MAKEMEVOTEOBAMA.ORG

Tenets

Michael — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:23:00 GMT

I'm going to take a turn for the abstract for a moment. Normally I try to keep the material here very real-world specific, but since it's pretty clear Obama's going to win anyway, I figure I can move this blog in a direction less directed towards a course of action and more towards a discourse of values.

As a socialist/communist/Marxist/collectivist/whatever, let's make a critical examination of your core beliefs. (You guys like encouraging others to critical introspection, right? Seriously, though, I'm not here to insult. I'm here to analyze.)

The Theory

At the heart of Enlightenment philosophy is the assertion that all human beings are of inherently equal value. Marxism (and all theories derived therefrom) takes this idea and couples it to the notion that equally-valued people should live equally-valued lives, and highlights financial disparity as a clear illustration that, despite having inherently equal value as human beings, some people live much, much better than others.

(Little-known fact: By some accounts, as described here, Karl Marx actually invented the word "capitalism" to describe the system of economics as he saw it, so that he could describe something different. Before Karl Marx, there was no "capitalism". There was just, "You buy stuff that I sell at a mutually agreeable price.")

Now, Karl Marx considered himself more a prognosticator than an advocate. He forecast that eventually the world's poor would take arms against the rich and achieve victory by their sheer numbers. He predicted that they would seize the assets of the upper classes and redistribute them in a manner more consistent with financial equity, and would erect a bottom-up system of government that would prevent the kind of transaction that caused disparity to arise in the first place - including, but not limited to, the wholesale abolition of the notion that anybody "owns" anything. Marx didn't explicitly describe how such a system of government would work - i.e. he didn't write a constitution or outline a specific system of checks and balances. Nor did he seek to organize any such movement himself; he simply saw the rise of such a movement as inevitable.

The Practice

The principles of Marxism necessitate the construction of complex government institutions.

The economic disparity that Marx finds so offensive largely arises naturally from the normal everyday individual transactions of a free market. All other things being equal, some people make lots of money selling their goods and services (or making bets on others' ability to do so), while others don't.

Thus, in order to prevent some people from making more money than others, a Marxist society would have to have some way to prevent free transactions from taking place. For example, it cannot permit a celebrity hairstylist and a willing customer to trade $400 for a haircut, even if both the stylist is willing to do it and the customer is willing to pay it.

As such, implementations of Marxism have largely involved complex bureaucracies to dictate the prices and availabilities of goods and services, and highly intrusive enforcement agencies to ensure that all transactions adhere to the bureaucracies' mandates.

If I understand correctly, many modern-day self-described Communists/Marxists consider such implementations to be flawed, claiming that every real-world attempt at creating a Communist nation has failed because it's "impure" or corrupted. Yet, because implementation of Marxist philosophy mandates regulation of otherwise private transactions, don't these "corruptions" derive directly from Marxism's most fundamental principles? After all, if I'm a master hairstylist, I can ask someone to pay $400 for a haircut and they'll pay it, because to somebody it's worth it. Sure, most people might consider it an outlandish price, but none of those people are involved in this transaction. It's between the stylist and the customer, period: your money for my time and labor. Yet in a Marxist system, these "most people" must intervene and forbid the transaction from occurring - by force, if necessary - because it is through a large number of such transactions that the hairstylist grows wealthy.

I mean, if there's another way and there's something I'm not getting, by all means tell me where I'm wrong... but do me a favor and think about it first, 'k?

In case you think I'm speaking in the abstract, let me describe exactly what this intervention looks like. In almost all cases, it takes the form of a combination of regulation, tax policy, and flat-out police action. In the case of our master hairstylist, in most states he already needs to buy an operating license (whose terms and conditions are set by the state legislature) in order to run a hairstyling business. It would be very easy for a state to pass an addendum to the license agreement stating that no stylist may charge more than $50 for a haircut. At that point, the stylist could theoretically keep selling $400 haircuts to willing customers under the table, but if he's caught he'd face fines and/or jail time.

So, when I talk about "the people" involving themselves in private financial transactions and intervening with the use of force, I'm not talking about a torch-and-pitchfork mob raiding the hair salon and demanding that the stylist give them everything in the till. I'm talking about that same mob, sans pitchforks, going to a ballot box where they vote in a set of legislators who create a set of laws that will cause the local police to raid the hair salon, and levy a fine against the stylist (if he's lucky). It's a little bit more indirect, but at the end of the day, if I shoot a freethrow, the scoreboard doesn't care whether I get nothing but net or whether my ball bounces off the backboard and spins around the hoop for a while before going in. Both the cause and the effect are the same: the people prevent the stylist and his customers from engaging in transactions that don't concern or involve anybody else.

The Problem

Financial disparity is a dubious metric of a society's dysfunction. As the old Winston Churchill quote goes, "The vice of capitalism is that there is an unequal share of blessings; the virtue of socialism is that there is an equal share of misery." Just because everybody's no better or worse off than anybody else, doesn't mean that everybody is doing well.

In fact, it is much easier to create poverty than to create wealth. It's easier for me to trash a house than to build one. It's easier for me to crap on a subway platform than for me to clean it up. It's easier for me to impregnate a bunch of girls and increase the population than it is for me to feed the resultant children. In a normal non-collectivist economy, I suffer more than others as a result of such actions, and as such there is a strong disincentive for me to engage in them. But in a society where one man's poverty is every man's poverty, in a society where everybody pays for the building of a house regardless of who lives in it (or what they did with their last one), each individual has no incentive for responsible behavior. Not only that, but they have an active disincentive (or, at best, a lack of incentive) to produce wealth, since they themselves gain no benefit from their own actions.

