Why I DO Vote… Occasionally
Since Sean posted so eloquently on not voting, I thought I’d make the opposite case.
Last time I took the Political Compass test, I came out at almost the same place as Sean. And, I’m in firm agreement with the points he makes. (I especially appreciated him talking about the Commerce Clause.) Yet… I will, occasionally, vote.
Here’s why:
I expect governments to be coercive and manipulative. They always have been and always will be. It’s the nature of the beast. But, there are differences between administrations. Not enough differences, to be sure, but the economics of Ronald Reagan, for example, were far superior to the economics of Franklin Roosevelt.
So, if I have some confidence that one side is actually less bad than the other, I might go vote for that side. Mind you, I seldom do this, but I have, and I may again. In doing this, I do not expect good to come of it, only less evil. I can never be sure that I’ll be right in these guesses (politicians not being especially reliable), but sometimes I will take a shot.
One important point: While I think my method of handling voting is sensible enough, Sean’s arguments against it are sound too. That means that I don’t think either Sean or I are completely, provably correct. We’re both looking at a very complex data set, and trying to weight the many factors. We may weigh the factors slightly differently and come to different conclusions.
As for this year? No decision as yet. I’m convinced that Ron Paul is significantly less bad than the others, so if he’s on a ballot near me, that might push me over the edge. I don’t agree with him on everything, but I wouldn’t be looking for perfection anyway - only “less bad.”
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June 29th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Oh yeah, Reagan, the guy who decided that solar panels on top of the White House were for wusses and that even though oil had peaked domestically a decade earlier that the nation should just keep driving big cars and wasting its resources while maxing out their credit to the Saudis, etc.
Nothing is cooler than living for the moment, leaving your country on an unsustainable path to the future, passing your debt on to your successors, who promise not to raise taxes even though they know perfectly well that they couldn’t possibly dig themselves out of the hole their predecessor has left them in if they didn’t.
I think Mondale once said while on the campaign trail that both he and Reagan would raise taxes, with one difference: He would tell the truth while Reagan would lie about it. As it later turned out, he was right, considering how unmanageable the deficit had become at that point. But by that time everyone had probably forgotten about it. I’m sure Reagan himself had, his ever-receding attention span mirroring his electorate’s perfectly…
June 30th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Wow, guess I hit someone’s hot button! I said only that Reagan’s economic policies were preferable to FDR’s.
This is a good example of the “excluded middle” fallacy of logic. Either I hate Reagan absolutely, completely, and vehemently, or else I am his sycophant, and must be shut down! Nothing else may exist.
Lots of bitterness in such posts. People on “the other side” must be destroyed.
The same thing has been very strong in the past several years regarding Bush: For many, it’s not enough to merely disagree with him on issues, you must also condemn him in ever more emotional and extreme ways. Bush must be the devil.
Again, I suggest that people read the Polarization post: http://www.veraverba.com/blog/2008/01/04/agree-or-die-polarization-on-the-frontier/
July 3rd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Yeah, but, come on, FDR passed programs helping people that were hurting from a Great Depression that came to pass when a recursive, self-referencing free market developed into a chaotic system of boom/bust speculation frenzy. He inherited a country that had hit rock bottom and left it recuperated and fortified against such unnatural disasters.
Reagan did exactly the opposite. He pulled out all the stops, resulting in recession following boom, following recession, all while spiraling the country into debt—in peacetime. And while keeping the US the most wasteful energy hog on the globe, meaning that they’re now forced to adjust the most that oil is finally globally peaking.
So the idea of claiming that Reagan was better than FDR is a little bit Twilight Zone/Through the Looking Glass/Bizarro World to me…
July 6th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
I’ll make this brief:
FDR “helped” people by stealing money from certain people, and giving it to a monster bureaucracy. After that bureaucracy blew half or two thirds of the money, they gave what was left to the “poor.”
Also, your characterization of the Great Depression is incorrect. That is a cartoon version that is passed-along among certain groups. Like many of us, you probably grew up surrounded by that idea and had it buttressed with cherry-picked facts.
Reagan - while no example of perfection - did try to reduce the amount of theft and to restore the dominance of the market above the State.
Actually, you inspired me to repost something I wrote recently for DGC Magazine. Will do in a few.
Do think about where government gets the money that bribe people with. Everything they have, they must first take away from the people who earned it - they just like to leave that part out of the conversation.
Capitalism (or, “free trading, which is a better term) is not good because it is useful; it is good because it is moral.
Think about it a little. Coercion is immoral, and capitalism proper includes no coercion whatsoever.
July 14th, 2008 at 4:39 am
You know, I’ve read your book, “God Wants You Dead,” and you make a lot of sense in it most of the time. But then I get to the parts solely devoted to spreading the libertarian propaganda meme, and I’m sorry to have to tell you guys that a) libertarianism is *your* God and that b) …
LIBERTARIANISM WANTS YOU DEAD.
Before I go into dissecting the flaws in your comment above, let me tell you how I see libertarians: Have you ever seen that scene in “Life of Brian” in which Brian tries to preach the virtue of making up your own mind to a crowd below his window? He says:
“You are all individuals.”
