Capitalism for social good

I've long been arguing the point that positive incentives rather than punitive ones are the most effective means towards nudging companies into socially beneficial behavior outside of the direct pursuit of profit. Business will always respond to economic incentives so... give them one.

It looks like someone else had the same idea:

CarrotMob.org

Wow, what concept? Using the market forces to encourage your agenda rather than using the state to tyrannically demand the same. This is how capitalism is supposed to work. This is how the invisible hand is supposed to operate. This is environmentalism at its best: Envirocapitalism. 

I believe in solar power, energy efficiency, and various forms of recycling. I want clean air, and clean water but I want liberty more and I've never believed them to be mutually exclusive. Carrotmob gives me hope for a world where environmentalism need not also mean authoritarianism, where profit need not be a dirty word, and where people can act as stewards of the environment and still where a suit and tie.

To you Brent Schulkin and his team, a hearty thanks.

And there shall be nothing for all...

Another example of irrational and arbitrary guidelines (this time for the purpose of diversity and multi-culturalism) causing shortages and in this case the closure of a much needed service.

You Tell 'em McCain... On Second thought

So it appears that a border dispute over South Ossetia has broken out between Georgia and Russia. Honestly this doesn't really bother me and I can find very few reasons why anyone in the U.S. should care. True, Georgia is a somewhat firm U.S. ally but does that mean anything consequential? What should the U.S. position on this conflict be? I would hope that it would be something along the lines of:

Good luck with whatever your issues are, don't let this spread beyond the two of you.

Of course, no such luck. My favorite quote comes from Sen. McCain:

"Today, news reports indicate that Russian military forces crossed an internationally-recognized border into the sovereign territory of Georgia. Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory. What is most critical now is to avoid further confrontation between Russian and Georgian military forces. The consequences for Euro-Atlantic stability and security are grave."

Interesting. Not only does McCain feel comfortable giving orders (considering that his knowledge of the South Ossetian conflict likely comes from nothing more than a few minutes worth of briefings), but then has the audacity to suggest to these two warring states "what is most critical." I tend to think that Georgia and Russia have some ideas as to what is critical, that is after all why they are fighting in the first place. Not that Sen. Obama is much better. The Senator from Arizona isn't done yet though, as he goes on to suggest that the very stability of Europe is at risk. Seriously?

First of all, what business of the Senator McCain's is it to involve himself in what is essentially a border dispute? There is very little risk of this spreading, unless of course other nations recklessly, arrogantly, or needlessly insert themselves into this conflict.

Secondly, is Europe really threatened by this? This is a region of the world that has dealt with localized and not-so-localized conflicts for more than two millenia. Is there any reason to think that this will be any different or any worse? In short, no. 

Georgia and Russia have an issue and it's not one that concerns most of the rest of the world. It is a private issue between them and it will reach resolution without our meddling. One side will win and one side will lose, built up tension will be released, people will surely die, and maps will likely need to be redrawn. Or we could try to maintain "the stability" of the region and watch this issue flare up for rest of eternity or descend into chaos as tends to happen whenever the international community gets its collective panties in a knot about something.

And so this is the issue at hand: Does the U.S. have anything at stake in this conflict worth (an oil pipeline seems to be about it) the potential risk of involving ourselves in it? Is it appropriate for a potential president to be so casual in his decrees and condemnations concerning the seriousness of this issue to both Georgia and Russia? Should we even bother with attempts at mediation and U.N. resolutions considering how regularly they are simply ignored?

Considering the limited risk to the U.S. and Europe, why not simply allow this conflict the hash itself out and we can console the loser with a nice U.N. resolution after the fact? Why not indeed...

California Uber alles

An interesting bill sb 1322 now sits on California Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk, having already easily progressed through the state assembly and senate. This bill’s basic function is to remove all of the anti-communist regulations and restrictions on teachers in California, thus putting communism on a level playing field with the wide range of other -ism’s.

This bill is interesting to me because it's legislative success suggests one of two things... either communism is now so utterly passe in this country that no one fears it or that it’s underlying ideas are so common that no one finds explicit communism objectionable anymore.

Conservative bloggers have already started in on this topic here, and here with the slightly panicky tone that is oh-so familiar for regular readers. They fear that without authoritarian rules designed to ostracize anyone with communist ideas, then our schools will soon be turning out generation after generation of leftism indoctrinated drones. I believe this passage to be the most troubling to them:

"This bill would delete provisions that prohibit a teacher giving instruction in a school or on property belonging to an agency included in the public school system from teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism. The bill would also delete provisions that a teacher may be dismissed from employment if he or she teaches communism in that way."