So from the point of view of engineering, from the point of view of basic math, this is a system that tends towards universal financial degradation. Each individual component of such a system gradually gets fewer and fewer resources at its disposal, no matter what its own efforts or abilities might be.

In short, there doesn't exist any economic system which can take a population that inherently cannot financially support itself, and make that population prosperous through the application of government policies. With a free market, you can at least have the few elements that can support themselves go ahead and do so, and those elements can create opportunities for others as they pull ahead. With a collectivist system, everybody just drags each other down into the same poverty-riddled pit.

The way I see it

Marxists and their ilk are the most materialistic people in the world. They don't think of themselves as such, but the very foundations of Marxism equate financial value with an individual's inherent value as a human being.

Personally, I don't base my judgment of people based on how much money they have. I base it on how they treat me, how they treat their friends and family, how they treat strangers (in pretty much that order).

And you know what? Most people are assholes. Really! It doesn't matter how much money they have. If they're rich, then they're rich assholes. If they're poor, they they're poor assholes. And frankly I feel safer and more secure around rich assholes than around poor ones - at least if an asshole has money of his own he'll be less inclined to abuse my friendship to break into my place and steal my TV.

So it doesn't make the slightest sense to me to use the force of government to enforce economic parity - a goal you can't even viably achieve because some retards out there will always take their redistribution-awarded profits and spend them all on crack (thus reducing the total amount of wealth in the system, thus forcing another round of redistribution. I mean, hey, why not smoke a little crack if the government is always going to level everyone out?). You might as well try to enforce parity of height, or hair color, or penis length, or neocortical serotonin levels.

What does make sense to me is recognizing that people differ in their ability to create wealth, just as surely as they differ in their athletic ability or their physical attractiveness or their intellect or their predisposition for aggression. And the best thing you can do is to let them do their thing, to back the hell off and let hairstylists cut people's hair and programmers write software and surgeons remove tumors under terms and conditions that both they and their customers agree to, without your interference. The transaction doesn't concern you, and you have no place to say or do anything about it. And yes, with enough such transactions, some of those hairstylists or programmers or surgeons are going to get rich. And you know what? There's not a damn thing wrong with that.

Flirting With Socialism

Michael — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:47:00 GMT

I'm trying to understand why all my friends and coworkers are socialists.

Not socialists in practice, of course. After all, they don't personally redistribute their own wealth for sake of numerical financial equality. Sure, sometimes they'll give a buck to the homeless or buy a "fair trade" bag of coffee beans... but that's only after they've made sure to pay their rent, buy their groceries, and pre-order the next PS3 game. In their day-to-day lives, they understand that their employers pay them for their labor and they'd happily go work for more money or less responsibility if the opportunity came along; they understand that their barbers and shopkeepers charge them as much as they can and they'd happily go shop somewhere else if they could get a lower price for comparable goods and services. In actual practice, everybody I know lives and breathes capitalism, and wouldn't really know how it could possibly be otherwise.

But they're socialists in the abstract. My friends, in general, are highly intellectual (and most are even intelligent). Most of them work in an engineering- or technology-related discipline that involves arranging intricate components into elaborate complex mechanisms, a task that takes a combination of brains, creativity, and extensive training. In fact, this process applies equally to my friends in the arts, literature, and journalism professions - whether your "components" are transistors, STL functions, paint colors, notes on a clef, or words in the English language, the process of creation is the same. Maybe they believe an economy should be like a circuitboard or a painting - something that needs a Creator, or at least an Intelligent Designer. While most of them scoff at creationism, the thought of letting Darwinian selection guide a $40T economy makes them feel uncomfortable.

I wish I could understand why.

It can't be a matter of intelligence per se, because most of my friends are extremely smart and yet the principles of socialism are so blatantly, self-evidently stupid. I suppose it could be a mis-application of intelligence - the kind of cognitive error that makes a particle physicist think he can perform open-heart surgery because really a living organic system is nothing but a big collection of subatomic components. And he knows all about quarks, so a triple bypass should be no big deal - after all, he understands the structure of arteries and cardiac muscles on a much deeper level than the surgeon, right? It's not that he necessarily thinks a surgeon is dumber than him, it's just that he views everything through the lens of his own expertise.

Personally, though? I believe it's lust.

I think my friends - nay, the country - see Socialism as the trashy slut in third-period English that they feel disturbingly drawn to. They see her there every single day, sitting at her desk with her razor-burned legs crossed, her flabby thighs displayed prominently under her dark blue pleated plaid skirt. Her pimpled cheeks expand and contract as she sucks on a Blow-Pop with her pierced tongue and her excessively ChapStik'ed lips. Her stringy hair is done up in loose pigtails, probably still riddled with crusty droplets from her previous night's date. She wears T-shirts that say "Plays Well With Others" and her checkerboard denim purse has buttons on it saying "You know you want it". You hate yourself for having to admit it's true.

