"Glocks Still Spittin', The Whole Block Politickin' Like Presidents" [A Political Aside]

Originally Posted 1/4/08:

Sam Baron already did this, but maybe I'll reach a different audience, so who y'all voting for/would be voting for if you were older?

I'm voting for Obama, who I do dig but admittedly don't know that much about beyond what comes out of the highly biased mouth of my brother. But, like I said, I wish I could vote for Ron Paul because I'm a Libertarian at heart, but I just can't make myself do it.

Also, I wanted a little more space to talk about my political beliefs (which I'm not too clear on myself), particularly in answer to Dan's question on the other other Sam's note.

"Dan Davidson (Brown) wrote

sam, if you were a libertarian at heart wouldn't you believe that concealed weapons would have a statistically insignificant impact on gun violence because when you let people do whatever they want things are chill?"

First, I won't pretend to know a lot about the justification for things like concealed weapons, but I imagine that (beyond the 2nd Amendment) it's something along the lines of allowing people to defend themselves. Which is, if not entirely stupid, at least totally unreasonable--you want to talk about statistically insignificant, imagine the number of times that you need to have a weapon concealed in order to protect yourself vs. the number of times it would allow people (particularly in already dangerous urban areas) to murder people more easily.

See, I'm all for freedom, and, particularly, rewarding the people who have earned their reward, but when it's reasonable to assume that by allowing a particular freedom, it will lead to violence and death and virtually no actual benefit, it ends up leading to less net freedom (i.e. it's hard to do what you want when you've been shot). As Ayn Rand says, "morality ends where a gun begins."

I'm a little confused about my political beliefs in general, especially because I don't actually believe that when people do whatever they want within reasonable boundaries, things are generally more helpful. I think most people make things worse in that situation. What it does allow is for the truly great peopleto rise to the top, which has them earn what they deserve and is better for the country as a whole. The problem, however, is that modern Libertarians don't make much distinction between the rich who are the great producers of the world and the rich who have bullshitted their way there by playing the political game, inheriting it, et cetera.

Libertarians aren't actually interested in having the best people run the country, they're interested in having the rich (whether they are truly productive or parasitic) stay rich and the poor stay poor. It does nothing to try to get us to a place a of equality of opportunity, which is the only way we could have a truly Randian moral country. The point of Libertarianism should be true justice in the Orestian or Karmic sense--that is, you get exactly what you deserve without a handout or an unfair penalty--but that's not what happens. So, in conclusion, I badly want to be a Libertarian, but I just can't in good conscience.

Which sucks.

And fuck corn farmers. At least Ron Paul wouldn't give them shit.