Perhaps they have a point... but I doubt the one that they will likely think of. The problem isn't that our public schools will turn generations of kids into happy little leftists because they already do that. The problem is this bill suggests that we have completely abandoned the principle that we should be teaching people how to think, not what to think. Most people who read about this bill will worry that their children are being influenced in favor of communism when they should be concerned that their children are being indoctrinated rather than educated.

A teacher who teaches communism with the intent to indoctrinate or predispose someone to it should be fired because preaching and indoctrinating is not their job in an educational environment. Our teachers should be cultivating intellectual curiosity, sound methodology, historical context, and logical skills, etc. but not indoctrinating. It shouldn't matter what ideological predilection an academic has, he should leave it at the door and strive to sharpen the conceptual faculties of his students.

The language in this bill  flagrantly acknowledges a philosophical premise that the left has been pushing for years: that the human rational faculty (empiricism, reason, and applied logic) is useless in knowing the truth of the world and therefore educating to those ends is pointless. 

In their world, you can't teach a student to understand anything because their is nothing to understand, thus it is simply a battle of which emotional ideology is to be impressed upon the next generation, ideally theirs of course. No point in striving for impartiality because it is impossible and futile. No reason to train students minds to think logically, rationally, and efficiently because it is a lie. Just accept your base emotional whims and go with the heard.

Accepting the notion that education is simply cultural indoctrination, absent of objective value, is to completely abandon its purpose, value, and utility. Given that, what underlies the left's vigorous support of the public school system, if not to educate and enlighten?

Simply put, they believe that the purpose of education is to indoctrinate. Ultimately it is their intent to mold generation after generation into compliant, harmless, unthinking, desperately confused robots seeking some authority to submit to. That is what is scary about this bill - it is the tacit approval of this coming to pass.

Gov. Schwarzenegger should veto this bill and should follow it up with the decimation of the entire public school system in California. It is obviously horribly corrupted by irrationalism and the only thing that can fix it is nature itself.

Sir Francis Bacon once said:

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed"

The natural world is reality and it has rules. Every misstep and every violation of those rules will be mercilessly punished; the world enforces its nature absolutely and relentlessly. Those same rules, when understood and obeyed, open the door to immense human potential as well as a kind and benevolent universe. Civilization is the byproduct of a far stricter adherence to that fact than those cultures which still dwell in poverty and barbarism. Within civilization, complete liberty is man's most natural state and the free-market (i.e. capitalism) its economic expression. Only the coercive force of the state (or chaotic violence) can corrupt the market and nowhere is that corruption more apparent than the public education system.

State sponsored education attempts to violate one of natures rules: that of accountability. The state taxes the people in order to subsidize public schools. It regulates the competition and controls its curriculum. The schools are funded based on forced attendance and not on achievement or quality. Coupled with an obscenely powerful teacher's union, and meddling politicians the public schools have become ineffective bastions of irrationalism, inefficiency, and leftism. It is only their sheltered existence and the states ruthless oppression of competition that keeps them in existence. In the natural world they would have died out years ago. 

Let loose the market upon education such that it can devour the weak and irrational parts of. Force the school system to abandon it's absurdities or die as a consequence. The insipid and irrational ideologies such as communism stand little chance in the market place of ideas and a school system which accepts them will justly whither away, bested by the superior, more rational schools which will necessarily and inevitably evolve. 

In a free society, without government intrusion, it is the rational, and their institutions, that will flourish and they would have nothing to fear from any phantoms of communism. They need not worry about their culture being corrupted because the market, and nature itself will continuously cleanse such irrationality from the civilized world.

U.S. Foreign Aid

Here's a somewhat random listing of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid in 2006:

Israel - $2,520,000,000

Egypt - $1,795,000,000

Columbia - $558,000,000

Jordan - $461,000,000 

Pakistan - $698,000,000

Peru - $133,000,000

Indonesia - $158,000,000

Kenya - $213,000,000

Bolivia - $122,000,000

Ukraine - $115,000,000

India - $94,000,000

Haiti - $163,000,000

Russia - $52,000,000

Ethiopia -$145,000,000

West Bank/Gaza - $150,000,000

Liberia - $89,000,000

Bangladesh - $49,000,000

Bosnia - $51,000,000

Give it a moment to sink in...

What is most striking about this list to me is how seemingly nonsensical it is. We give to impoverished nations and wealthy nations, allies and enemies, nations with strategic resources and those with none. We give to nations with exploding economies and those that have been impoverished since the dawn of man. We give three times as much to Haiti as we do to India even though India has a population that is 127 times larger, thus we give 381 times the money to Haiti per capita. WTF?????

