For Whom Should I Vote in 2012?

For Whom Should I Vote in 2012? 

Eric Paul Nolte

 

For whom should I vote in this election?

You may know that I am champion of every individual’s right to life, liberty, and property.  I certainly agree with Jefferson’s formulation of an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness too.  I mention property first, because property is the fruit of one’s thought and labor, and without it one is stripped of the rudder we need to steer our life on a course of our choice.

I also uphold Ayn Rand’s formulation that life is made possible only by the application of reason—meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience—to the problems and threats of existence.  I believe that we must choose some vision of happiness as our purpose in life, and that self-esteem is the fuel that allows one to get out of bed in the morning and feel that we have the ability to make our way in life and are worthy of happiness.

All of these beliefs have political implications.  So who, among the candidates running for president this year, looks most like somebody who would be a champion of every individual’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and property?

It’s not the Green Party candidate or the chap flying the flag of the Socialist Workers’ Party.  These are hardly champions of individual rights, they are purveyors of big government leaders dictating every detail of life according to the rulers’ vision, and unlimited government control, if not outright ownership, of the means of production.

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s candidate, clearly comes closest.  The Libertarians champion free minds and free markets, with the purpose of government limited to the protection of individual rights.  Sounds pretty good to me, notwithstanding Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwarz’s straw-man argument against the libertarians in their short book, Libertarianism: the Perversion of Liberty.

But the Libertarians stand not a snowball’s chance in Somalia of winning the election.  So which of those who do stand a chance of winning comes closer to my own beliefs?

It seems important to vote for somebody who might do a better job of protecting my values, and to condemn those who would attack my interests.

The short answer is that I think both Republican and Democratic candidates for president are deeply flawed, and I am not happy with either of our choices for president, as you might guess, if you’ve read my rant on the state of our nation’s addled notions of the purpose, powers, and capability of government.

Both major candidates promise something good and something awful.

The good thing Romney offers is more support for the free market system that provides us with the things that make life and flourishing possible.  I believe Romney also offers a more energetic and realistic defense of America in the international arena, but I’m still not entirely happy with his policies there.  The threat is his superstitiously inspired opposition to abortion and gay marriage, clearly threats to individual liberty.  There are also a long list of other bad things economically, including the matter of unfunded obligations for future welfare programs, but these aren’t as bad as Obama’s positions, in my opinion.  I believe Romney promises to do less damage to our international interests as a free and sovereign nation.

The good thing about Obama is that his presidency supports women’s reproductive rights and gay marriage, clearly supportive of individual liberty.  The bad things are a long list: his long-standing anti-American views expressed in his books and actions, his redistributionist, wealth-destroying, soak-the-rich politics, his collectivist and Keynesian economics, and a long list of more things too.

In balance, I think Romney is less destructive than Obama, but the matter bears so.  So here are my thoughts on the matter:

I have been writing another piece which I shall shortly post, that goes much deeper into the roots of how conservatives and liberals think about the world, and  elaborates in far more nuanced detail than I will go in this piece, why I believe that if Romney replaces Obama, we should not expect a transformation into a truly free country.  I call that article, “When We Fire the Confiscator-in-Chief, Don’t Expect the Sweet Land of Liberty.”  It is a much deeper piece than this one, but this one cries out to be written before the polls close today!

Now, maybe you’ve seen the billboard out there these days, posted by the American Business Owners, that addresses President Obama’s remark to business people that “You didn’t build that.”  I take Obama’s statement to mean that none of us is truly responsible for our own success or failure, and, by implication, that government must be there to help us all out.  We’re all in this together, after all, and so we, the regulatory-welfare state must be there to tax the rich and redistribute it to the needy.  The billboard,  proclaims, “WE built it!  YOU broke it!  WE’LL fix it!  YOU’RE fired!”

The political right was outraged and indignant at Obama’s cavalier dismissal  of individual effort as the basis for success in life.  Once again, Obama’s candor allows his true colors to show.

Now why is it that, for all their rhetoric about free markets, the actual policies of enacted by recent conservatives today are farther to left than those of  Roosevelt the Second, Kennedy, or Johnson?

 

Don’t Expect the Sweet Land of Liberty from the Conservatives

Seeing that billboard slogan against Obama filled me with the pleasurable thought of firing this worst of all presidents!  Except that the other side is so screwed up in their own way, too. 

Alright, to the point here:  to those who are praying for an end to the statist control, eagerness to nationalize whole sectors of the economy, and the  redistributive, entitlement and regulatory policies represented by the Obama administration ... abandon hope, ye fools!  Why?  Because Romney/Ryan do not embody a foundational departure from the welfare statism of the incumbent.  Romney/Ryan do not offer a real answer to the liberals because their policies are not an embodiment of anything like the American founders’ vision of freedom.

