Voting For Economic Self-Interest

Benjamin Franklin said"When the people find they can vote themselves money,
that will herald the end of the republic."

Commentators are astonished that middle-class conservatives seem to vote against their economic self-interest by voting for Republicans. Let's break it down.

First, we believe that, as the cliche goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. The economy is not, as Marxists believe, a zero-sum game, in which some get rich only when others get poor. More often, either everyone prospers or no one does.

Suppose two people acquire wealth at different rates, one becoming only a little better off while another becomes filthy rich. The social justice crowd would have us believe that the people who are only a little better off are actually worse off, because their envy blinds them to reality. The gap has widened, which they take as conclusive evidence of injustice.

If you have no car, and someone sells you his clunker at a bargain price, you are happy. Then, when the former owner of your clunker drives up in a Certified Pre-owned Lexus, you're envious: you have a clunker, and he has a Certified Pre-owned Lexus. When is your car going to break down? Yet before you had to walk to work in the snow and rain, and now you can drive. You're not driving a Certified Pre-Owned Lexus, but you're not driving Certified Pre-Owned Nikes, either. You're better off, not worse off, and the circumstances of that other fellow are irrelevant except to your own envy.

And thus is it in general.

But back to voting: a person's vote indicates his mindset: is he voting for what's best for him, or is she voting for what's best for her country? To the extent that a single vote matters, a person ought to cast it in favor of something larger than his own petty interests, if that is defined as what the government is going to give him.

We have public schools. They should be teaching that Franklin quote, and from it the principle it conveys, which is as old as democracy. Perhaps then the people would know that their vote is an important choice between the health of the Republic the satisfaction of their own envy.

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Islamabad Marriott Owner: "I am not scared."

When terrorists bombed the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, they probably thought they were striking a blow for Islam or some such crap. What they actually did was to alienate their customer base.

The idiot terrorists are going to turn the rest of Pakistan against their cause. What little sympathy they had will evaporate.

Pakistan is angry.

I am not scared. I have seen death very closely, this doesn't bother me. If I had been here I would have run after the bombers and caught them.

-- Sadruddin Hashwani, owner of bombed Marriott in Islamabad, Pakistan

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A Dark Fortnight for Moneychangers

To save the financial system, the government took it over.

Ironically, the financial crisis was caused by the government. Banks were forced (by liberal banking regulations) to sell mortgages to people who could not pay their bills. Oddly enough, many of those loans resulted in foreclosure.

The argument for forcing the banks to provide the loans is simple: get more people in houses, since homeowners are more stable economically. And it's politically popular to encourage home ownership, a symbol of success in America.

The first trouble with that is the usual liberal sloppy logic: just because owners of homes are more responsible and successful economically doesn't mean that making someone a homeowner will make them more responsible or successful. The part that makes a person responsible is having skin in the game: if you work hard to get something, you're more likely to work hard to keep it. Working hard means, among other things, living within your means. People who save for a down payment have shown they have what it takes to continue that lifestyle.

The second, and equally big trouble with forcing banks to make unsafe loans is that it artificially increases housing values, both for houses and for apartments. It's simple economics: more buyers means higher prices. In seeking to make loans easily available to marginal buyers, Congressional liberals ensured that everyone would be paying more for housing.

Loan availability should be based on the ability to repay, not simply on possession of a heartbeat.

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It Can't Happen Here

The seven years with no successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil are giving us that old feeling that we're safe from attack.

We're not.

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McCain Lead Mystifies HuffPo Blogger

Writing at the Huffington Post, Adam McCay is perplexed at why the addition of Sarah Palin has given John McCain such a huge polling bump.

I was going to go through all of the points he makes and deal with them individually, but I decided to do a shorter me: if your logic is valid and leads to a false conclusion, then at least one of your premises is incorrect.

The details are left as an exercise for the reader.

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Charging the mound on a curve in the dirt

(via Redstate) A reporter from the Las Vegas CBS affiliate asked presidential candidate and presumptive Democratic Party nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) why he supported a bill put forth by Sith Lord Darth Chenius that contained tax breaks for oil companies.

All Obama should have said was that there are lots of things in every bill, some good and some bad, and if the good things in the bill outweigh the bad you vote for it.

But instead he accused the reporter of being in the tank for McCain. And then he said what he should have said.

That pitch wasn't at your head, Senator. It wasn't even a fastball.

In the same interview, Obama flip-flopped on nuclear power, saying there's room for nuclear power in our "energy mix", but pandered to the Nevadans that the waste shouldn't go in their back yard.

Politicians shouldn't be designing our energy mix. The free market should. If people don't want oil, or nuclear, or whatever, they won't buy it. But they do want those things. Politicians like Obama want to control everything and make decisions for us, because they don't think we can figure out what's good for us on our own.

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What the Democratic Party Should Do

When Democrats talk about Obama, they should focus on him as the fulfillment of Dr. King's Dream.

But really, they should quit talking about Obama. Talk instead about health care, the environment, the economy, and that kind of thing. Domestic stuff.

And they should put the blame for the price of oil on the war in Iraq.

They've been blaming oil companies and speculators, and now would have a hard time switching gears and making it stick. O'course, the MSM would pass the story along. But if they'd starting saying "See what happens when you start wars?" when oil hit $90/bbl, they'd own both issues now. They could have people convinced that we may have won the war, but at a cost of $4 gasoline.

(It's not logical to blame the price of oil on the war in Iraq, but since the speculators are sensitive to Iran's threats to blow up Israel, and Iran is fighting us in Iraq, it makes enough sense that some people would swallow it. That may be enough to allow people to ignore the Democrats long-standing refusal to allow more domestic oil production).

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