Category Archives: Democracy

The Jaws of Victory

The Democrats seem to be becoming more and more adept at snagging defeat from the jaws of victory. Ever since the “what happened?” upset defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 the Democratic party’s strategists couldn’t find the pulse of the American electorate if you handed them a stethoscope. Not that the Republicans are much better – but the Republicans currently hold the reigns of power – so all they need to do is sit back and keep their mouth shut while the left engages in hyperbolic ranting’s about male-heteronormative-rape-culture-privilege or whatever the latest SJW trending outrage is focused on. They don’t understand the “common” American, so they turn to their intellectual muses – the ivory tower elites who currently occupy basically 99% of all US universities. These elites struggle on with their never ending quest to unearth the most arcane and esoteric slight to some ever shrinking slice of cultural Marxism. Turning to these people for advice on strategy is like asking Siri for dating tips.

The Democrats latest fiasco was the Judge Kavanaghs confirmation hearings. The hubris of naked Democrat partisanship knows no bounds. Somehow they thought no one would notice that they knew about potential serious allegations again Kavanagh back in July but chose to sit on those allegations until literally the 11thhour of his confirmation hearings. Obviously they hoped that these last minute allegations would sow uncertainty in a handful of Senators, just enough to turn the tide against him. What they didn’t count on was how absurd the charges would look under public scrutiny by the “common” American (seriously, something that happened nearly 40 years ago in HIGH SCHOOL!). If he did what he was accused of doing it is naturally condemnable behavior – but it’s not rape. Guys being pigs isn’t rape. Who hasn’t done something stupid in their youth that they then NEVER DID AGAIN? I’m sure if they had found a shoplifting charge when he was 12 they would have used that instead.

Kavanagh was a terrible pick for the Supreme Court. He is absolutely atrocious on the 4thamendment (he time and again confirmed the government’s right to spy on its own citizens with impunity). That is what the Democrats should have hammered him on. They would have shown the American people that there are some in power that do care about their rights and their privacy. But no, they can’t do that, because the Democrats are just as much a bunch of Neocon’s warmongers as are the Republicans. Both sides are more than happy to keep the perpetual war state going.

So, for the past several months polling has shown the Democrats were likely to take both the House and the Senate in the midterm elections. But then the Kavanagh fiasco occurred. And guess what now? The tide has turned. Polling shows that it is very likely the Republican swill keep BOTH the House and Senate. As Hillary would say, “what happened?” My take on this turn of events is that the atrocious naked partisanship games of the Democrats has genuinely angered lukewarm center-right folk into supporting Republicans this fall and has also fired up the Republican base to go to the polls and show the Democrats just what they think of their games.

If you thought the 2016 left-meltdown was something, it’s about to go full nuclear this November when the Republicans keep the House and Senate. Now time to sit back and warm up the popcorn…

Words Speak Louder Than Actions?

Why so much hate for the Donald? If we look only at his actual policies they are in fact no different than any of his predecessors. Differences that may exist are in degree, not kind. Or non-existant at all. For example ICE deportations are both up and down under Trump when compared to Obama. They are up from FY2016 (61,094 vs 44,512) but dramatically lower under Trump than under Obama’s first years (averaging over 225,000 from 2008-2012). The point being before you start jumping up and down about what a monster some president is in comparison to “your guy” chances are high that “your guy” at some point did the exact the same thing or far worse. That goes both ways my Democrat and Republican friends. That’s because they are all the same. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump – they’ve all been responsible for murdering innocent civilians in other countries by the truck load. But nobody cares because we wave the flag and chant “US interests” or “national defense” as if somehow that incantation is supposed to bring absolution. We’re all too eager to protest the president over something he said (mere words) but then stand silent with respect to their horrendous actions (murdering innocents). I guess actions don’t speak louder than words when it comes to Presidential concerns, at least where it concerns Trump.

Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump have all escalated the drug war. They have all been responsible for caging millions of people for the “crime” of having in their possession something that some other people think they shouldn’t have in their possession. If we threw people in cages for owning certain books there would be a groundswell of public outcry; yet change that word from “book” to “drug” and somehow it all makes perfect sense. There is no constitutional amendment (like alcohol prohibition had supporting it) mandating a drug war, so any of these presidents with the stroke of a pen could have ended this senseless and costly “war” on drugs. That not one of them has serves as a testament to their cowardice and wickedness.