And they reply in one voice:
“Yes, we are all individuals!”
He says:
“You are all different.”
And they go, still uni sono:
“Yes, we are all different!”
Then one of them says:
“I’m not.”
And they all go “Shush!” at him.
Now that’s how I see libertarians. They’re like a bunch of sheep, all being told that they’re rugged individuals, all being told to march in lockstep against the Great Satan, Big Government, who oppresses people with taxes.
If you really were a rugged individual, though, you’d be a *pragmatist,* not a libertarian. You wouldn’t spout such phrases as “coercion is immoral” or “capitalism is good because it is moral.” No, it isn’t. Or, what I mean to say, it isn’t *always.*
Let’s continue this in a separate comment…
July 14th, 2008 at 5:13 am
Unregulated capitalism isn’t good or bad per se. It isn’t moral or immoral. It just is. So is coercion.
When I keep someone from crossing the street because I see a car approaching that they didn’t see, thus saving their life, then I was coercing them for a moment. Does that make me an immoral person? Would having let that person just go ahead and unwittingly walk to their death made me a moral person? I think that most people would argue the opposite.
Different example: If I happen, by inheritance, to own all the arable land and hence all the food and people around me who own nothing are starving and I use my leverage to make them do work for me that breaks their backs and ruins their health and makes them die young, does that make me a moral person? After all, I’m not coercing them to slave for me. They are perfectly free to refuse my employment and to starve. Or they could try to steal my food, but in that case they would be coercing *me* and I would be free to shoot them if I catch them.
Many people would accuse me of being immoral acting like that (although I’m not sure about you guys regarding the last example), and why do you think that is?
It’s because it isn’t the coercion that is moral or immoral. It isn’t the capitalism that is good or bad.
It is INDIVIDUAL HAPPINESS that is good. It is INDIVIDUAL SUFFERING that is bad. And any system that manages to make people happy is moral, and any system that manages to make people suffer is immoral, and if a system makes people either happy or suffer depending on the circumstances then the system is either moral or immoral depending on the circumstances.
But you guys aren’t pragmatic about the issue. You are rigid ideologues. You claim that coercion is always bad, unregulated capitalism is always good, even in the face of occasional evidence to the contrary.
Whether unconstrained capitalism is the optimal system as opposed to a social market economy is very highly dependent on what the ratio of natural resources vs. human resources is. If you have a lot more natural resources, such as land, ore, oil than you have people exploiting it then you’re in a more-than-zero-sum-game, in which it would be foolish for an authority to step in and to add unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. That’s what the situation in America used to be throughout most of its history. But the scarcer the resources become and the more people have to share them, the more does the situation turn into a zero-sum-game, in which my having more means you’ll
be having less and vice versa.
I brought up Asimov’s “freedom of the bathroom” metaphor in another comment. If there are two people and two bathrooms and you don’t have to alot bathroom times. But twenty people and two bathrooms means you do, or else there is going to be a lot of social friction. 200 people and two bathrooms and your alotment may have to be very rigid in order to keep people from crapping in the hallway and spreading disease. If there are resources to build more bathrooms then that is, of course, the way to go, but if there are not then I’m afraid you’ll either have to have government coercion or otherwise anarchic, “Lord of the Flies” chaos eventually…
Maybe I’ll address the FDR and the Great Depression history lesson in a third comment…
July 14th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Now, what made the Great Depression so severe? Two things: First, the amount of money available didn’t grow faster than the economy. That meant that cash didn’t lose value over time, and that meant that cold, hard cash wasn’t that bad an investment. But that didn’t matter while there was still confidence in the stock market and in getting much, much richer through investment—which all changed on Black Monday in ’29.
All of a sudden people lost their faith in investment while those who still had money became aware that it didn’t inflate. So what did they decide to do? They simply kept their cash stuffed in their mattresses. That meant that more and more money went out of circulation, making whatever was left more and more valuable, rendering more and more people dirt poor and hence willing to work for less and less, making people’s money even more valuable, meaning the incentive to sit on what they put aside rather than to spend it became ever more powerful.
You see, everyone was acting perfectly rational and in their own best self-interest, and yet all those millions of rational-acting people had just brought the economy to a grinding halt and deadlocked themselves in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma.
So that was the situation at the height of the Great Depression. Then, finally, FDR followed the model of Keynesian economics, based on the idea that government employment and government spending for social programs (or wars) could losen up the cash that everyone was sitting on. The “monster bureaucracy” you’re speaking of consisted of people, earning wages again, which allowed them to buy things from vendors, who were earning money again in turn. The so-called “blowing” of the money simply meant that it went back into circulation, hauling the economy out of a totally unnecessary, completely psychological deadlock.
Now, if you were a pragmatist then you’d have to admit that this strategy, whether you call it “stealing” or not, helped a lot of people out of Hooverville shantytowns and eventually alleviated a lot of unnecessary suffering. If you’re an ideologue, however, you can claim forever that property trumps happiness and that therefore wealth redistribution is always bad. Which would mean, I guess, that once all the property of which there is only a limited supply is divided up, those who have it can use the oligolopolistic leverage to consolidate their wealth even more, which just might result in a feudal system.