Do I hear you saying, "Huh? Not based on bedrock American values?

That's right.  Not if the most important value in our founding documents was an affirmation of the central importance of every individual's inalienable right to life, liberty, and property.  Not if the very purpose of government is held to be limited to the protection of these rights.  Not if the moral legitimacy of government is rooted in the rights of individuals to self-defense.  Not if the powers of the state are therefore seen to be derived from individual rights, an aspect of human nature, a delegation of power from individuals to the state, which would thereby embody the consent of the governed.

Left and Right Both Believe We Are Sacrificial Animals

This is the trouble with Republicans:  just like the liberals, they believe in self-sacrifice for the common good.  Individuals are treated like sacrificial animals on the alter of the common good—expendable cells in the greater organism of the state, to be disposed of according to judgment of the rulers.  The main difference between the left and the right seems to be that the conservatives believe their moral authority for freedom and individual rights comes from their imaginary friend for adults (that would be the Christian version of the god of Abraham), while the liberals believe their moral authority comes from some version of the socialist ideals of Karl Marx, John Rawls, Paul Krugman, or some other commie lib.

I get so sick of these political dogfights!  Neither the Dems nor the Pubs seems to have a clue about Ayn Rand's crucial insight that the basis for our rights comes neither from divine law nor congressional law, but from the Law of Identity.

Huh?  Yup.  The law of identity says that A is A.  This is the starting point of Aristotle’s laws of logic.  Things are what they are, and can act only in accordance with their own nature.  A plant is a plant and cannot roam the land in search of food.  A lion can't breathe under water, and a fish can't breathe on land.  The nature of all creatures, save one, sets them to act by instinct to pursue their own survival.  The one exception, of course, is man. 

The other animals are endowed by their physical equipment (wings, fur, fangs, gills, etc.) to survive in the wild, against the natural elements, and they are equipped with a set of instincts that is sufficient to guide their actions for survival without having to give the matter any thought,  in the propositional, conceptual, voluntarily directed manner that is characteristic of human beings. 

By contrast, Homo sapiens lack adequate physical equipment to brave the elements without the help of artificially crafted aides like clothing, shelter, weapons to hunt for prey and till the soil.  We also lack the comprehensive set of instincts that automatically guide the animals to succeed at living without conscious, voluntarily controlled thought.  It is this conscious, voluntarily controlled thought which is the singular distinction of humans, and without which we would die straight away. 

We are not born knowing how to survive and our instincts are inadequate to guide our actions successfully to live.  Survival requires knowledge of the nature of things and we can acquire and hold this knowledge only by means of concepts.  Only humans can expand our knowledge and accumulate it over a time longer than a single life span, or a hundred life spans.  To acquire this life-serving knowledge requires us to think and figure out how to produce what life demands of this, and we can only produce things if we are free to think and act on the basis of our thought.  Our nature is the source of our individual rights to life, liberty, and property, because we must use reason, logic applied to the evidence of experience,  to figure out how to produce the stuff we need.  Human rights are therefore an aspect of human nature, inherent in us.  Ayn Rand put this in a brilliant formulation, that rights are not gifts from a generous government, rights are conditions of existence, inherent in our nature, and without them we cannot survive for long.  Government, by this light, has no warrant except as the protector of individual rights.  The only legitimate purpose of government is as the protector of our rights.

When governments cross the line away from the road of protecting our rights, they tend to become the most destructive forces on the planet.  In the 20^th century, totalitarian governments, those governments which steered farthest away from the task of protecting individual rights, murdered more than two hundred million of their own citizens, in peace time.  Asking governments to be our care takers for anything more than the bare minimum is like playing with a tiger inside its cage.  You can get away with it so long as the tiger doesn’t get hungry or bored for something to toy with.   

So when do we ever hear conservatives affirm these ideas in any consistent and principled way?  NEVER!  They NEVER say that we have inalienable rights.  Not in any way that means what they say, or reveals a glimmer of insight into what the words really mean.  

If something is inalienably yours, this means it's yours no matter what, unless you physically attack another person in an unprovoked, first-strike manner that is not in self-defense. 

I hasten to add as a sort of footnote here that a predatory, unprovoked attack on another would strip one of one’s own rights because this attack would contradict the very idea of rights as universally rooted in human nature.

Now, if something is inalienably yours, it means that nobody has the rightful power to take it away from you.  Conservatives,  just like liberals, are always harping on a long list of things they want to make you do against your will, and in clear violation of our natural freedom.