So it is not Trump’s policies that the left finds so objectionable but rather his delivery. Indeed when he shuts up and bombs people the press fall all over themselves praising how “presidential” he is. For shame. Killing people is presidential? Trump is crude and blunt when he speaks. Not at all how we picture our Hollywood presidents to be. The press and the left would like someone from central casting (like Obama) filling the role – someone who just “seems” presidential. This crudeness is perhaps Trumps only redeeming quality. It puts the lie to the notion that presidents are somehow better, smarter, and wiser, than the rest of us and are worthy of the power we bestow upon them. They are not. With Trump we see the Everyman President. And it scares us. And it should. But it should scare us no matter who occupies that office. Do not be so easily duped by the silver tongue of the professional politician. If you focus on their deeds and not their words then perhaps we might one day reign in their power.

The March on Windmills

The Women’s March on Washington DC (and around the world) this past January 21 was supposed to “send a message” to the new Trump administration. But rather than address his actually harmful stated goals (tariffs, wall building, etc.) they’d rather tilt at the imaginary windmills of things he never even touched on once. The inanity of it all cries out to be addressed; therefore I give my blow by low critique from their entire Unity Principles. Enjoy.

“We believe that Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights.”

Well duh, hard to argue with a tautology.

“We must create a society in which women”

So that would cover all women, irrespective of all other sub-categorizations, right? No, ok, so apparently “women” is unclear and you find it necessary to further qualify it…

“including Black women, Native women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, lesbian queer and trans women”

You forgot short women, skinny women, fat women, old women and young women. So I guess those women don’t qualify for the right to be

“free and able to care for and nurture their families, however they are formed, in safe and healthy environments free from structural impediments”

I wasn’t aware women are not being permitted to care and nurture their families was a thing. When did they pass that law?

“Women deserve to live full and healthy lives, free of all forms of violence against our bodies.”

Wait so men don’t deserve these things? I thought women’s rights were human rights and men are human… so why not be a bit more inclusive here with “people deserve”? Oh right, identify politics derives its power from the notion that we must separate ourselves into little political fiefdoms rather than accept the proposition we are all simply human beings with identical individual rights.

“We believe in accountability and justice in cases of police brutality and ending racial profiling and targeting of communities of color. It is our moral imperative to dismantle the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system.”

Can’t disagree with that… then again this sort of thing grew substantially during Obama’s 8 years… where were the marches and protests by millions of women highlighting his actual failures to address this vs. your mere fear that Trump might not focus on it.

“We believe in Reproductive Freedom. We do not accept any federal, state or local rollbacks, cuts or restrictions on our ability to access quality reproductive healthcare services, birth control, HIV/AIDS care and prevention, or medically accurate sexuality education. This means open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people, regardless of income, location or education.”

Right, in other words “I have a right to free stuff… it is my right that you use a gun to take money from people in order that I don’t have to suffer the indignity of being asked to actually pay for $20 worth of birth control pills”

“We firmly declare that LGBTQIA Rights are Human Rights and that it is our obligation to uplift, expand and protect the rights of our gay, lesbian, bi, queer, trans or gender non-conforming brothers, sisters and siblings.”

So LGBTQIA people don’t have the right to vote, hold a job, own a home, get married, get a driver’s license, go to school? Wow, that’s news to me. What rights is it they don’t have again?

“We must have the power to control our bodies and be free from gender norms, expectations and stereotypes.”

Right, body control is fine as long as you use it in those ways officially sanctioned by the left. Two bodies engaging in trade requires “regulation” (the market). A body being forced to labor for another is perfectly fine (taxation). The right to “be free of people thinking x about me” is the right to use violence to control the bodies of others by curtailing their free speech and free thought lest someone’s feelings get hurt… cause hurt feelings are the worst possible thing in the world. Far worse than Obama drone-bombing brown women and children on an almost daily basis. But we only care about brown women and children in the United States. Those in other countries aren’t Americans so we don’t care about them. We don’t march for them.

“We believe in an economy powered by transparency, accountability, security and equity”

What does this even mean? Today’s menu consists of word salad.

“All women should be paid equitably”

They are already, if they weren’t then female unemployment would be 0% and it’s not, so case closed.

“with access to affordable childcare, sick days, healthcare, paid family leave, and healthy work environments.”

