Of the Way

My practical political philosophy can be summed in three words: Pray for Gridlock.

The Republicans and Democrats are two wings of the same bird of prey.  You have one party that gives you larger government and less freedom while the other gives you less freedom and larger government.  The deck is stacked; the choice between Republicans and Democrats is like the choice between 1984 and Brave New World.

The Democrats really only have one card to play: the class envy card.  You have the right, nay, the duty to vote rich people’s money into your own bank account.  (Of course the money doesn’t actually wind up there.  It winds up in the pockets of lobbyists who live in Loudoun and Fairfax Counties in Virginia and work for the rich megacorporations the Democratic voters were trying to soak.)    Envy reaps what it sows. “The way of the wicked is like darkness; They do not know what makes them stumble.”  -Proverbs 4:19

On the national office-holding level most Republicans (especially your powerful ones) are nothing but liars as well. I can name a few more that I admire than Democrats, but not many, and they’re really libertarians who ran as Republicans and won’t rise to power in the party. In many ways the Republicans are far worse liars than the Democrats because they campaign on small government and then grow the government faster than Democrats do whenever they get power. At least with the Democrats (aside from the war, corporatism, and PATRIOT Act expansions) you get an end product that’s close to what is advertised by the campaigns.  The Republican power elite are even less sincere about ending abortion than the Democrats are about ending poverty.   (Roe v. Wade could have been overturned by a majority vote in both houses and the president’s signature (or better yet, by state nullification), but the Republican party insists that the only way to overturn Roe v. Wade is to stack the supreme court.  Since 1973, 8 of the 12 Supreme Court Justice appointments have been by Republican Presidents.  It’s like watching Lucy hold the football for Charlie Brown.

The worst thing that can happen is to have the executive branch and legislative branch controlled by the same party.  Whenever the government gets anything done, honest people suffer.  Liberties erode, wealth is destroyed by confiscation by taxation and inflation, and the empire starts more wars.  Because my practical political philosophy is pray for gridlock, my preferences for the outcome of the election are based on the probability of achieving gridlock.

1. Obama with a Republican legislature (highest probability for gridlock)
2. Romney with a Democratic legislature (similar but with a higher probability for compromise and large scale global war)
3. Obama with a Democratic legislature (Disastrous, but Republicans are a good opposition party and are closer to what they campaign on when they are the minority)
4. Romney with a Republican legislature (Democrats as an opposition party will give the Republicans the war they thirst after, but only if the Republicans give in and grow the government faster than LBJ did. Even though my views are closer to Republican rhetoric (sans warmongering) than Democratic rhetoric, as somebody who is anti-war and ant-state, this is a nightmare.)