Aretae

The virtue of excellence

Friday, April 20, 2012

On Romney

Borepatch and I have been arguing (together, not in opposition) for a good while now that Romney is suspicious as a choice for president.  While my last post on the topic indicated uncertainty, Dan Mitchell just reminded us out the principle of the thing:


Posted by at

10 comments:

Leonard said...

I know you're being facetious, still, taking the assertion seriously:
(1) this policy is immoral according to libertarian theory
(2) this policy doesn't scale
(3) anyway, the right never learns
What it is, is a prescription for left-wing dominance.

Also, I would point out that the President is different from other positions in that he appoints the Supreme Court, which actually does exercise sovereign power. As such, the President matters in a way that no other elected office does. Even a squish like Romney will make better appointments than any Democrat.

As such, I think the best we can realistically get out of America is a Republican president opposed by a split Congress. But you have to sustain it for long enough that the liberal Justices die or retire in spite of wanting to hold out for a Democrat.

April 20, 2012 at 8:21 AM
Joseph said...

I go back and forth with Borepatch's arguments re: voting for Obama if Romney is the nominee. His reasoning is sound, but I can't stay sold. After some considerable thought, I believe I've identified my long-view problem with this strategy, and it can be summed up in two words: malicious intent.

Put simply, because I'm working right now and can't go fully into it: I can't get past the prior associations of our current President - Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis (Mr. Obama's "Uncle Frank"), Jeremiah Wright, et al. Some pretty scary characters in prominent positions in Mr. Obama's past. Mitt Romney may be, at best, squishy on the things I value, but if even 25% of Mr. Obama's world-view is colored by the people he hung out with in his formative years, I can't help but think that we want him gone from his position of power as quickly as possible.

April 20, 2012 at 8:22 AM
Aretae said...

Joseph,

1. I go back and forth as well. I've argued both Borepatch's side and the other side.

April 20, 2012 at 9:21 AM
Aretae said...

Leonard,

Actually...I think that voting is itself (a) immoral, and (b) ineffective

You're both signaling support for a thug, and your vote has a <0.0001% chance of making a difference to anything.

2. When I do argue the other side, for Romney, it's on Supreme Court Justice grounds.

April 20, 2012 at 9:23 AM
Leonard said...

Aretae, agreed that voting is ineffective.

I don't find voting immoral, but that's because I accept (if grudgingly) that the system exists and that I cannot simply turn my back on it, as I would prefer. This is somewhat of a later development for me.

I have in the past argued from libertarians bases that the morality of voting on coercive measures is contextual. Doing it is always wrong in anarchy; but it may be moral if you are starting in a situation where there is already coercion. In this situation voting is moral iff you vote for a candidate who you are confident (some?, a lot?, very?) will reduce the net amount of coercion. I had this exchange with Billy Beck about this at Jim Henley's blog a few years back. Sampling Billy:

I don’t see how one can be a libertarian and vote for anybody at all, period. Look: I don’t have a right to get together with my friends and determine with them how to dispose of your rights. Any sensible person would call that a conspiracy. Nobody has that right, and there is no sleight of logic morally competent to bring it into being.

Sample of me:

If we were in a situation where there was no democracy, then you’re right – getting together to form it would be morally wrong. Or if we could opt out of the state by not voting, again, voting would be morally wrong. But that’s just not the reality we live in. A democratic process is in place that owns us, regardless of our actions. It interprets all non-votes as support for the system. ...

I don’t see any moral problem with harm mitigation.

And we pingpong back and forth with various arguments and hypotheticals.

April 20, 2012 at 9:58 AM
Jehu said...

Don't forget the MSM, the university sytem, and the permanent bureaucracy when counting branches of government that you want to divide.

April 20, 2012 at 11:00 AM
Anonymous said...

Since politicians do basically the same stuff, I guess you should vote for them as cultural ambassadors. Most people voted for Obama because they wanted a first black president.

I think we should make Romney the first Mormon president. Mormons are the only functional civil society left in this country. It would be good for them to gain mainstream acceptance.

April 20, 2012 at 12:12 PM
Borepatch said...

@Joseph, you can reliably assume that Romney will come down on the side of any issue that he thinks will be politically advantageous for Romney. To do this, he will deploy full frontal Liberal Evasion techniques - clintonesque lies, for example.

If he's successful, he will entirely hollow out the Republican party in the same way that Clinton did to the Democrats. Read Hitchens on Clinton's impact, and extrapolate. Then let's talk about the impact of malice.

@Leonard, the pelt of my wookie suit is not so long and luxuriant as Billy's, but I see this as an opportunity for Monkeywrenching the (expected) Republican majority. "I voted for Obama" will have an impact on people's thought patterns when you tell the. "Sure he was a communist jackass; I voted for him because he was better than your offer" is something that Republicans will need to hear for the next 4 years, should Romney win.

Think of it as political slut shaming.

April 20, 2012 at 9:25 PM
Aretae said...

Leonard,

Borepatch may be over-civilized, but *my* wookie-suit is substantial.

I am familiar with the effectiveness counter-argument.

I think that active withholding of my vote in order to undermine the legitimacy of the system (only 20% of the populace voted at all makes for a real anti-mandate)...which I think has a *greater* (read not-exactly-zero) chance of causing impact than voting.

Of course, in my life, I've lived in California, where 1,000,000 people won't shift the vote (they're all communists here...adding only a Million non-communists wouldn't help)....Chicago, where 1B people won't shift the vote (they'll cheat until they win...and they don't even pretend honesty)...and Texas, where communists get rounded up and shot, as a weekly passtime. My odds of impacting any non-local election I was entitled to vote in EVER has been precisely zero.

April 20, 2012 at 9:37 PM
Anonymous said...

nice idea.. thanks for sharing.

April 29, 2012 at 5:34 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)