“Access” – another euphemism for “point a gun at that guy so he gives me stuff I want for free”. To claim you have a right to anything that can only exist by the labor of another is to say you own the labor of others. We have a word for that. I’ll let you figure it out on your own.

“All workers – including domestic and farm workers, undocumented and migrant workers – must have the right to organize and fight for a living minimum wage.”

Sure, fight all you want, but you don’t have the right to use violence, at the individual or state level, to get what you want. Of course let’s just ignore the fact that this thing that you want to control (the state) so you can have your grab bag of “rights” is also the thing that defines people as “undocumented” or “migrant” and limits their rights to begin with.

“We believe Civil Rights are our birthright, including voting rights, freedom to worship without fear of intimidation or harassment, freedom of speech, and protections for all citizens regardless of race, gender, age or disability.”

And these things don’t already exist? I’m sorry, I must have missed the part when Trump campaigned on a platform of repealing the Civil Rights Act and the 1st Amendment.

“We believe that all women’s issues are issues faced by women with disabilities and Deaf women.”

You already included “disabled women” above in your laundry list of female subgroups. But I guess the irony of treating the disabled differently by pointing them out in particular is lost on you. Oh, and when did deafness not become a disability? So blind women are disabled but deaf women are not? So confusing…

“Rooted in the promise of America’s call for huddled masses yearning to breathe free, we believe in immigrant and refugee rights regardless of status or country of origin. We believe migration is a human right and that no human being is illegal.”

Agreed – of course Obama deported more “illegals” over 8 years than even Bush. So there’s that. But why let partisanship get in the way of holding your leaders accountable.

“We believe that every person and every community in our nation has the right to clean water, clean air, and access to and enjoyment of public lands.”

I guess the irony is lost on you that you are beseeching the government to maintain this right when in fact it one of the world’s biggest polluters. It also uses as a perennial excuse it’s own failure to protect the environment to justify even more funding. Normally doing a poor job gets you fired, not a raise.

“We believe that our environment and our climate must be protected, and that our land and natural resources cannot be exploited for corporate gain or greed – especially at the risk of public safety and health.”

Yes it would be far better to let everything in the world lie fallow and unused. This is Snow Globe Environmentalism – the notion that the Earth is a static bubble that man must not disturb. Everything has a trade off. The balance is found through the discovery process of the market price system. Not by top down edicts that would condemn 95% of the human race to death if they got their way (through elimination of electricity and mechanized agriculture).

We now return you to our regularly scheduled apoplectic Trump bashing for things we think he might do.

The Blame Train

The blame train continues its journey. First the democrats blamed racist angry whites for Clinton’s loss. But it turns out white’s preference for the R over the D candidate was statistically no different in this election than in those of recent memory. Indeed Clinton lost ground among blacks and Hispanics against the putatively “racist” Trump. Next came the “fake news” canard which suggested that overtly absurd “news” stories with limited ideological appeal somehow swayed the decision making process of those completely unplugged from the inside baseball of politics. Now the latest attempt at diverting blame for Hillary’s historic loss is the narrative that Russia tried to influence the outcome of the election by “helping” Trump by exposing to the public the sordid underbelly of the DNC and their candidate. The source of this narrative? None other than the CIA. You know, the folks that brought us “trust us, there really are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” The agency with a decades long history of interfering in the internal affairs of other nations (see Iran coup of 1953), whose sole purpose is to manipulate foreign nationals into doing their bidding so as to gain a political outcome favorable to US interests, they are now the ones crying foul that the US was the victim of the exact same shenanigan they routinely engage in. Well sort of. The Washington Post article citing this revelation only refers to anonymous sources indirectly briefed by the agency. Yep, sounds ironclad to me.

What evidence that has been released is laughable at best. It is the real world equivalent of citing as proof of an Indian attack the fact that the attackers wore headdress and threw tomahawks. Because no one ever has ever thought to cast a false appearance in order to shift blame. In other words, if Russia actually did decide to engage in such a hack they would not be stupid enough to actually use tools with a clear Russian fingerprint. That alone basically tells you it was NOT Russia.