Everybody's had a piece of her - the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans, the Koreans. She's "dating" some Eurotrash guys right now, and occasionally banging the English dude even though he really should know better. Most boys she's been with quickly end up feeling a burning sensation when they pee. A few of the particularly stupid ones fell in love with her, and they've never quite been the same since. The Russian guy had a really serious thing going with her once - by most accounts, he was her first - but that relationship got very, very ugly and now the two of them won't even talk to each other. The Russian guy's still a little messed up - for example, he's got some serious boundary issues - but he seems much more together now. He's always been a little messed up anyway. As for her, well, she's as big a whore as ever. Maybe she's just trying to punish her former Russkie lover by slathering her parasite-laden cooch-juice on every boy she can find, but she's only hurting herself... and her willing victims.

You know the old mindgame where someone tells you, "Don't think of a white bear"? You can't not think of a white bear, because you have to process the sentence to know what it is you're not supposed to do.

It's the same thing with Socialism. Every time you see her, you can't not think about taking her back out into the alley behind the school and slamming her up against the dumpster. You try to force yourself to not visualize her stuffing your cock down her throat until her eyes tear up and her sloppy mascara runs down her ruddy cheeks. You try, but you can't. You hate yourself for it, but the fact is you just want to plow that dirty, nasty little slut from every possible angle. To just do her already. Get her out of your system, get her out of your head.

And in the back of your mind, you think maybe she's not so bad after all. Maybe she's got a heart of gold. Maybe she's a really sweet, wonderful girl underneath that slimy exterior. Maybe all the stories about her are wrong - or maybe you're the man that will finally tame her. Sure, the Korean kid now sits alone in his room every night writing poems to her... but that's 'cuz he's the Korean kid. Maybe with you, if you're strong enough, things will come up roses, and you and she will create something beautiful together. Here she is, having been with every guy in the school (and a couple from the nearby community college), and who's the one she chooses to be with when all is said and done? You. Wouldn't that be something?

So what do they do? They flirt.

They flirt with Socialism. They flirt with the idea of socialized health care and federal housing management. They implement progressive taxation schemes and federal grant programs. They know in the back of their minds that no good will come of it, that the wanting is more compelling than the having. And they believe that, once they've gotten a taste of her, they'll be okay afterwards - at worst they won't catch anything they can't fix with penicillin. And maybe, just maybe, it can blossom into a romance. It's a gamble, one that they feel themselves destined to take, not because it's necessarily a good idea, but because it's an idea at all, and it's stuck in their heads and they'll never be rid of it until they finally just do it.

And so they pursue Socialism as though they are pursuing their destiny. They rally with irrational (and frankly creepy) fervor behind politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, who promise to set them up with her... as though that's a good thing. And they flirt with her every chance they get.

They flirt with disaster.

Learning To Love a Weak Dollar

Michael — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:24:00 GMT

The buzz of the day revolves around the collapse of the mortgage industry and the debate over the use of the public purse to alleviate the financial pain of some of the industry's major players (or more precisely, to distribute that pain over the entire tax base).

The details of the bailout plan are still in discussion in Congress, but it's pretty clear that the federal government plans to perform some kind of acquisition or offer some kind of loan program, using the contents of the US Treasury (real or imaginary) to perform a risk-based investment whose expected value is below zero. If it was actually a potentially good investment, the federal government wouldn't need to take action. Private investors would jump at the chance to take it upon themselves to do so. For example, Warren Buffet's $5B investment in Goldman Sachs shows that, at least as far as Buffet believes, Goldman Sachs is still a viable company.

In short, government doesn't make money. Government only gets involved if there's no money to be made, where businesses and investors have decided the field is barren. Fools rush in where angel investors fear to tread.

Now, I've said many times on this blog that I'm not going to pretend to be able to correlate macroeconomic policy decisions with microeconomic ramifications. What I seek to point out here is merely to echo the popular belief in the relationship between the national debt, the value of the dollar, and the impact of the value of the dollar on individual pocketbooks.

I think there's a general consensus, right or wrong, that the bigger the national debt gets, the less purchasing power the dollar holds. In actual historical analysis, there does tend to be a correlation, but, to my knowledge, raw historical economic data itself doesn't really establish a cause-and-effect relationship. That is, does the dollar get weaker because the debt grows, or does the federal government need to borrow more money because goods and services require more dollars to pay for? To what extent do these forces feed one another, and to what extent are they fed mutually by some common underlying factor?

It's exactly these kinds of issues that make me realize that economic policy debates are largely sophomoric and undignified affairs, conducted by people who purport to sound authoritative without actually knowing what the hell they're talking about. They're unsuitable for serious adults intent on solving problems and getting things done. Yes, there are self-styled economic policy professionals out there, such as Ben Bernanke or Thomas Friedman, and people do listen to them... But if you ask me, these guys know about as much about the science of economics as Asclepius knew about medicine, Aristotle about physics, or Paracelsus about chemistry.

It's also why I believe that, when it comes to government involvement in most things - especially the economy - the cure is worse than the disease. It's like having an Egyptian anatomist for a physician. It's not that he doesn't know anything. He knows some stuff, but the stuff he knows is warped and skewed. The more subtle and serious the problem, the less reliable his treatment. You might trust him to remove a splinter or even set a broken bone. But would you trust him to surgically excise a tumor? Me, I think I'd take my chances with the cancer.

And that brings us to where we are now, facing a major hike in the national debt and a federal alleviation plan whose goals are of dubious desirability and whose likelihood of achieving those goals is improbable at best. Makes me wish I'd held on to my gold last year.

On the upside, though, a weaker dollar has advantages for the country in general and for me personally.

