Thursday, October 20, 2016

When it is moral to vote for an imperfect candidate


Imagine you have just fallen off a cliff.  Your fall is stopped by small ledge. You have a chance to survive but you cannot possibly do it alone. Various people become aware of your situation and want to help.  One of them has a good rope and the strength to pull you up, but he is a flawed person with sins in his past that repulse you.  The others who come to help are weak and don't have proper rescue gear.  One of the people even wants you to fall and is preparing to tumble a boulder down on you.  You have a family at home that needs you so you need to make decision.

In my view, it is immoral for you not to choose the rescuer that has the best chance of getting you out alive.

Of course I'm talking about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson and fringe candidates like Evan McMullin, the top contenders in the 2016 election to save America.  Clinton is the one preparing a boulder to toss on us: open borders, ruinous taxation, and disdain for the rule of law.  Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin have some good ideas but they don't have strong coalitions.  They can throw you some tooth floss, but they have no rope.  Trump has the coalition.  He has the rope and the strength to pull you up.  Imperfect as he is, he won't take you all the way home, but he'll get you up from the ledge.  And you'll have to keep an eye on him once your up.

When you understand the realities before us, picking a well-intentioned but ill-equipped rescuer, even if they have impeccable character, is suicidal.  If your choice negatively affects the livelihoods of others and the future of a nation, it is immoral.  This is not the time to indulge in self righteous protest votes.  It is not the time to indulge in wishful thinking about third parties.  It is time to get real and grab the only rope that can pull us to safety.

Under President Obama we were pushed off the cliff.  He initiated what is to be the eventual nationalization of the healthcare industry.  He has doubled the national debt with nothing to show for it.  The bubble economy continues and the recovery has been the weakest since the Depression.   Obama has instituted the precedent of governing like a dictator when it suits him.  As noted here, with the exception of Roosevelt, no president has justified his executive overreach by openly contending he was working around the law-making branch of government. Obama has divided the country more starkly along racial and class divisions.  These divisions are exploited to create a permanent class of people who depend on Democrats.  This is not a unifying effort.  This is an effort to balkanize and to buy votes.

Point of No Return
Enough voters expect benefits from Democrats that it may already be impossible to reform the country.   As of 2013, 35% of tax filers pay no federal tax.  12 million residents (4% of the population) are not here legally and have formed ties with sympathetic voters who believe Democrats will reward these folks .  35% of Americans receive federal welfare benefits.  When you include all federal programs, we have reached the point where over 50% of voters rely on the federal government for their welfare.    Talks of reform naturally scares those voters.  This is why we may already be doomed to collapse.  We simply don't have any more time.  We don't have the luxury of four or eight more years of Obama's policies under a Clinton presidency.

Rigged Election
Donald Trump is not the "evil" choice that I keep hearing so much about.  I just saw him stick his neck out for the unborn on National TV.  It isn't popular to challenge abortion, but he did.  He stuck is neck out to defend the Constitution, the American worker, and people of every race.  He dares call out radical Islam.  He dares to reform immigration.  He dares to be politically incorrect.  There is good in this flawed man.

Oh, I don't doubt that he may have been a philanderer.  But I'm voting for someone to save my country, not teach my Sunday School class.  I tried to get the ideal man (Ted Cruz) during the primary.  But to my chagrin, my coalition chose Trump.  As his wife said, Trump is "raw".  He is not my kind of role model in terms of demeanor.  But by the same token, his unconventional demeanor is what many voters wanted after so much political dishonesty and correctness of the years.

Accusations and video tapes have surfaced with impeccable timing.  Four weeks left before voting, and suddenly we are hearing about all kinds of supposed misdeeds that occurred decades ago.  If the media was not in the tank for Hillary, we would have heard all of this back in February when Trump was running in the primaries.  Trump got all of free coverage in those days because the media saw him as the weakest candidate against Hillary.   Meanwhile the ammunition to take him down lay dormant until the strategic moment.  The news is now 24/7 about anything salacious regarding Trump.  Meanwhile, the coverage about Hillary's corruption is downplayed.

Don't let the media use your morality against you to get their much more corrupt candidate elected.

Number one rule of Politics
If you want to succeed in real estate, they always say, "location, location, location!".  Similarly, there is only one way to succeed in politics:  coalition, coalition, coalition!  Protest votes and third parties will only bring failure.


Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Third Parties

Third Parties
The last time we had a new party win a national election was in 1860 when Republican Abraham Lincoln won.  Examine the following conditions and see if any of them apply today:
  1. In 1860 the Democratic Party was deeply fractured.  It actually split into two conventions and nominated two different candidates.  Had they been united (as today's Democratic party is) Lincoln would have lost.
  2. The Republican Party was made possible by the disintegration of the Whig Party after 1852.  The Whig Party was divided over slavery and could not survive the the turmoil over slavery.  Today's Republican Party has inept leadership, but it has no deep philosophical rift to break it up.  
  3. It took 8 years for ex-Whigs, ex-Democrats and ex-Free Soilers to coalesce around the new Republican party.  The Republican party, having not yet built up a strong coalition, soundly lost the 1856 election.
The conditions for a third party to not exist today.  Also, in a first-one-past-the-post voting system such as our, it is a mathematical certainty that we'll always have just two major parties.  The only way to have persistent third parties is to have a parliamentary voting system or something like approval voting.  So any talk of a third party in the current system is just wishful thinking.