Then again it doesn’t really matter if Russia was involved. They aren’t being accused of actually physically hacking vote tallies. They are being accused of playing a role in the release of truthful information. It is indeed a crazy world where the former heart of the Soviet empire is the vanguard of truth while the American government seeks to bury it. Notice none of those on the left deny the information that was released. They can’t, because it’s all true. The best they can hope for is some sort of Cold War era McCarthy-esque ties-to-Russia smear campaign against Trump in order to undermine or delegitimize his presidency. But it won’t work because at the end of the day the people only care about the information, not how it was obtained. To wit, even with all of the recent revelations of Russian “hacking” a Pew Research poll shows 99% of Trump voters and 97% of Clinton voters would cast the exact same vote today as they did on November 8.

Is this fake news?

The Democratic Party is a peddler of envy. It’s not fair your neighbor has more than you. Elect us and we’ll right this injustice by taking from them and giving to you. But don’t feel bad about it; it’s not your fault you couldn’t achieve on your own. Forces beyond your control (racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, bigotry, white privilege, male privilege, etc.) are conspiring to keep you down. You are the victim so there is no need to reflect on the results of your choices.

So it should come as no surprise that the party itself is practicing this mantra in their own affairs. Hillary Clinton’s loss is not her fault. No, it’s (now) the fault of “fake news,” the Russians, or misogynistic women. Apparently “fake news” is the latest epidemic to sweep the nation, although oddly enough it was on no one’s radar until after the election. Funny that. This grand great epidemic that didn’t warrant so much as a peep out of anyone on the left until AFTER Hillary lost. Interesting. Hillary Clinton spoke last week on the subject of “fake news” calling it an “epidemic” with “real world consequences.” She called for “bipartisan legislation” that would allow Congress to respond to such “propaganda.” Whoa-whoa there! So Trump was a monster when he spoke of “looking into” libel laws after getting upset about his coverage in the news media but Clinton calls for tossing out the 1st amendment (Congress “responding to” such speech would be just that) and no one in the media bats an eye?

Let’s define a few terms here first. True fake news is supposed to be satirically fake. It is commonly found on sites like The Onion, where tongue in cheek satire makes the comedic intent clear. Then there are soft-fake sites that try to (poorly) emulate the Onion but do so with click-baity semi-legitimate sounding headlines; but, once the story is read it becomes clear it is not real – but too late – you clicked on the link and their ad revenue just went up! What people are upset about is pseudo-fake news, that is, they are Onion-like stories that purport to be real. Lastly there are a number of sites that have been labeled as “fake news” because someone disagrees with their opinion based content. If people like Clinton got her way we would have a Department of Truth that would be tasked with reviewing all internet content and empowered to ‘take down’ any content that did not conform to officially sanctioned opinion. Want to run a blog? Just apply for your speech license comrade. You laugh – but it’s coming.

In the end a two second analysis would reveal that actual fake stories did not influence the election one bit. Social media has become an echo chamber on both sides. The only people dumb enough to think “cbsnewslo.com.co” is a real news site are those already living in the social media echo chamber. Opinions are not changed by such sites, only reinforced.

Calexit

The vote counting continues. Thus far Clinton has accrued approximately 2.5 million more popular votes than Trump. Wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues – “how can this be? Democracy!?” The democracy game depends in large part on how one slices the pie. Democracy is fundamentally arbitrary insofar as the rules for inclusion are based on imaginary invisible lines in the dirt. Just take a look at a map of gerrymandered congressional districts; those distended and warped puzzle pieces forensically betray the party of their author. We could easily redraw state boundaries that would give Clinton a win; likewise we could draw new state boundaries that would give Trump an even larger electoral college win. But let’s play this game: if we look solely at popular vote within two distinct geographical areas we find a stark contrast. The first region is California and the second region is every other state except California. In California, Clinton handily won by 4 million votes. But in the other not-California region Trump won by 1.5 million. If direct democracy popular voting is going to be the new gold standard, then would it not be a crime to force the entirety of not-California to suffer under a Clinton presidency merely because one state, California, wished it to be so? Indeed, remove just one more state from that mix, New York, and the differential climbs to a 3 million more for Trump in the new country known as not-California-or-New-York.

Oh but you argue that’s disingenuous, we are “one country.” But are we? Borders are arbitrary, there is no physical law of nature that dictates biological entities living at these coordinates on a sphere must be irreversibly bound into a political union. Unions exist only so long as the parties wish it. Indeed, union dissolution is the last vestige of the people’s right to counter federal overreach. Yes, we’re talking about the “s” word: secession, an end to that “indivisible” union. Before November 7, 2016 such talk was ridiculed by the left (in straw man like fashion) to be the bailiwick of racists. However, now that the left no longer holds the reins of power they have suddenly discovered the merits of federalism, states rights, and even (gasp) secession. There is currently a movement for “Calexit”, that is the idea that California should leave the union and becomes it’s own country. A Calexit success would finally sever that peculiar linkage of secession to slavery in the American psyche. Normalization of secession would release a long neglected cudgel against expanding federal power.

