Romney

Of the two candidates for American president, I prefer Romney. However, I still have many issues with the Republican candidate. Part of the problem is inherent in our modern conception of politics. When the rubber hits the road, people vote for the candidate that will benefit them most personally. Promising benefits to a voter, even at the expense of others, will still get a vote.

So Romney, like Obama, has set about to give promise after promise about how he will make your life better. Romney will improve education, he will get you a job, he will spend more on military, etc. He claims to be all for smaller government, but this claim is hard to sustain when he is also promising everyone more from the government.

I applaud Romney for wanting to liberalize the economy, but it's really just skimming from the top. In theory, Romney is more in favor of the free market, but his advocacy of it is only as strong as the people will stomach. Obama on the other hand truly believes in socialism. He believes the government is always the solution and that if things don't work out, the government simply needs more money or better people.

This is why I am skeptical of the conservative-liberal paradigm. Both are fundamentally the same in believing they will use the coercive power of the government to "make things better". They both fundamentally believe the government just needs smarter bureaucrats, that departments just need more funding etc.

That's why I am a fan of Ron Paul. He wants to reduce government, not make it bigger. He is already skeptical of the gov. to make things better. He would rather let people be as free as possible. Meanwhile, the two dominant presidential candidates disagree with this. They want the power of government to fix the economy, something I think is impossible.

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU THINK!

Democracy can be quite annoying! Canada has always striven to be free, at least historically. Freedom and democracy are often incompatible. Unfortunately, rather than individual liberty, Canadians now seem to embrace the idea of collectivism and socialism. We have drunk deeply from the cup of democracy to the point where we think we can and should vote on everything. Instead of freedom, we believe in imposing our will on everyone else and controlling their lives for their own good!

People must be free to make their own decisions, even if everyone else thinks they are wrong. Unfortunately no one thinks like this anymore. People will say something should be banned simply because they disagree with it. They think certain religious practices should be outlawed because they don't personally like them. They want certain foods to be banned because they are unhealthy. They think to take away someone else's freedom is totally acceptable as long as it is the "right" thing to do.

This is a total perversion of freedom. We have to ask the government permission every time we want to be free, and a handful of "experts" will inform us if we can make that free choice. Does no one else see the irony in this?

It's like freedom of speech. You cannot dictate that freedom of speech only exists if we are sure those using it will use it for some good purpose. The whole idea behind free speech in the first place is that some people will abuse it, but this is part of the risk we must take.

The point is, you cannot limit freedom because you think you are somehow doing someone a favor. How is this different from communism? So when you are in a discussion about a particular subject, the pertinent thing is not whether or not you "like" something, but rather whether or not you want freedom for yourself or others.

Does the GOV own everything?

There are two rival ideologies. According to the first, people are the masters of their own domains. If you go into the forest with the permission of the land owner, use an axe you bought to chop down a tree, and sell the wood, then you are entitled to the proceeds from that sale. This is not because anyone authorized you to have those proceeds, but it is a human right that you own what you produce.

This ideology is countered by one which is becoming very popular which says the government owns everything. It owns your forest, it owns your saw, and it owns your labor. It essentially owns you. At the end of the day, it is up to the government to decide how much of what you produced you can keep. People who espouse this point of view do not see any level of taxation as inherently wrong. They only consider what they believe to be most effective.

According to those who espouse the second point of view, if a planned socialist economy worked "best", then the government has the full ethical right to establish it. People are simply cogs in a giant wheel. You do not own anything, you are simply a government employee.

Few people nowadays seem to make arguments about this from a moral perspective, rather they focus on a practical perspective. Increasing taxation is only bad if it has negative consequences, which are defined by those who advocate this point of view. I believe a strong case can be made from a moral standpoint. We can start by someone explaining to me how taxation is not a form of theft. First, define theft and then explain how that is not what the government is doing.

California wants to ban gay-to-straight therapy

In another example of government overstep, California wants to ban any group which has as its goal to change people from gay to straight. Think what you like about this endeavor, the bottom line is the government is using its police and military to stop people from voluntarily associating and transacting business. The government is not meant to be thought-police and the types of therapy you receive should not be banned simply because some government officials have a different point of view.

Government Investments

Newfoundland set up a fund to attract new business to the province. Earlier this year it was revealed that 98.5% of this fund went unused. Companies did not come here to do business despite this bribe. Despite this, I'm sure there were many people hired in the "business department" to attract new business.

Just more government spending gone down the drain as usual. You see, the government should not be "investing in anything.". If someone in the province wants to make money, let them invest their own money. It should be a free choice, not money stolen from me to invest in some rinky dink company from around the bay.

