Category Archives: Elections

Exercising A Right Over Others

PBS’s Christina Bellantoni cites a poll (which I can’t locate on PBS News Hour’s usually well-organized site), according to which individuals earning less than $50,000 trended Barack Obama; those earning more than $50,000, and certainly individuals in the upper-income tax bracket, preferred Mitt Romney.

Single women and racial minorities are with Obama too. (Understandably, categories overlap.)

People with higher incomes are in the minority. They are an economically dominant minority (to paraphrase Amy Chua). The rich dominate the economy, the poor dominate the polity.

When elections roll around, the voting mass exacts its revenge against the economically dominant minority.

The economically dominant minority funds government. The rich pay most of the taxes. Obama is the candidate who, on paper at least, has promised his special constituencies more of what richer people rightfully own. Mitt Romney is the candidate who, on paper at least, promised to confiscate less private property.

That is, at least, how the voter perceived the candidates.

Answer me this, then: What kind of a right is the vote? What kind of a right gives one man control over another man’s life?

In this democracy (for we are no longer a republic), you vote not for a representative who will defend your inalienable, individual rights. Rather, if you are The Rich, whom The Left treats as a reified, rigid state-of-being, you vote defensively. And if you are The Poor, you vote, indirectly, to extract what your guy has promised you from The Other Guy.

In a word, pillage politics.

UPDATED: Libertarians And The Vote

Canada, Democracy, Elections, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, The State

New American columnist Jack Kerwick is blasting non-voting libertarians. (I have an excuse: I have chosen to decline citizenship of Police State USA. I’m a permanent resident, but not a US citizen. I am, however, an American patriot. I don’t need Uncle Sam’s imprimatur or papers to be a patriot.)

I think Jack is making an argument that is similar to the one made in “LIBERTARIAN WRANGLING”:

From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, …they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who, while fleeing the law, happens on a scene of a rape, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because a murderer has performed it?

Writes Jack:

“Romney, along with his fellow partisans, has pledged to repeal ObamaCare. “Would that be evil? [NO] He also wants to make America more energy independent. [Note: Libertarians want energy production, not necessarily energy independence, for the latter would imply a rejection of the logic of trade. It’s “drill AND trade, baby, trade.”] Would this be evil? A Romney administration would engender an environment dramatically more business-friendly than any that we could ever expect from an Obama administration. Would this be evil?”

The answer is no.

Basically, Jack Kerwick wants to shatter the pretense of ideological purity that allows libertarians (like myself) to stand outside of politics.

It’s a good debate. We should have it. (If I were cleared to vote, I doubt I would vote for the loopy Gary Johnson.)

UPDATE: Joseph Farah feels the same urgency that Jack Kerwick does: “It’s a matter of self-defense and self-preservation,” he says. MORE.

‘Bronco Bamma’: A 4×4 Force For The State

Barack Obama, Classical Liberalism, Elections, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Private Property, The State

On voting defensively:

I listened to a young (24), fiercely individualistic, libertarian friend speak about casting his vote for Mitt Romney. My pal may not be finely tuned to every philosophical nuisance, but he lives and breathes individualism. His backbreaking work as a proprietor of a small business means, moreover, that local politics are vital to his bottom-line. My friend explained to me why he would be voting to keep the toxic Dems out of office in our state, and why he supported Romney.

Although wedded to reality, columnist Jack Kerwick is “finely tuned to philosophical nuisance.” As mentioned in “On Living In Sin: The Sin of Abstraction,” Jack and I parted company over his decision to vote Romney. However, I admire Jack for “mixing it up”—for his commitment to arguing the issues and making pragmatic decisions in the rigorous and vigorous Rothbardian tradition.

But then Jack’s a scrappy New Jerseyan.

The entrepreneur (my young friend) and the philosopher (Jack Kerwick) are aligned in this instance.

I will say this unequivocally: “Bronco Bamma” (little girl tires of him and his rival, whose name at least she can pronounce)—Barry Soetoro Frankenstein, spawn of the state—is trash. Mitt Romney, however, is a patrician.

His individual achievements outside politics show that Mr. Romney is nothing like “Bronco Bamma,” who has always been at full throttle for the distributive state.

UPDATED: Orgasmic And Idiotic For Obama (Brave Boeremeisies)

Africa, Ann Coulter, Constitution, Democracy, Elections, Feminism, Gender, Intelligence, Private Property, South-Africa

Way back (in 02.13.08), I mentioned a very old suggestion I had made on a discussion list of unconventional individualists. It was this: “I’d give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.” (Also here, under “Feminism & Feminization.”)

Now, don’t get confused. From the fact that one acknowledges that most women should not have the vote—it doesn’t follow that certain individual ladies are not blessed with great intelligence and should be respected for it. (This is the error of some ultra-conservatives in conceptualizing about certain women.)

On the topic of vaginas voting, the highly intelligent Ann Coulter counseled the same, during a riveting TV segment with the “retarded” and insufferably pompous Piers Morgan. (At one point, Ms. Coulter just glared at this idiot, who refused to talk about anything other than one of her tweets, and who, whenever she spoke, stopped the conversation to demand why she could not be as reasonable all the time, as if cerebrally compromised liberals like himself could detect reason.)

What prompted Ms. coulter’s comment on female suffrage (how we suffer for it) was the Hos for O commercial, in which a representative of the pox of a cohort known as young women (Lena Dunham) likened voting for Obama to her first sexual experience. (Do you allow your daughters to carry on like this?)

The whole thing is repulsive down to the exaggerated, affectatious hand movements (what’s with that bit of bad breeding?).

Watch:

To the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the vote, add the 26th Amendment. It was smuggled into the Constitution by statute, and it artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, youngsters get to vote for dibs on the livelihood of those who do.

Naturally, CNN, which employes an army of “Harpies Hot For Big Daddy O,” went and axed a segment that offered up evidence that hormones sway female voting patterns. Hormones and a propensity for sentimentality sway most decisions women make. And this proclivity is encouraged in a culture that equates whimsy, capriciousness and silliness with creativity and individualism.

UPDATE (Oct. 28): In response to a fascinating thread on Facebook (stimulated by Brian James Smith’s comments).

BJS: Sigh.. big sigh…. I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. Rather the uncertainty of Africa then the completely plasticized construct of american political/social thought and action. We have no leadership and a pate’ -brained populace, so it seems.
IM: BJS: Perceptive points you make. Thanks. I must say that I understand what you say when I listen to your average SA little (black) girl speak about her future, usually in good English and with the sweet innocence our kids have lost (thanks to their parents and pedagogues).

AND, checkout the brave Boeremeisie (Afrikaner lass).