Vote! Or Else You Have No Grounds for Complaint!

Vote! Or Else You Have No Grounds for Complaint! Eric Paul Nolte It is 0720 hours in Arizona as I write this on Election Day morning.  Nobody can know now what the outcome of this election will be. But I suspect that the Republicans will keep both houses of Congress, given the behavior of pollsters and voters in recent years. 

To the outrage of my liberal friends, I hope the Republicans win everything. 

Notwithstanding that the Pubs tend to be clueless on many matters, I believe that a vote for any Democrat looks like a vote to outlaw free speech, to ban guns, to continue the relentless march towards government control of damn near everything, and to promote the outright thuggery of fascist Anitifa (yes, how ironic, but it's true!) and Black Lives Matter. 

Among the defining characteristics of a Progressive is the belief that it is right for government to solve every problem.  Moreover, to be a progressive one must also believe that the state actually has the power and the knowledge to solve our problems.  In fact, the bloated state, meddling in every aspect of our lives, is at the heart of so many of our problems! 

Progressives do not see that freedom works.  At the very least, freedom works a damn sight better than coercion. 

Voluntary exchange gives us the best we can hope for.  It ain't perfect, but it's the best anybody can hope for at any given moment in time.

The absence of government regulation does not mean the absence of regulation.  Government regulation imposes the judgment of a small pool of unelected bureaucrats on the hundreds of millions of us--by force! 

Absent government regulation, we the people, in our hundreds of millions, by our every choice of what to buy or not, regulate the behavior of every business. 

As Ludwig von Mises pointed out long ago, in a free market, the consumers are the kings and queens who control the fate of every enterprise.  It is we who determine the flow of scarce resources into those ventures that stand the best chance of satisfying what real people really want in this world.

Freedom is the difference between the iPhone and the government-made $900 toilet plunger. 

Freedom is the difference between the Wright brothers' astonishing success and Samuel Pierpont Langley's government-subsidized airplane that crashed into the Potomac River every time it flew off the top of its houseboat launching pad. 

Freedom is the difference between your life, your choice of how you want to live, versus some far-flung government bureaucrat bossing your around against your will. 

It's North Korea's grinding poverty versus South Korea's prosperity and flourishing--which was the same situation in Soviet East Germany versus the much freer West Germany.

If you fail to vote, you have no grounds for complaining about how awful things are in our country. 

If you vote for Republicans, you are indeed part of the problem.

If you vote for Democrats, you are a vastly bigger part of the problem.

If you vote for Libertarians, at least your vote will show up on the political radar as a vote for the bedrock, indispensable virtue of freedom for all.  Moreover, since Libertarian voters are more likely to take votes away from Republicans, a vote for the Libertarian is usually like a vote for the Democrats. 

If you vote for the Greens, you demonstrate that you have likely been seduced by the ubiquitous, jaw-dropping swindle which is the kind of Environmentalist religion we see among the supporters of such data-altering frauds, liers, and ideologues as James Hansen, Michael Mann, Bill McKibben, Paul Jones (of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit) and the summary writers of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The ambition of all these people is essentially to take over industrial production in the name of social justice (former French President Jacques Chirac actually said precisely this in his address to the last Kyoto Protocol conference at the Hague.)

If you vote for the Socialist Party of America or the Communist Party of America, I suggest that pack up all your stuff a move to Venezuela, where the citizens are enjoying the fruits of actual socialism.  Don't tell me that true socialism has yet to be tried.  Don't tell me that democratic socialism works in Scandinavia. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have much greater economic freedom than we have in the US. Their system combines massive welfare statism on the productive back of capitalism.  But among these countries, only Norway, thanks to its huge oil inventories, is not now in a descending economic spiral as a consequence of the welfare statism.  Maggie Thatcher rightly said that socialism can work only until it runs out of other people's money.  Sweden and Denmark are  now running out of their productive citizens' money. E P N 2018.1106