The mere fact that secession is on the table as an option is further proof of the failure of the constitution (or rather the failure of men to be bound by it). The principals of federalism embodied in that document gave most power to the states with only a narrow set of enumerated powers granted to the federal government. Were that still the case no one would even care who the president was.

The Rise or Fall of Socialism

Is socialism on the rise (Bernie Sanders)? Or is it on the decline (Venezuela’s economic implosion, Brazil’s impeachment of their socialist President, Cuba and North Korea’s decades of abject poverty)? To be fair, one could likewise cite the relative success of China, Denmark, Norway, or Canada as proof of socialism’s success. Why the difference? Why are some putatively socialist countries not total economic basket cases whereas others clearly are? To uncover the answer we must understand why some groups of people come together and achieve their goals while others fail. In any endeavor there is a group of individuals who have tight control over the means of goal achievement. This allows them to direct those means so as to ensure an efficient operation that will achieve the desired ends. Does that not remind you of something else? Like say a business perhaps? The reality is that the modern nation-state is simply a really big company, with shareholders (citizens), a board of directors (congress/parliaments) and a president running the show. Unfortunately this is one corporate stock you can’t sell if you disagree with how the company is being run.

So if states are structured as a business, why do some fail and some thrive? For the same reasons any business might fail or thrive. Success entails the optimization of three factors: consent, control, and resources. All factors play a role, however any one of them can overwhelm the others. This is the reason we see very different outcomes in a variety of nominally socialist countries, e.g. Venezuela vs. Denmark. It is not enough to cite Cuba (excessive level of state control) as a failure and therefore close the case on socialism. Were that the case then one would be susceptible to charges that capitalism can’t “work” because sometimes a business goes bankrupt. However it is just as disingenuous for those on the left to cite oil-rich Norway (abundant resources) as proof of socialism’s success. If Cuba had Norway’s oil resources it would be faring far better. Or maybe not, as in the case of oil rich Venezuela which too suffers from excessive state control of the economy and is presently circling the drain.

Countries that exert a high degree of control (totalitarian) over their citizens will always experience less “success” than those that exert little control. Less control means greater freedom to innovate and solve problems from the bottom up rather than the top down. Formerly socialist/communist countries (China, Vietnam) that have embraced the benefits of freedom (that is, free vs. state managed markets) within their borders have seen improved standards of living relative to those that have not (Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela). As a country or business grows in size, efficient control becomes exponentially more difficult. This is due to the Hayekian knowledge problem. Stated simply it is the reason that a family farm runs smoothly but a state run collective not so much. Unfortunately, those in charge don’t realize they lack the appropriate knowledge and thus make sledgehammer style choices that only serves to undermine the endeavor. The solution to the size-control problem is to move toward less control and smaller size through decentralization. Large businesses with autonomous subsidiaries have mastered this problem well.

A critical and often overlooked factor in the success of a state is consent. Without consent the process will be crippled if participants undermine or refuse it. This is a key difference between business endeavors and state endeavors; states always compel those who do not consent to participate. Businesses cannot force people to work for them or for customers to buy their products. Apathy was not an option when it came to the rise of 20th century socialism. The motto of Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia: join us or die. Democracies maintain an illusion of consent that mollifies a credulous citizenry into the quiet acceptance of being ruled. They are better than dictatorships, but not by much, and fall far short of the benefits one would see with true pluralism.

To make America great again we must recognize that while our resources are substantial our size puts us at a disadvantage. The only way to overcome that disadvantage is to loosen, not tighten, the reigns of economic control and to foster true consensual pluralism by permitting those who wish to not participate in the dominant system to work toward building alternatives that will expand, not constrain, choice.