Now Romney can't even stick consistently to the idea that the purpose of government is to protect our rights.  He said in debate that people can't be left free.  Yes, he did!  What else can it mean when he says we require all kinds of government regulation.  Government regulation means state meddling, control, intervention, substitution of an individual’s free choice for that of a government agent, all of which add up to meaning “not free.”  Regulation means not free.  Advocating regulation means advocating that people not be left free.  In essence, this means, just like the Dems say, that we need government to meddle in damn near everything.  Romney gave a long list of things he wants government to mess with.  The biggest of the interventions he wants government to impose is probably in the area of healthcare.

Romney said that government must force insurance companies to operate like a de facto branch of the welfare state.  Yes he did!  What else can it mean when he says that under a Romney administration, insurance companies will be forced to take customers with pre-existing conditions?

By the way, as another footnote, I must point out that we live in such a crazy time that I feel compelled to point out that just because one asserts that government should not do something, this does not mean that one is arguing AGAINST the thing one wants government to keep its big nose out of.  This insight has a flip side too, and also means that just because I believe that people should be left free to do something, it does not mean that I approve of the things they are free to do!  So to say that government should not force insurance companies to do this or that does not mean that I'm against this or that.  To say that government should not force companies to cover pre-existing conditions does not mean that I believe people with pre-existing conditions should be left to die in the streets like Hindu untouchables in the filthy gutters of Kolcatta (formerly known as Calcutta.).  What I am saying is that if freedom means ANYTHING at all, then business, like every individual, has a right to be free.  We should be left free to pursue our own well being by our own lights, to profit, in other words, not to lose, and not to be a sacrificial animal on the alter of the welfare state.

Forcing insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions is precisely the same kind of regulation that would force an auto insurance company to cover automobiles with “pre-existing conditions.”

Forcing companies in this manner does not respect the nature of business, where the parties voluntarily trade one value for another value, to mutual advantage.  This regulation amounts to a mugging of the company by the government.  This imposition of government force is an act of the welfare entitlement police state, not free trade.  This "welfare" is defined by the government, and amounts to the nationalization of a business's profits and the privatization of losses.

This mode of government control is a kind of nationalization, which is a polite way of saying theft, pure and simple.  This intervention is just another massive tax imposed on business by bureaucratic central planners.

Imagine being forced to cover a car with an emissions control system that is pumping raw gas into the exhaust pipes (a fire hazard), has bald tires, 300,000 miles on the odometer, has had no oil changes in the last 100,000 miles.  Compelling the auto insurance company to pay for oil changes and every other kind of repair, all of it "regulated" by a sort of automotive, government regulated HMO which gets to dictate what repairs and diagnostics are to be allowed. (Footnote:  By the way, being a very lucrative monopoly enabled by the government, this sort of HMO fulfills every condition that would attract organized crime in the same way and for the same reasons as the gangs gravitate to gambling, prostitution, and illegal recreational drugs.  These companies could very possibly be taken over by an organized crime ring, as has happened to all the HMOs in New York, according to a colleague of mine who is the son of a prominent Mafia family and told me this is true.)

It appears to me that Romney is a good and decent man, although I disagree with him profoundly on many points.  Not so sure Obama is a good man, when I think about the company he has kept, although I hasten to add that it is not fair to find a man guilty by association .  It also appears to me that Romney and Ryan are men who at some deep level truly believe in the unprecedented American vision of a sweet land of liberty where the purpose of a government is to protect our rights.

At least I think they believe that they believe in this vision of America as the land of the free.  Too bad their policies do not embody this vision. 

But I find that Romney/Ryan inspire more confidence than Obama, whose vision is informed by a rogue’s gallery of America hating radicals.  There was, for example, the anti-colonial and Marxist writings of his father.  There was the deep  influence of his far lefty mother, step-father, and grand-father, and there was the Muslim madrassa in Indonesia, all of them pushing various anti-American ideas.  Back in Hawaii, as a teenager, there was his close friend and mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party.  At Columbia, there was the Palestinian radical, Edward Said.  At Harvard, Brazilian socialist Roberto Mangabeira Unger, his mentor.  Then there was Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground terrorist, a radical who bombed the Pentagon and a police station in New York City, and who in later years said that his only regret was that he did not do more bombing.  Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn,  later became his supporters when he came to Chicago,.  There was his “God damn America” pastor, the revolutionary preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose council Obama sought more than once, the pastor who married the Obamas and baptized their children, and in whose pews he sat for 20 years.  There are all of his communist and totalitarian buddies around the world, like Putin, the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, and Ahmadinejad, all of whom send Obama their endorsements and blessings for his reelection.