As other currencies strengthen relative to the dollar, American labor becomes a steadily more profitable investment. The reason American companies use Mexican or Chinese labor is because it's cheaper than American labor. As the dollar drops relative to the peso or yuan, American companies will find it steadily more expensive to hire Chinese or Mexicans, and relatively cheaper to hire Americans. This means jobs that are currently overseas will return to the US.

It also means that foreign companies will begin to find it profitable to build factories here, which means that we'll grow accustomed to seeing American workers going to work in British or German or Chinese-owned factories in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. Some might find this an unappealing prospect, but I don't really see what's so bad about it. It's part of living in an integrated, globalized world - after all, we're supposed to celebrate multiculturalism and diversity, right? Besides, a paycheck's a paycheck, regardless of whether it comes from an American boss or a Chinese one.

And as for me personally, I believe a weakening dollar will actually make me a bit richer.

I believe that software development is already a fairly globally priced asset. That is, it's very, very easy for a software development firm to hire anybody from anywhere in the world, thanks to the lack of physical constraints on the development and manufacturing process of the end product. It's much easier for a British company to hire Indonesians to make software than to make cars. As such, the salary I draw is driven more by competition in the global talent pool than by the value of the regional currency. If I was paid in yuan, I'd be earning approximately the same total dollar amount as I earn now, converted to yuan. That goes likewise for pounds, pesos, rubbles, or rupees. There might be a variation by as much as a factor of two in either direction, but the variation in cost of living in the currencies' respective locales can vary by a factor of ten or more.

My debts, however, are at a fixed dollar amount. The amount I owe on my mortgage is not going to rise just because the value of the dollar falls.

This means that a weakening dollar increases the numerical value of my salary but leaves my mortgage unchanged. If the dollar were to halve in value next year, it would dent my salary, but my company would give me a raise in order to keep me around - this raise would not be a factor of 2x, but it would have to be pretty hefty, since it's very easy for me to simply find a British or Irish firm to contract my services out to from remote. My mortgage, however, would effectively drop in half, and there's nothing the bank can do about it.

So, if you're in debt (as most of us are), and you work in a globalizable industry (as most of us do), a weakening dollar can be your friend.

Obama Spares Some Change

Michael — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:10:00 GMT

For all his talk of Change, Obama's stated policy positions offer very little difference to the stances of his opponent - or, for that matter, those of the current administration.

I've already noted before that Obama's Iraq plan is identical to Bush's and McCain's. To recap, Obama vows to bring the troops home in a 16- to 20-month phased withdrawal, contingent on the Iraqi's ability to functionally replace them. He will then leave a forward base in Iraq indefinitely for regional force projection. This is substantively indistinguishable from the plans of his opponents.

Now Obama has conceded Bush's and McCain's positions on the economy as well.

Democrat Barack Obama says he would delay rescinding President Bush's tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy.

This is such a great revelation. On the face of it, he is evidently admitting that he understands that Bush's tax policy helps drive economic growth. Now, I know better than to make authoritative assertions of economic policy, but Obama of course doesn't. So it doesn't matter whether or not I believe the Bush tax cuts are a good idea (I do) - what matters is whether or not Obama thinks so.

And like a teenager who rails against her parents demanding more autonomy and then asking for an extra $10/wk for her allowance, Obama has been deriding the Bush tax policy for the entirety of his campaign only to now assert that he will keep it in place to help the country's economic performance.

More generally, this invalidates the most basic premise of the Obama campaign. Now that he's in consensus with McCain on the two biggest issues in this election - Iraq and the economy - can someone please explain to me exactly what it is about Obama that makes him the candidate of Change?

McCain the Tax Man?

Michael — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 03:29:00 GMT

See, now, this is interesting! This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about!

Prompted by Ari, I investigated some of the tax policies laid forth so far by Obama and McCain. I recognize that these are tentative policy statements and that the guy who wins might do something completely different once he actually gets into office. Nonetheless, these projections are interesting in the meantime because they tell us at least what the candidates think the voters want to hear.

As it turns out, taken at face value, Obama's tax policy doesn't actually increase my tax load by much relative to what it is by now. What's even more interesting is that it appears to be roughly on par with what McCain would tax me. Now, there are additional factors, such as how much Social Security they take from me and how they'll tax things like my house and my investments. But in the end, it ends up being pretty darn close to a wash.

Both plans end up being pretty vanilla party-line policies when it comes to income tax: McCain extends the Bush tax cuts and throws in a new way to compute health insurance costs, whereas Obama promises to ~~screw~~ ~~punish~~ increase taxes on ~~successful~~ ~~productive~~ high-income earners. There's two catches, though. One is that McCain's health care thing is kinda fucked up, and ends up actually slightly hurting people in my income bracket. The other is that Obama's progressive tax scheme is very progressive; it reduces taxes a little bit on people earning low to medium incomes, then it hits individuals earning over $200K (and couples earning over $250K), and it taxes all holy hell out of them. These people end up shouldering over half of the nation's total tax burden.

I am not one of those people or couples. My income is too high to get an Obama tax reduction but too low to get an Obama tax increase. To me, the difference seems to end up being within a few hundred dollars, maybe one or two grand tops. Now, don't get me wrong: Given a choice between paying two grand and not paying two grand, I'd rather, you know, not. But it's not quite enough to make me start going around serial-killing welfare recipients to reduce the economic burden, either.