Earning Freedom

With each election cycle the people grow wearier of politicians who can’t get anything “done” – perennial gridlock maintains a perpetual status quo that breeds disdain for all things political. History teaches that as a community grows into a nation, then a country and finally an empire, the ensuing proliferation of voices brings action to a standstill. This sets the stage for a strong leader with a message of salvation. Finally! Someone who will do something! People get so frustrated they almost don’t care what is done as long as someone is changing things. At least with change there is at a chance their lot might improve. Witness the broad popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders; they both tell the people exactly what they want to hear, namely that their problems are not their fault and that if you only give either one the power he’ll make their lives great again.

However, there is an alternative to resigned acceptance of a dictator in chief. To uncover the alternative we must first be brave enough to ask: why is nothing getting done? Is it because a handful is maliciously plotting to undermine good ideas? Quite the contrary. It is our greatest strength, our ideas, our freedom of thought, that is the “downfall” here. Too many ideas all competing brings about not gridlock but equilibrium. No one idea can dominate because so many are equally appealing. But this will not stand! How can one rule without dominance? Perhaps dominance is not needed because human societies require no rulers to maintain order. Witness the “anarchy” among Protestant denominations. There are over 30,000 of them and without a single Protestant “ruler” somehow it all works just fine. Is this religious anarchy a thing to be feared? Quite the contrary, we universally welcome it as part of fundamental human liberty. Odd then that political free association is not likewise permitted and is instead smeared with fear-tinged epithets such as “anarchy”.

The real enemy is the notion that government can only “work” as long as unwilling people are forced to participate. It is like if a hundred people went into a McDonalds to order but food could not be served until at least 51 of them agreed on what to eat, and then all 100 would have to have the same meal. Let’s instead go to Burger King where everyone can have it their way. If I can order a hamburger while you order chicken nuggets then why is it so hard to let me opt out of Social Security even while you voluntarily choose to opt in? Life insurance doesn’t require participation of the entire country to “work”, so then why should a simple income insurance policy need it.

What if we just let each group implement their ideas as they desired, holding only those who voluntarily consent to such rules to be subject to them. If the progressive democrats want to have a single payer, massive minimum wage, cradle-to-grave-social security system then let them. Likewise if the social conservative republicans want to have drug, alcohol, gay-marriage, abortion-rejecting set of standards then let them. Nothing is stopping them from forming voluntary associations where all like-minded people agree to abide by such rules. If either side does not want to live among those who disagree with them then each is free to form private communities (á la the Amish) where no outside ideas will intrude upon their peace. If your ideas can only work if others are forced to participate in them then it’s time to examine the morality of your ideas.

A carriage goes nowhere if some horses refuse to move, some wish to go left, and some right. Better to release those with their own ideas and move forward rather than employing brutal force to bring all in line. In order to receive freedom, you must first be willing to give it.

Party Time

The American political party duopoly is a curious thing. Every other modern democratically run state has multiple political parties that freely compete for votes in order to establish their representative share of the people’s voice within the government. But that’s not the case in America; here we have two parties that share total control of the state apparatus on a semi-regular seesawing 8-year cycle. The curious thing is that no one questions why this would be? Is it that in other countries there are four, five, or six different more nuanced mixtures of political opinion but somehow when you cross the American border human minds undergo a transformation that imparts upon them the capacity to only hold allegiance to one of two political mindsets?

As you might have guessed there is no magic involved at all. Wherever you find constrained or limited options you will find government pulling the strings from behind black cloth. Political parties are not institutions established by the constitution. Indeed they are not necessary at all for our government to operate. Political parties are private institutions, businesses really, and are the product of the natural tendency of people with similar views to work together for common cause. That is all perfectly fine. The problem occurred over time. Whenever one party gained control, they would pass laws (erect barriers) making it that much harder for opposing parties to gain access to the ballot box. If your opponents can’t get their name on the ballot that tends to increase the likelihood you will remain in office.

Simultaneously they made the process of their campaigning that much easier by passing laws (providing assistance) that authorized the government to use public resources to assist with internal party business (i.e. nominating primaries) thereby supporting the illusion that party business is really state business. That is to say, these private businesses (Democrat Party™ and Republican Party™) have the cojones to get the public to pay for their private primary elections that ultimately are entirely pointless, as it is the party delegates that decide the nominee, not the voter. This process is merely an insidious trick to dupe the people into feeling as though they have a voice in the process so that they come to view the primary process as party of “democracy” when it is nothing more than a privately run, and publicly paid for, straw poll. This process has gone on so long that most people are unaware of the distinction and simply view the “primaries” as part of the normal political process of electing someone to office. They are not. They are private events held in public, paid for by that public, masquerading as democracy in action.