Now, I condemn Romney/Ryan for the avowedly superstitious and mystical basis for their values.  They would be offended to hear me call their religious beliefs superstitious and mystical, but the terms are almost synonymous.   

I condemn Romney and Ryan for their opposition to abortion and the rights of homosexuals to make families and lives by their own lights without interference from the meddling of government.  And I condemn them for following three steps behind, but on the same road to serfdom (as Hayek put it) as the Democrats’ progressive policies. 

The left and the right are both leading us to a more powerful and oppressive regulatory and entitlement state. 

Nevertheless, I believe that Romney et al will likely do less damage to our tattered but still sweet liberty than the incumbent commie in the White House, our Confiscator-in-Chief.  I give the prospect of a Romney win not three cheers, but maybe one quiet mumble of approval for a couple things.  How sad.

To me, a Romney presidency looks like a looming misfortune for liberty.  It’s absurd to believe that their return to the budget of 2008 will do much to address the tsunami of 60 trillion dollars worth of unfunded obligations to social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, to pick just one issue here, but this is far less threatening than the prospect of the policies that Obama would pursue in a second term.

To me, as the father of two daughters, a Romney presidency looks like a despicable and  genuine threat to women’s reproductive rights.  The possibility of a fifth Supreme Court judge to be appointed by the Romney administration looks like a real threat to Roe v. Wade, if not to the availability of abortion throughout the nation. 

A Romney presidency also looks like a real threat to an individual’s right to make families by the peaceful lights of whomever wants to call their blessed unions a family, which is just another way of saying gay marriage. 

But a second Obama presidency looks like an epochal catastrophe, a calamity, a tragedy for liberty’s prospects here and abroad, a threat to our security in the international arena, an epic disaster worse than Carter’s, from which a speedy  recovery seems as likely as a child’s bedtime prayer for world peace.

And yet, with all my doubts about Romney, I hope that Tuesday will bring us the knowledge that come January, we will be able to speak of the “former President Obama.”  What a lovely ring those words have!

The pleasure of my thinking of a “former President Obama” is almost destroyed by my fear of yet another superstitious religionist in the White House.

But the election of Romney would likely give us more time than the reelection of Obama to hope that we can purvey a more rational basis for liberty and the human prospect.

The reelection of Obama will make me start looking more deeply into safe havens for my retirement and what’s left of my investments.

So take your pick:

Romney-- a looming disaster, with the likelihood that freedom will once again be wrongly blamed for the disaster. 

Or Obama-- an epochal catastrophe, with the silver lining that Roe v. Wade and gay marriage will not be attacked so strongly, for what this is worth, knowing that at the same time everybody’s rights to life, liberty and property will be under a  profound and relentless assault of a kind that has not existed in America since before the end of slavery, the Jim Crow south, and the advent of women’s suffrage.

The great French champion of liberty, Frederic Bastiat formulated the idea that “government is the great fiction by which everybody attempts to live at the expense of everybody else.”   Obama’s vision of forcing everybody into being their brother’s keeper embodies this stupid fiction more radically than any president before him. 

This election will do nothing to right this line of cockamamie thinking.

We look forward to a better day, far in the future, I’m sure, when a more enlightened polity will have put a permanent and moral stop to the idea that individuals are sacrificial animals who can rightly be plundered, bossed around in every detail of their lives, jailed, and sent to slaughter on the alter of the “common good.” 

This election will have done little to bring that better day any closer. 

But we can each do something to bring that better day a little closer if we think and struggle to understand a few questions, such as these:

 

1.   How on earth has America come to have a commie lib Marxist in the White House, a man whose books clearly revealed himself to be an enemy of the American vision of freedom long before his first election, and who now stands an excellent chance of being reelected?  Anyone who bothered to read his books or to LISTEN to what the man told us could hardly fail to see that Obama’s Hope and Change was his hope to change America into something more like the egalitarianism and democratic socialism of France’s advanced welfare state.  He campaigned on the premise that he would unify us and make government more transparent.  We have to look as far back as our own Civil War to find a time when we were more divided.  Ask yourself why?  Never before Obama Care has a major piece of social legislation passed without ANY bipartisan support.  The great unifier not only failed to enlist the opposition, he cheerfully told them to go to hell.  How come?  Government has never been more opaque.  Why?  He promised more fiscal responsibility and lower unemployment, lower debt and deficits, an end to the unfunded long term obligations of social programs.  All of these issues are vastly worse now.  Why?  And, perhaps most puzzling of all, why on earth do all these failures seem not to make many more people turn against him?  The Republicans tell Obama that he can’t run on his record.  Liberal comedian Chris Rock recently tweeted, “Only Pres Obama could prevent a depression, end a war, get bin Laden, bring unemployment below 8 percent, then be told he can’t run on his record.”  How can Rock be serious?  This praise is ludicrous enough to inspire vertigo.