In fact, such a small margin basically takes the candidates' income tax stances out of play from the point of view of my own personal benefit. What it leaves is a philosophical evaluation rather than a pragmatic one. I strongly dislike the Obama income tax plan because I oppose the idea of forcing any human being to pay, work, or live for another human being, and I utterly refuse to support a candidate whose policies would use the power of government to empower the many to subjugate the few. But I gotta admit, right now it doesn't affect me personally. And maybe in four or eight years it will, but for the time being there's no difference to me.

There is, of course, more to this story.

Where the McCain tax plan really wins is in its treatment of corporate taxes, tariffs, and investment incentives. In other words, while both McCain and Obama want to take the same amount out of my paycheck, McCain wants to take substantially less from my employer as a whole. This would leave more money for my employer to either hire me some help, or just increase my salary. Either way, my life gets a little easier. It also reduces the cost of goods by reducing business overhead, thus increasing my buying power.

So, looking at just income tax alone, my life pretty much doesn't change regardless of whether it's McCain or Obama in the White House. They'll both take essentially the same chunk out of my paycheck. However, when you consider corporate tax policy as well, it becomes clear that, while the chunk they take out stays the same, my paycheck is likely to be bigger under McCain, and I'll be able to buy more with each dollar of it.

Point: McCain.

Reason Online summarizes Obama speech

Michael — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:24:00 GMT

Reason Online succinctly puts what I heard coming out of Obama's mouth last night.

Government cannot solve all our problems. Just the ones involving energy, education, work, the weather, cities, the countryside, sick children, sick mothers, joblessness, hopelessness, and frightening foreigners who do not live in Iraq. Now if you'll all look under your seats, every one of you is going home with a new car!

(I'm disabling comments and trackbacks on this entry because this snippet of brilliance is Reason's, not mine. Please post comments and trackbacks on Reason's site.)

FAIL: This website is full of nothing but strawmen and factual errors

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:31:00 GMT

Well then, by all means, correct the facts and flesh out the arguments. I'm all ears.

FAIL: I should be voting for the country, not for myself

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:10:00 GMT

This argument is an attempt to take down all my other arguments by claiming that my premise is incorrect, that I should give my vote to whoever will make the country better rather than who's best for my own personal situation.

First of all, the idea that I should bow to any higher power is something I find ridiculous, and your belief that I am somehow morally inferior to you for refusing to do so is something I find deeply offensive. I love my country because it affords me the opportunity to live my best possible life. The god or gods I choose to worship are private, my business, not yours, and I'm not interested in your input on the matter. I will not kneel at your altar, regardless of whether it's for a sentient supernatural being, or for a secular construct such as Country or Society or The Greater Good.

Kindly keep your religious or quasi-religious beliefs to yourself and out of my government. And while you're at it, kindly keep your laws off of my body and out of my pocketbook.

But for humor's sake, let me grant you the premise. We should all vote to make the country as a whole better, right?

Well, the country, as a whole, is comprised of individuals. By making the lives of the individual citizens of this country better, you and I together can make this country better by induction.

Now, as it so happens, I in fact am one such individual. So by voting towards my own self-interest, I am in fact improving the country.

And, even more so, by voting towards my interests, you can help individuals other than yourself: namely, me! And that means you can improve the country too! So it looks like you just convinced yourself to vote for McCain! Neat!

Isn't collectivist political philosophy wonderful?

FAIL: I'm stupid, deluded, I should be ashamed of voting Republican, and this website sucks

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:09:00 GMT

Yeah, that's a really convincing argument there.

FAIL: Everybody else wants Obama to win, so vote to be around happy people

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:06:00 GMT

This argument addresses an Obama Presidency from a strictly symbolic perspective with corresponding self-fulfilling prophecies, rather than a pragmatic perspective revolving around policy issues. It works on multiple levels, from the personal (my coworkers would be less grumpy and irritable) to the international (Europeans would hate America less with Obama at the helm).

The idea is that, ultimately, people around me want Obama to be President, and, whether their reasoning makes sense or not, I will benefit from my neighbors being less whiny, cranky, and obnoxious.

Now, this argument is interesting because it's totally circular. It is factually true that, if you threaten to irritate me with your whining unless I help you elect your man (or donate to your charity, or attend your cocktail party, or Perform Arbitrary Action X), then I will experience less of your whining by complying with your demands.

This is a form of emotional blackmail, and your paltry attempts at it pale in comparison to what I've learned to endure from my Jewish mother.

It is not actually a form of persuasion. Basically you're saying that I should vote for Obama not because he's the better candidate, but because his supporters are volatile, melodramatic crybabies. I do not find this convincing.

FAIL: Prove that America isn't racist by electing a black man

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:49:00 GMT

Oh man, this argument is flawed on so many levels it's astounding.

First and foremost, how is this supposed to affect me? What do I get out of "proving" that America isn't racist?

In theory, I guess it's supposed to increase my self-esteem or something by enabling me to take greater pride in my country. That's quaint. Let's count the ways this doesn't work.

My self-esteem is just fine, thank you. And even if it wasn't, it's a leap to assume that greater pride in my country would help it (though, in fact, it would).
I already take great pride in my country. And even if I didn't, it's a leap to assume that my pride would increase by "proving" that America has overcome its history of racism (though, in fact, it has). Besides, whatever gain in pride I would feel from this proof would be counteracted by the shame I feel in knowing that my countrymen want to elect a socialist soothsayer to the Presidency.
The America that I know and encounter on a daily basis is not a racist country. I interact with plenty of people every day, and all of them either harbor no racial animosity, or recognize that such an attitude is shameful in modern American culture and they do their best to conceal it. Now, I can respect a difference of opinion on this matter if your own personal experience shows otherwise, but we're not talking about you, we're talking about me.

