better than the economies of their neighbors.  Incidentally, Sweden also enjoys greater freedom and less government regulation than the US!) 

Since the Green Party’s centerpiece politics is about climate change, let me briefly address this issue:

The idea that global warming or climate change is caused by the human creation of industrial CO2 is a crackpot notion promulgated by lying, data-altering ideologues like NASA and NOAA’s James Hansen, Michael Mann, and Bill McKibben, of 350.org.  Then there are also the likes of the frauds and cheats at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit who were caught red-handed attempting to hide the decline in temperatures of the last two decades.  Punish scientists who disagree with the anthropogenic theory of climate change, pour enough money on scholars and tie their tenure to finding a human cause for global warming, and one can expect to see a lot of research reflecting this narrative.  Anybody who can read a graph, however, can plainly see that there was a Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago, in which temperatures were three degrees warmer than today. Wine grapes were grown in the north of Scotland, which can’t be done today.  The Vikings farmed the southern shores of Greenland and buried their dead in soil which today is a permafrost that will not allow one to push a Viking shovel a millimeter into the soil.  One can also see that the Earth has been through hot house periods in which the polar ice cap was completely melted while the atmospheric saturation of CO2 was much lower than today.  Conversely, the Earth has also been through periods in which atmospheric CO2 was greater than 4,500 parts per million, more than 10 times higher than today’s 400 ppm, while at the same time the Earth was going through an ice age!  Jacques Chirac, the former president of France once told a Kyoto Protocol meeting that the theory of anthropogenic global warming represented his like-minded politicians’ best chance ever for implementing global governance for the purpose of social justice, meaning socialism, of course.  THIS is what this gang is up to, not the man-eating and absurd chimera of saving the earth from humans.

So I reject Hillary on this point just I did Obama and the Greens.  They want to take over industrial civilization and hand it over to control by armies of bullying politicians and unelected bureaucrats.  In short, Hillary’s policies on climate change are really no better than the Green Party’s.  

While Gary Johnson affirms that global warming is a problem and that it is caused by humans, he points to his record as governor of New Mexico to show how he would address the matter: a company on a river was pumping toxic wastes into the river, so the EPA was called in to stop them on the grounds that this pollution was a species of trespass into the rights of citizens not to be poisoned by an industrial firm.

Alone among third party candidates, the Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson, is on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Johnson has been reviled for his embarrassing lapse of not knowing about current events in Aleppo, Syria.  Now, I worked for a Saudi Arabian company for a year, flying business jets all over the Middle East and much of Africa.  I often flew to Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Tehran, and to many other cities in the area.  While Aleppo has a long history, it began a long decline after the Suez Canal was built in 1869, and by 1977, when I moved to the Middle East, the city was in such bad shape that I never even heard of it the whole time I was there!  I knew of nobody who even spoke of it.  The current battle of Aleppo which began four years ago was not among the biggest news from the Middle East until maybe a year or two ago, and even then other news from the region seemed much bigger. 

The point about Johnson’s foreign policy is that he actually has a much better grasp on the nature of the Islamic world than any of the other candidates.  His beliefs on the purpose of government is much closer to my own than any of the other runners in this election, namely, that it should confine itself largely to the protection of individual rights.  He knows that when we back Sunnis, we shortly get mass murder of Shias, and when we back Shias, we soon have mass murders of Sunnis.  He knows that our recent deal with Iran is sheer suicidal madness.  Hillary does not; Hillary was all in on that deal.  Hillary represents a continuation and even a worsening of the awful policies of Obama.  Trump makes much more sense than Hillary on this matter.

Now, speaking of the Middle East, I find one fact so appalling that it trumps (so to speak) everything else:  If Secretary Clinton wins the election and follows through with her threat to impose a no-fly zone in Syria, then the United States will be shooting down Russian airplanes, which means war with Russia, for crying out loud!  

Dr. Stein therefore concluded that the election of Secretary Clinton would be vastly more dangerous for us than that of Donald Trump!

Along these lines, Mikhail Gorbachev recently commented that Russia and America are closer to outright war than at any time since the Cold War.  Think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and now wrap your mind around the idea that we are closer to war than at any time since then.

Think about that when you go to the polls today.

Clinton is unacceptable for other aspects of her foreign policy too.  Not only will she get us into a war with Russian over Syria, as Secretary of State, she has already made a much bigger mess of things in the Middle East by emboldening our enemies and abandoning our only genuine ally through her antisemitism.

If Hillary were an Army officer, the scandals of her handling of the Clinton Foundation and her email server would have stripped her of the security clearance she would need even to be put in charge of a motor pool in Montana—much less to become the Commander in Chief of the US military!  Talk about poor judgment!  Hers is much worse than Trump’s  The career of General Pretraeus was ruined by his mishandling of classified material, an offense that was not nearly so egregious as Secretary Clinton’s crimes.  Other officers have been jailed for lesser offenses than Clinton’s. 

There are so many more reasons to reject Hillary for president!

Hillary recently said that the world leader she most admired is Angela Merkel, whose ruinous handling of Muslim refugees has turned Germany, like Sweden, into one of the rape capitals of Europe.  It is horrible that Hillary plans to bring into the US hundreds of thousands of Muslims from countries known to have large populations of terrorists.  It is absurd to think that it is a good idea to bring these people here instead of helping Middle Eastern countries to protect them in their own countries or neighboring countries of the same culture.

I believe it is ridiculous that the Democrats are against having voters show proof of their citizenship and identity as a condition for voting.  But Democrats have famously encouraged immigration as a means of enlarging their voter base.  Some Republican business people also want this immigration as a means for enlarging their access to cheap labor.  But one has to show an ID for so many other things!  Why not have to show an ID to vote?  You can’t buy a beer or board an airplane without proving your identity!

But enough about Hillary.

Finally on to Donald Trump.  The man is egocentric and apparently misogynistic.  He is a Type A, boorish Alpha male who is not well spoken.  He is accustomed to getting his way and not above using the government to help him succeed in business, which makes him at least somewhat of a crony capitalist.  But he is also advocating policies that in my view promise to be significantly less ruinous than Hillary Clinton’s.  Trump will not begin to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, although he will rightly deport those who are already imprisoned criminals.  He will close down funding for sanctuary cities that harbor illegals who are violent criminals.  His foreign policy promises to be much less harmful to the US than Clinton’s and his handling of the military will promote our country’s strength in the world, empower our allies and strike a better pose against our enemies.  His policy of reducing taxes on business will attract foreign businesses to the US and repatriate so many businesses that were driven away by outrageous taxation.  The envy-driven policy of soaking the rich through business taxes is insane, as one can plainly see when it is understood that business gets its money solely from its customers—so, in other words, it is customers, name you, who pay the taxes of business, just as we pay for every other factor of production. A tax on business is actually another tax on your income.

Alright, enough already!  There is so much more to mention, but it’s time for me to go vote. 

In the end, I think Trump may be a bit of a loose cannon, but Clinton is a battery of heavy artillery aimed at the heart and soul of America.

All right, so here's the bottom line:

I'm voting for Gary Johnson.  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All the smart folks I follow believe that Trump will win, in the same way and for the same reasons that the Brexit vote prevailed in the UK.  And I hope he wins.

Hillary represents the horrible continuation of Obama's ethos, and I hope that she sinks.

    

    

E   P   N

2016.1108