Besides the theft, how does the government even know how to invest the money? Where do they get the handful of "experts" who will know which businesses to invest in? Two things can be said about this:

1) Gov. officials probably don't know much about business investment. If they did, they would not work for the government.
2) Any money that is invested is probably not done so on the basis of profitability, but rather done on the basis of some vague notion of regional development. Maybe an MHA wants to bolster his reputation in a particular area so he will invest there. Or maybe some industry is highly visible to the public and will make the gov. look good. These are the most likely reason politicians invest.

The bottom line is, I don't want a bunch of bureaucrats who can't make it in the real world to invest my hard-earned money in order to get more votes.

Right to bear arms

Okay, so in the states people have the right to bear arms. In Canada, we do too, but it's not as publicized and I think there are more restrictions.

One things I've never understood though is the distinction between different types of guns. Sometimes semi-automatic and automatic. So people will say "who needs an assault rifle anyway?" So they will propose banning the more powerful guns.

But I don't get this logic. I mean a small gun can kill people, perhaps many people. A semiautomatic weapon could kill many people no problem. Yes, an automatic weapon could probably kill even more people, so that would mean the logic is this:

1) killing a handful of people is bad but not that bad. people have the right to do this.
2) killing a bunch of people is really bad and the government should ban weapons which can do this

So what I don't get is the logic. "Who needs automatic weapon?" Well, maybe you need to kill a bunch of people, or you want a powerful weapon to kill an individual and that will allow you to do it more easily. I mean the point of having the right to carry a firearm is not just for hunting, it's for killing people if necessary.

So if the intent is to kill someone who is threatening your life, what difference does it make if you kill him with a handgun or an AK-47. He's still dead. An AK-47 doesn't kill him "more".

Maybe what these people are really saying is that no one should ever have a weapon to possibly kill someone else. That's another debate. If that's what they are saying, they should advocate a total gun ban, not just the more powerful ones.

Anyway, I don't think guns should be banned at all.

Green movement has it wrong

I hate to be the garden at your skunk party, but I think the green movement has it wrong. The whole idea now is to "reduce" what we use. I know reuse and recycle are there as well, but it's really all about reduction. Reusing and recycling generally come with some reduction in quality. I'll just address those two briefly first. We are told to use crappy paper products or cheap items in general because they use "recycled" material, sometimes as little as 5%. We are expected to make this sacrifice for the good of "Mother Earth".

Reusing is a similar concept. "Sure a new product would be better and you would prefer that, but just reuse the old one to help the environment".

But most of all, it's about reduction. It's such a simple answer. Use less electricity. Get shorter showers, maybe in cold water. Wash your clothes in cold water - it will reduce the quality of cleanliness, but hey you're helping the environment. Buy a smaller car, even though it's more dangerous to drive and not as comfortable. Don't drive as much in general, instead walk or bike even though you don't want to and it takes much longer. Use public transit even though it takes much longer to get where you're going and they are probably worse on the environment anyway. Don't eat meat or eat very very little, that way you can eat all vegetables and that's better for the environment.

For the first time in hundreds of years, people are supposed to be lowering their quality of life rather than improving it. According to some environazis, we haven't gone far enough until we live naked in the wild.

My contention is, we are barking up the wrong tree. Instead of demanding that everyone lower their quality of life, we should be finding new innovative ways to increase our quality of life and levels of consumption. In fact, the free market is the best way to do this anyway. The price system guides people from rare products to abundant ones. The free market always seeks efficiency. Whenever energy or products are lost, this is lost profit. Increasing efficiency saves money.

I like the new innovations in cars, but let the market work. You don't need to use peer pressure to force people to drive hybrid cars. Once the technology improves enough and it becomes a cost-saver, people will automatically buy into it.

The ironic part is that the solution most people propose is to extract money from successful companies and just pay people through the government to operate a certain way. If a company is charged millions of dollars in taxes, that's millions they can't spend on R&D and responding to the demand for more fuel-efficient cars. The government does not innovate. It simply steals money from one group and gives it to another. If the government steals $10 million from a car company and then gives a rebate of $10,000 to 1000 drivers to buy a hybrid car, this does not provide innovation. The car company could have used that $10,000,000 to research new and better ways to produce fuel efficient cars.

Anyway, my point is that people will buy into things once they make sense economically and meet their needs better. Redistributing wealth does not create innovation. The free market loves to innovate. There is already a market demand for environmentally friendly products. It's pointless for the government to take money from the economy that could be productive and effectively kill its productivity.

Also, making cheap products artificially more expensive mostly hurts poor people. It's all fine and dandy for celebrities to talk about the benefits of hybrid cars, but poor people need cheap vehicles and once they establish themselves, they can move on to more fuel efficient models.

Let's work to increase quality of life instead of decreasing it while also pursuing our interests in the environment.