Monthly Archives: October 2012

Here’s the problem. Romney isn’t a great candidate. Honestly, I’m pretty sure that anyone who would be arrogant enough to run for President wouldn’t be a good candidate for President. You see the dilemma.

I’ve heard lots of people complain that the choice between Obama and Romney is just a choice of which form our Gozer will take. Fair enough. But maybe we should take a close look at our premise and see if it is valid.

Why would we care if a candidate is perfect or not? I believe the answer is because everyone wants a President who will rule over us wisely and would use his good judgement to rule as we would if we had the same information as he has. If that’s what we wanted, then only perfect candidates would be acceptable.

Here’s the problem. We aren’t electing a Philosopher King. We are electing a chief of the Executive Branch of our government. If we had a Philosopher King, we could go back to being lazy and ignoring politics while the King benevolently ruled over us. I don’t know about you, but my ancestors didn’t come to this country to be ruled over. Where’s my master? That son of a bitch ain’t been born.

We keep searching for the perfect candidate who will do everything for us so that we can forget the hard work of ruling over ourselves. That’s just laziness. That’s how we got to where we are. No one seized unconstitutional power, we gave it to them. We voted it that way. And why did we do it? Because we were lazy and didn’t want to be bothered. We didn’t want to get our fat asses off the couch and make it happen, we wanted to sit in front of the boob tube and watch it happen.

Every time I hear some hard-core Libertarian I want to strangle him. Libertarians seem to have two problems. One is that they don’t seem to have any idea how to convey their beliefs without basically telling people that they are both wrong AND stupid. I can’t find it, but there is a hilarious video about how Libertarians can’t sell their ideas to regular people because Libertarians would rather rant at people that make the case for them. The second problem with Libertarians is that they make the perfect the enemy of the good. They can’t accept “good enough.” If it ain’t perfect, it’s worse than Barack Obama. Politics is the art of compromise, and as far as I can tell, the stronger Libertarian they are, the less flexible they are to compromise.

This means that Libertarians are unable to infiltrate and convert the Republican Party, which is the only possible route to power for them. No one with even an ounce of sense believes that the Libertarian Party will replace the Republican Party. And that whole “Liberaltarian” garbage was just a way to confuse those Libertarians who had hit the bong so many times that they had lost touch with reality. So rather than win slowly, the Libertarians would prefer to lose quickly. It’s a shame, because for the most part the Libertarians are right. The government shouldn’t spend what it doesn’t have, should respect people’s rights and their property, and should basically stay the hell out of their lives to the maximum extent possible.

Why won’t Libertarians infiltrate, take over, and change the Republican Party? Laziness. They don’t want to take the time to make the changes. They don’t want to pressure their Representative and Senators. They don’t want to bug the crap out of their State Rep and Senator. They don’t want to make sure that the Governor knows their name. That’s actual work. Sitting on the couch bitching about how it’s just a different face on the same Gozer is easy.

Everyone needs to get it through their thick skulls that “throw the bums out” isn’t the solution. The next set of bums will do the same thing. They will do what is profitable, and changing the bums doesn’t change what is profitable. We can’t find only good people to represent us. We are mostly going to elect power-hungry jackasses. It’s hard not to elect them when they are basically the only people who would run for office. The solution isn’t to change the people, it is to change what is profitable.

Milton Friedman said it best.

 When you make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, they’ll do it. It’s just that making the right thing politically profitable is hard work.

So what are you going to do? Are you going to do the hard work? Or are you going back to your couch secure in the knowlege that the Gozer is just going to destroy you anyway?