And if government is as weak as they are powerful then it is they who will eventually write the law of the land, rendering them a shadow government nobody voted for. Remind you of something?
Isn’t it striking that presidents who ran on a “government is bad and should be small” platform, like Reagan and the Bushes, actually increased government while the only one who did shrink it somewhat was Clinton?
Communism sounded like a good idea on paper once, but in reality it turned out to be anything but. Maybe the same thing can be said about libertarianism, as being the other extreme…
July 15th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Hi Ool. A few quick comments:
1. You’re entitled to your opinion, but neither Sean nor I hold libertarianism as a God. I came to it from philosophy and I care about non-coercive arrangements because they are moral. That they are practical too is wonderful and makes sense, but it wasn’t my motivation.
2. Coercion isn’t something that “just is,” it comes from human action - from choices.
3. Happiness is not always good and unhappiness not always bad. Those are subjective states of being. Charlie Manson can be very happy over some very “not good” things. A flawed standard.
4. Creativity trumps scarcity. At one time, woven cloth was scarce. Not a problem anymore.
5. Capitalism is not a system - it is simply what people do when no one forces them to do otherwise.
6. Elitist plans (”we know, from our deep studies, how resources should be balanced”) require centralized force - coercing an entire populace to obey (or else). This mechanism of centralized force is far more deadly than anything else humans have ever created.
PR
July 16th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
1. Well, from your mouth to libertarianism’s ear! As far as I’m concerned the mantra, “coercion—immoral, non-coercion moral” sounds dogmatic and, objectively, not necessarily always true, even if it may be *often* true.
I go more by the circular reasoning that everything I want is good and everything I deem good is what I want, because that’s how “good” and “want” is ultimately defined. I want to be happy, therefore happiness is good; I don’t want to suffer, therefore suffering is bad. And that’s also because that’s how I *define* happiness and suffering.
2. Yes, but coercion, assuming it’s defined in such a way that it needs a living agent, isn’t the only source of force and of limitations of freedom in our lives. Environmental circumstances can also be the culprit, which either no one created at all or no one created deliberately. And they can be just as bad, because they can cause just as much suffering. Conservatives—and libertarians are conservatives—seem to be famously incapable of grasping the concept of systemic causation, which no one is deliberately responsible for, rather than direct causation, i.e. something someone is assumed to be deliberately responsible for. And that is why they focus all their energy on force originating from people while turning a blind eye on forces coming from the self-unaware systems surrounding us, or at least when they recognize it they try the same strategies that sometimes work on people to control those forces.
Now the idea that memes can be a source of untoward force is a very systemic one. The idea that government is a meme is, too. But the idea that you can punish and disappropriate a meme like you could a person—that is a direct causation idea, and it is as impractical as thinking you can control your subconscious mind by suppressing it. The same rules don’t apply to such systems and subsystems as apply to people, because such systems aren’t self-aware and therefore stupid, and stupid means you can’t threaten them or hope to teach them a lesson or kill them, because they’re not really alive in the first place. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist and won’t always exist.
3. Happiness is always good for the one who’s happy. The only way that it isn’t good is if it causes suffering in other ways, such as to other people or to oneself in the future. But that still means that it’s the ultimate standard. Some happiness may be bad in the big picture only because the big picture involves more suffering. But it’s in reality the suffering that makes the big picture bad.
They say there are four kinds of people, which are the Helpless, the Intelligent, the Bandits, and the Stupid. The Helpless are the ones that lose while others gain from them. The Intelligent are the ones who gain while others gain from them. The Bandits gain while others lose to them. The Stupid lose while making others lose, too.
It is the Intelligent who always make society thrive. It is the Stupid who always make society go down the drain. But as for the Helpless and the Bandits, it is only those that lose more than others gain from them and those that gain less than others lose to them that are an overall negative rather than a positive influence.
Charles Manson would be a bandit who gained less than he took away from others, and that is why he’s such a great example for the “coercion is bad” meme. But a government, which takes away from you but also gives you back services and infrastructure in return (if it works), is not such a clear-cut example.
4. Yes, the creativity is the quality that the Intelligent in my above exaple would display…
5. No, what people do when no one forces them to do otherwise is very different, depending on whether they’re intelligent, stupid, helpless, or bandits. The intelligent may trade and create. The stupid may crash into you on the road and kill you as well as themselves. The bandits will try to steal your stuff. The helpless will have their stuff stolen.
That’s not all capitalism, is it…?
6. They *can* be far more deadly. That depends on whether the centralized force is a competent or an incompetent robber baron, i.e. whether it is more on the intelligent side or the stupid side. By trying to suppress government as badly as you can you just may be more likely to keep it stupid rather than intelligent, though, meaning in a roundabout way you may be making things worse with the best of intentions (like a stupid or a stupidly helpless person would)…
Not all destructive elitist plans are socialist and egalitarian, you know…