Either way, trying to prove you're not racist by voting for a black guy because he's black is kinda self-defeating.

FAIL: Vote Obama, keep the Religious Right out of power!

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:39:00 GMT

Are you kidding? The Religious Right hates McCain.

He's arguably an anti-Federalist conservative, not a religious/social one. He supports stem cell research. He'll sooner dismantle the U.S. Department of Education than force it to teach creationism. He opposes Federal involvement in social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, preferring to punt those issues to state legislatures and letting people define the rules of their own society on a state-by-state basis.

The website Campaign Issues 2008 offers a very good breakdown of issue stances of all 2008 candidates - and if you compare McCain's stances against those of the Religious Right's cheerleader, Mike Huckabee, you'll find there's no danger of the Religious Right's empowerment via a McCain Presidency.

These entries are supposed to be about me, not about social philosophy in the abstract. But it's not even worth getting into my opinions about religious conservatives, where they're right, where they're wrong, the recent history of religion in politics (it's changed substantially in the last 30 years), the value that the Protestant Ethic brings to America and the Christian roots of all contemporary Left-wing dogma, blah blah blah bah. The bottom line is, McCain has about as much love for Pat Buchanan as Obama has for Louis Farrakhan. So in this election, religion is pretty much a non-issue, and I won't be affected either way.

FAIL: Obama will avoid war with Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc.

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:12:00 GMT

Why the fuck would we want to avoid war with these assholes? And even if we tried to avoid war, I think these guys might have a say in the matter that runs counter to our hopes.

Look, a lot of Obama supporters believe that the world is full of misunderstood people that are only violent because America keeps stopping them from fulfilling their dreams. In a way, this is true... primarily because their dreams involve killing everyone who worships differently or speaks differently or looks differently from them. I can think of no greater setback for the propagation and practice of liberal values worldwide than to reduce the credible military threat we perpetually pose to these freaks that keeps their ambitions at bay.

Now, being constantly on our guard is very expensive, financially and psychologically. As John Kerry astutely observed back in 2004, the ideal way to defend yourself against enemies is to not have any.

One potential way to reduce your number of enemies is to open discussions, address people's grievances, and build interdependence and understanding. Another, much more reliable way is to fucking kill them already. For a comparison of the relative effectiveness of these two approaches, I present western Czechoslovakia for the former and Carthage for the latter.

The problem with the peace-love-flowerpower approach is that it only works for people with legitimate grievances and a sincere desire for reconciliation. It doesn't work with medieval turd-world fucktards or totalitarian dictatorships. And while Obama supporters seem to have no problem thinking of members of the Religious Right as psychotically delusional fundamentalists who are beyond reason or empathy, for some reason they have trouble extending this perception to turban-headed suicide bombers who believe that Allah will reward them with 72 virgins in heaven for killing Jews. You write off the entire American Bible Belt as a bunch of lunatic Klansmen, yet when confronted with an actual honest-to-Allah theocracy complete with stoning of homosexuals and a different set of laws for non-Muslims, you embrace it as an exotic foreign culture that simply needs more understanding. It'd be silly if it wasn't so frustratingly consistent.

But, I promised that these arguments aren't about abstract morality but about direct impact on me personally. How do Middle Eastern wars affect the day-to-day life of an average American? The hard truth of the matter is that they don't. Iran could nuke Israel tomorrow, India can invade Pakistan, Russia can blitz through Eastern Europe, and life in the US would still continue as normal. We'd stand back and go, "Holy shit!", but it wouldn't affect the homeland.

Now, if we choose to enter the fight, then foreign wars become an enormous drain on our economy. Our taxes increase, rationing programs ensue, and our cities get shut down by mobs of hippie protesters.

So, when it comes to foreign wars, we can do one of two things to protect our domestic economy. We can either follow a policy of foreign disengagement, which means we'd let China do whatever it wants to Taiwan, Russia do whatever it wants to Europe, let Iran have its way with Israel, and so on. We don't care anymore, we decide it's too expensive to care. That's the way of George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, and Ron Paul. And that's fine, that's one way to approach the situation.

The other way, doctrinized by Teddy Roosevelt and perfected through the Cold War, is to project such immense military might, along with the credible threat of using it in defense of our allies, that we never need to use it because folks like Iran know we'll stop them and destroy them if they try to step out of line. That's Pax Americana, and it's kept the world a more or less stable place for the last 60 years.

The worst thing we can do, from the perspective of the domestic economy (i.e. my perspective), is to uphold our commitments to our allies while at the same time backing down from a stance of overwhelming military might, opting instead for a soft-power approach. That means that our enemies will be less reluctant to start wars, gambling on the possibility that maybe we won't respond — and when we do respond, it hurts us as well as them (granted, it hurts them a liiiittle more). The most effective weapon is one you never have to use, and that only works when your enemies know you have it and will use it on them. It's why muggers never attack cops.