2.    Why is the Confiscator-in Chief’s opponent a man who bases his moral vision  on the ravings of his adult imaginary friend (the God of Abraham, of course) who tells him that marriage is a sacred union only between a man and a woman?  Why does he believe his imaginary friend, against the opinion of the scientific community, that life begins at conception and that therefore women should not have control over their bodies and their reproductive rights?  Why are Romney/Ryan set to do nothing essential to support the vision of America as a sweet land of liberty?  Why are the Republicans today miles to the political left of FDR, JFK and LBJ?

3.    Why does the mud wrestling contest between political left and right represent such an ironic tension between stupid false alternatives?  Think of the conservatives who say they champion individual freedom, but are so intolerant as to try to pass laws against gay marriage.  Think of liberals who say they champion freedom, but for more than a century have been passing laws to control the decisions that should be left between physicians and their patients, and why do liberals want to control damn near every detail of our lives?  Why do conservatives want to push their noses into peoples’ bedrooms?  Why don’t liberals trust consenting adults to commit capitalist acts together for mutual benefit?

4.   What is reality?  How do we come to know anything about the facts of reality?  What is it that makes Homo sapiens different from all the other animals?  How do we survive?  What are reason and rationality?  How do we come to know what is true and false?  What is ethics?  Morality?  How do we come to know what is right and wrong?  Are these matters merely the arbitrary ravings of the tribe into which we were born?  What is free will?  Determinism?  How do we reconcile free will in a deterministic universe, or is this impossible?

5.   What are rights?  How are they related to human nature?  What is the moral status of self-defense?  What is government?  What is the purpose of a legitimate government?  What is liberty?  Freedom?  Property?  To what are we entitled?  What should be the relation between individuals and governments?

6.   What is wealth?  There are material and soulful aspects of wealth; what are these, and how do you know?  In this context of wealth, again, what are rights and property?  What is trade?  Goods, services?  Barter?  Exchange?  Indirect exchange?  Money?  Government again, in this new context?  Banking?  Interest?  Usury?  Credit?  Central banking of governments?   Fractional reserve banking?  Government intervention?

7.   It is an unassailable fact that freedom works across every culture, in every time and place it has ever been remotely approximated.  You can look at social experiments like East and West Germany after 1945, at North and South Korea, at Japan before and after the war; these are like control and experimental groups of culturally similar subjects, in social experiments that prove beyond any doubt that freedom always works to increase the wealth, health, and perceived well being of those populations.  Freedom always works, and works better when it is increased and worse when it is diminished, AND YET, every major political group crusades passionately against it with relentless force everywhere in the world.  Why on earth can such a foolish and self-destructive politics be true?  And yet it is.  Why? 

 

We shall make little progress without better answers to these foundational  questions of philosophy than most of us appear to have today.

I believe the short answer to the above questions is, as Ayn Rand pointed out, that our world equates the essence of evil with a concern for one’s own self-interest, and the morally good with turning ourselves into self-sacrificial animals on the alter on the common good, which, at best, turns morality into the enemy of the individual’s unfolding and happiness, and at worst, provides the moral justification that opens the door to totalitarian slaughter.

Explaining this requires long study, in the face of the lifetime one has likely spent hearing the opposite.

 

As an antidote to the insanity, for starters, I recommend a short reading list:

 

Very quick read:

Leonard Read, I, Pencil

I know of no more pithy introduction to the true nature of markets is than this short, brilliant little pamphlet, available free and online, at the website of

The Foundation for Economic Education:   fee.org  )

 

Ayn Rand,   Atlas Shrugged

-----   ,       Philosophy: Who Needs It?

-----   ,       Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (Second Edition)

Leonard Peikoff,  Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

------ ,                The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West are Going Out

------,                 The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America

David Harriman,  The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics

Yaron Brook and Don Watkins,  Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can

                                              End Big Government

David Kelley,   The Evidence of the Senses

----,                 The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration

Henry Hazlitt,    Economics in One Lesson

Ludwig von Mises,  Socialism

----- ,                   Liberalism

-----,                    Human Action

Murray Rothbard,  For a New Liberty

George Reisman,  Capitalism