These political parties care not one wit about your vote or what you think. Because they are both private organizations they can ultimately pick whomever they want to be the nominee. They prefer to have the blessing of the voters upon their anointed candidate in order to give the people the illusion of choice. People are more easily controlled if they feel like they have some control of their life – if they feel like they have a choice, even the illusion of choice, they will accept a result even if they do not agree with it.

Duopoly control is further assured since most elections do not require the winner obtain a majority of the vote if by some miracle a third candidate appears on the ballot. This rules out runoff elections, which afford voters the ability to rank their choices. The deck is then further stacked against the third party candidate as people make a pragmatic rather than a principled choice to ensure the “most evil” candidate does not win

Political parties have co-opted the authority of government in order to ensure their continued stranglehold on power in this country. This is not democracy. This is not freedom. False choice is not real choice. We laugh at countries with only one name on the ballot and yet somehow only two names on the ballot seems perfectly reasonable. If you truly believe in democracy then you must demand the people be free to choose from all options. Every flavor of ballot access laws should be repealed, campaigning on the ballot (D or R next to the name) should be banned, all winners must have a majority decided through instant runoff style elections, and the Democrat and Republican parties should either have private nominating conventions or pay for their own public elections.

Land of the free?

Willful ignorance is the ability to be both cognizant of a fact while simultaneously ignoring it. This affords one the ability to derive some measure of comfort from pretending to live in a world where such a fact is not extant. For example, a child may know deep down there is no Santa Claus but derives more psychic comfort in pretending that there is. Any belief system that makes testable claims is susceptible to objective scrutiny and when that scrutiny undermines the belief, willful ignorance typically ensues in order to preserve the comfort of that belief. While the world has many religions, there is one belief system that transcends them all. Nearly every member of our species adheres to it (insofar as it seems to be woven into our DNA). It is known as tribalism or its more common variant, patriotism. This is the belief that ones own arbitrarily defined group is superior to all other arbitrarily defined groups. One can even stack their tribes and believe each is the best (best city, best county, best state, best country). Now while there may be no way to prove or disprove ones estimation of their group’s “greatness” sometimes the patriot will make a testable claim, such as, “America stands for freedom and independence” or “America is the freest country in the world.” The latter is easily disproven by reviewing any of the various indices of freedom (the US ranks very poorly at around 25th). But even if the US is not quite the freest it is still believed by the patriot that America is a “free” country; that we fought the Revolutionary War in order to gain our “freedom”. A close examination of the actual history shows that it was not a war of independence for the peoples of the United States but rather a war of independence for the governments of those states from Great Britain. The individual remained just as ruled after the war as before, all that changed was the accent of the ruler. But the myth persists, that America is all about freedom of the individual against tyrannical governments and that our military fights to preserve “our freedom”. This is where the willful ignorance comes in to play. Let us examine the evidence that puts the lie to that notion of “our freedom.”

Would a free country enact laws restricting the non-violent behavior of its citizens? Would a free country throw people in a cage because they exchanged an unapproved good or service for money? Would a free country throw people in a cage if the exchange were approved but the exchange did not conform to some third party’s idea of the proper conditions for the exchange? Would a free country throw people in a cage because they did not get permission from someone to work for themselves or others? To wit, a recent article in the Morgan County Citizen (3/3/16, pg. 1) or Lake Oconee News (3/10/16) concerning a lake homeowner who faces JAIL TIME for renting out her home for short-term vacations. The horror! Yes, certainly, let’s JAIL this MONSTER who clearly represents an imminent threat to public safety. The point is not “did she do it?” the point is “how can such a law even exist in a supposedly free country?” America the land of the free? North Korea would be proud.

Laws prohibiting or regulating human actions are in an absolute sense anathema to the supposed principles this country was founded on: freedom. If a transaction is voluntary and there is no fraud involved then it can’t be “wrong” in a civic sense. You might morally frown upon some activities but you have no more right to impose your morals on others than they have to impose theirs on you. If you wish to live exclusively among those sharing your exact moral code, then follow the Amish example and set up your own private communities. The public sphere does not become a private sphere just because you happen reside within it. Repeat after me: if violence (or the threat thereof) is the only way society can change the behavior of non-violent actors then there is something wrong with society.