Now, Obama's not going to go the full disengagement route. He is not Ron Paul. He's also not going to go the route of overwhelming military might, because that is far too McCain-ish and Bush-ish and has been historically shown to be far too effective. No, Obama is going to try to go the soft-power approach, attempting to hamstring the ambitions of hostile powers using international committees rather than armies. Obama's response to Russia's invasion of Georgia, for example, is the same as that of France: sending delegations to form multiparty negotiation committees to find mutually satisfactory resolutions and get buy-in from regional stakeholders.

For those of you who weren't watching, Russia's response to France was to have a very cordial, respectful discussion in which Russia ultimately agreed to an organized withdrawal. The French delegation came back to Paris announcing that they had reached a consensus and that the meeting was a success. Of course, Russia's tanks didn't actually go anywhere. This repeated about two or three times before Russia finally got bored and pulled back for cost-cutting reasons. Russia currently still maintains troops in South Ossetia and has declared it an independent nation under Russian protection. The UN issued a strongly worded condemnation.

Come to think of it, maybe this is an argument for voting for Obama. Sooner or later, Russia or China or somebody is going to respond to one of these strongly worded condemnations from the UN with a full-out public mooning on the floor of the UN. And I'd kind of like to see that happen.

FAIL: Obama will bring the troops home from Iraq

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:10:00 GMT

Yes, and his desire to re-deploy them to Afghanistan to fight a resurgent Taliban highlights what happens when you leave a job half-done.

Obama seems to recognize this, and describes a plan that couples US troop withdrawal with "successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country." Now, why does that plan sound familiar? Oh yeah, because it's exactly the plan laid out by George W. Bush! Of course, Obama (in that same linked op-ed) hedges the impact of his statement by saying that, of course, some American troops will remain in Iraq indefinitely, to help with regional power projection and peacekeeping missions. Gosh, that sounds familiar too... Oh yeah, because it comes from John McCain!

So in actual substance, Obama's stated Iraq policy is qualitatively identical to those of Bush and McCain. The only difference is that Obama is being a total snot about it, touting it as something new and different that he thought of.

This blog is supposed to be how I personally am affected by these issues. It's not even worth going into the details of how the Iraq War impacts me as an individual, because there's no delta between a McCain Presidency and an Obama Presidency with regard to this issue. So, neeeext!

FAIL: Obama will create alternative energy programs

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:30:00 GMT

The government can't create jack shit.(*) What it can do is get out of the freakin' way and let people profit from their own innovations. That means lifting the ban on offshore drilling, lifting the moratorium on nuclear power plants, refraining from passing draconian environmental policies with dubious long-term impacts, and refraining from using tax money to subsidize approaches that have no market viability. This sounds a helluva lot more like McCain's platform than Obama's.

And when it comes to me and how I personally am affected by this, the bottom line is this:

I'm not going to have a hydrogen car anytime in the next four to eight years, and neither are you.
My gas prices are going to continue to trend upwards, it's just a question of how quickly and who the money ends up going to.
My house will not be flooded away by rising oceans in four to eight years, and neither will anyone else's. And it's extremely unlikely that, if a century of CO2 emissions have fucked up the environment, that it will get any less fucked by anything the US does while India and China are industrializing.

So, in the end, the future of energy and the environment looks pretty much the same regardless of whether it's McCain or Obama in the White House. It's just that Obama wants me to suffer a little bit more in the short-term.

(*) The government's lack of creative capability is worth expounding upon. "What about the Manhattan Project? What about the Apollo Program? What about the Internet?" Yes, it's true, the government can drive military projects. Lest you forget, nuclear energy, space flight, and digital computer technology all come from mid-20th century American military programs.

The reason the government funds military programs is because the government, by definition, is the only one who can experience foreseeable benefit from such programs. The potential profitability of such programs is dubious at their inception. If it were otherwise, such projects would be run by private industry consortia, with each investor trying to pour in as much money as possible in order to get the biggest piece of the pie in the end.

In other words, the formula is always this: The government wants to build something that's useful for killing people and breaking things. The government, by definition, has the exclusive privilege to go around killing people and breaking things. Therefore, nobody but the government is willing to bother paying for the construction of such a thing. So the government spends massive amounts of money on it because nobody else has any incentive to do so. Sometimes, years or decades later, a clever industrialist figures out a way to make the government's creation do something other than kill people and break things, at which point it becomes an economically beneficial invention. Usually not.

This formula simply does not fit a project such as the creation of sustainable energy programs, which are economic in nature from the outset. A solar panel or hydrogen car is not useful for killing people or breaking things. It is useful for reducing consumption of resources, assuming it can be manufactured domestically and provided to the population for low individual cost. That means is has to be a profitable, economically viable consumer product. You want to build something like that, you don't ask the government. You go ask General Motors.

FAIL: Obama will implement socialized health care

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:29:00 GMT

And... this is... a good thing?

Look, I don't need it, don't want it, and think it would be utterly disastrous in general. I'm young and relatively fit, and besides I have health insurance.

I understand that there's some constantly fluctuating number of Americans without health insurance. Okay. They have votes too. They can vote to stick me with the bill.

The effects of socialized health care on me would be exclusively negative. I would pay more for health care (through taxes rather than through my paycheck), I would have less access to doctors, and my doctors would be less skilled. So, why exactly would I support such a measure - on pragmatic, not moral, grounds?

FAIL: Obama will alleviate tax burden on "the middle class" by taxing "the rich"

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:03:00 GMT

I am "the rich". I'm a single guy making more than $45,000/yr gross ($45K being the lowest income tax bracket at which Obama's tax increases begin). Who do you think those taxes are going to be coming from? When Obama and Biden talk about subsidizing your mortgage or helping you pay for your gas, where do you think that money's coming from? Hi. Nice to meet you.

Now, you might argue that this is actually to my benefit, that I myself end up with a better life in the long run by investing in "society at large". If that's your argument, then I should get to choose the amount and the recipients, and ultimately act on my own assessment of rate-of-return. Conservatives donate 30% more to charity than Liberals, partly because we believe that safe neighborhoods and prosperous communities grow from individuals, not from government initiatives. But taxation is not "investment". If it was, you'd be able to show me a cost/benefit analysis and get my money willingly. You wouldn't need to pry it out of my paycheck with a proverbial crowbar.

Oh, and, if you think that it's "only right" that I should pay more, not because I necessarily get anything out of it but because we all have a moral duty to help one another... you can kindly go take your moral code and shove it up your self-righteous ass, you dogmatic piece of shit. I accept that I have no choice but to submit to the government's consensus-driven tax policy, and that they will take more from me than they take from most others. But to suggest that I should be happy about it because I'm serving some kind of Higher Good, and to argue that I should give my vote to a man who will make it worse for me in contribution to some "greater interest"? Not. Fucking. Persuasive.

FAIL: Obama will fix the economy, end the housing crisis, create jobs

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:59:00 GMT

Okay, let's look at how this affects me. Why me? Because it's my vote you're trying to get.

The "economy", in the abstract, affects me largely by determining my buying power (i.e. how much a movie or a gallon of milk costs). And despite all the blathering you hear from the punditry, the President really has very little direct control over any of it. The President appoints a guy to run the Federal Reserve, which has some impact on interest rates. The President has some input over budget allocation, tax policies, and international trade agreements, but his actual authority over such matters is substantially shared with Congress.

In the end, none of these possible actions directly affect my economic situation (except for taxes, which I'll get to later), and the effects that these actions will have is almost completely unknown. What effect will a 0.5% drop in prime rate have on my ability to buy a movie ticket? I don't know, you don't know, Obama and McCain don't know, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke don't know. The microeconomic effects of federal fiscal policy is pretty much an ongoing experiment-in-progress.

So the bottom line is, when it comes to the economy, the President has very few proverbial knobs to turn, he lacks the ability to turn them very far without Congress, and nobody has any real clue what any of the knobs are connected to. Do yourself a favor and avoid this line of argument in serious political discussions.

Welcome! Convince me to vote for Obama!

Michael — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:26:25 GMT

Hello!

Well, it's Presidential Election time again — that four-year cycle which Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar calls America's "seasonal tribal warfare".

And, once again, I endure ongoing ridicule and ostracism from my Democrat peers. Everywhere I go I see t-shirts and bumper stickers lauding Hope and Change, constructivist artwork depicting Barack Obama as a grandiose revolutionary leader, and coffee-shop groups buzzing about the wonders of an Obama Presidency.

And none of it makes the slightest bit of sense to me.

My friends and co-workers are generally in the same demographic as me, with equivalent levels of education, income, similar professions, similar interests, and so on. The vast majority of them are aquiver with Obama fever. Yet they can offer me no explanation for how their own lives would be any better with an Obama Presidency.

They offer me abstract statements of morality and sociopolitical philosophy, but I'm really not interested in getting someone else's morals shoved down my throat. They offer me heated emotional diatribes expressing why they are voting for Obama, but I can't trace the source of their emotions back to anything I personally can relate to. It's gotten to the point where I can't talk to most of them about it because verbal conversations tend to sort of wander off into the proverbial woods.

That's why I'm starting this blog. Maybe a written conversation can be a little bit more sensible than a verbal one.

So, I offer an open challenge to any Obama supporters reading this to convince me to vote for Obama. This involves demonstrating to me why having Obama in the Oval Office will be good for me — a 30-year-old professional, single, educated white male homeowner.

In order to do this, you have to tell me how I will be better off with Obama as our next President.

Don't give me Obama's star power or his life story. I don't care where he grew up or how great his speechwriters are. Don't tell me how awesome or wonderful you think he is — on its own, I don't find your opinion convincing just because you really, really feel it.

Don't give me his background or his relationships unless they serve as a guide to his decision-making tendencies. And even then, I only care insofar as those decisions end up affecting me.

Don't give me abstract arguments about class struggle or social justice or how Obama will help other people. That's great for them, they can vote for him as far as I'm concerned. My vote is mine, and I will use it for myself. Other people's votes are theirs. The beauty of the election process is that it allows every citizen an equal chance to fight for themselves, regardless of race or gender or income, and the best results for the country arise from the synergistic effects of everyone pursuing their own individual greatness.

Don't challenge me to convince you to vote for McCain. I don't know who you are or what you believe in, so I can't tell you whether or not McCain should be your man. The purpose of this blog is to share enough about me to give you the opportunity to change my mind.

Do make your case. I'm skeptical but open-minded. Give me something I can grok, and my vote's all yours.

If you give me an argument that convinces me to vote for Obama, I will not only cast my own vote for him, but will use it to convert other conservative friends and bloggers. What you have here is a chance to explore ways to engage in respectful, meaningful debate, with a clear objective that serves your purpose. Use it wisely.

For starters, let me help you out and save you some time. Here's a few approaches that my Obama-loving peers have already tried with me. Note, of course, that I'm still voting for McCain.