Even if you ignore the question of merit or the legal/moral questions concerning foreign aid, you are still stuck with the self-evident fact that our foreign aid policies are insane.

Then of course there is the question of benefit; is our generosity having any positive results? Looking at that list it should be obvious that our foreign aid has neither improved those nations noticeably or made them more amiable to us.

The real question is why on earth we give any foreign aid whatsoever. Domestic policies aside, foreign aid makes very little sense. Do we really think that we gain more of a benefit from it than say... more police officers? How about job retraining programs for Michigan? Or vouchers for private schools? Or paying down the national debt? Or tax breaks for small-businesses, or even a bridge to nowhere? Can anyone really say that the $20+ billion that we give out every year to line the pockets of despots and corrupt bureaucrats, wouldn't do more good domestically?

By what right does the government give away our wealth? Was their some constitutional clause somewhere that says it's our national obligation to give randomly to foreign countries? I don't recall seeing it. I could perhaps tolerate it if there was some legitimate benefit but in my lifetime I have seen none and I believe that foreign aid is effectively theft and the politicians that endorse it are treasonous criminals. I will never, ever vote for a single politician who would ever endorse a single penny of foreign aid again...

Islam stands alone

I'm not a particularly religious man... and when I say that, what I actually mean is that I am, as far as I know, the worlds only atheist Christian apologist. That being said, I have issues with many of the so-called great faiths.

Hinduism is a nostalgic throw-back to the highly localized deities of primitive polytheism. I find it troubling only in the sense that it is archaic and a little silly.

The great eastern religions from Taoism to Buddhism all suffer from the same irrational metaphysical foundation which is exactly why they are so popular among leftist: they are ideologically related. No rational man could possibly take them seriously, for even a moment.

Islam has a special place in my heart though. I truly despise this religion and the only time you will ever see me in the Dawkinsesque anti-religious mode, that atheist are notorious for, is when discussing Islam and occasionally Scientology. Why is that you ask? Because Islam is truly unique, and not in a good way.

One of the hallmarks of a healthy religion is a rationally coherent and relatively consistent moral code. They should essentially engage your intellect even though they will often make absolute decrees which occasionally defy reason and they all require a leap of faith. Unhealthy religions usually resemble cults and the hallmark of a cult is that they are highly, highly prescriptive or ritualistic and usually lack any conceptually coherent moral code. 

Islam is deeply prescriptive faith, more so than any other major faith other than Judaism or middle-ages Catholicism. The key difference is that Jewish prescription is often rationally derived (such as the kosher diet which prevents easily communicable diseases from pigs) or philosophically consistent with the faith and Catholicism has matured after centuries of scholarly monasticism. Islam has no such safeguards or maturity, it's prescription is as nonsensical as it is ubiquitous.

A similar feature to tyrannical governments, cults, and brainwashing techniques is the notion of arbitrary prescription and absolute submission in order to find value or fulfillment or meaning. All things come from the source, whether it's the state, the leader, the faith, or whatever and all you need to do is submit to it's arbitrary demands. Islam fits this model to a tee.

Some of it's other charming characteristics include: 

an innate and baseless elitism - they are supposed to be the greatest people in the world simply because they are muslims.

Complete integration between the faith and every other element of their civilization. It's not just math, it's Islamic Math! They are simply deeply uncomfortable with any notion of separation or secularism - see Turkey for ample evidence of their best effort yet.

A sense of historical and holy obligation to make their faith the one and only faith.

Islam also, in part because of it's innate sense of superiority, is in a constant state of psychological turmoil which manifests itself in a tendency towards familiar violent outbursts, cultural nostalgia, hyper-sensitivity (see: Jewel of Medina), and bitter resentment towards other cultures.

While Islam's list or prescriptive demands is long, inconsistent, and comically surreal to be sure, when combined with its penchant for violence (not too much greater than in Christianity but far more dangerous considering it's cult-like and tyrannical nature), natural receptiveness to socialism, megalomania, and demented arrogance and you'll get a rough idea as to why I find this "great faith" so troubling. 

P.S. If you find this offensive and are not a muslim then please don't bother me. Just research some of my claims - I didn't make them up, and make an assessment on your own as to whether or not you think I am taking things out of context or reacting irrationally to things. If I am wrong then I will gladly reconsider my position.

However, if you are a muslim and find this offensive then please don't kill me. I don't want to die but I would rather die than kow-tow to your pathological rage.

The bi-partisan menace of gay marriage

Gay marriage is an issue that politicians, from both major parties, would simply prefer disappear, but I'm rather fond of it... just not for an obvious reason. I like the issue because it illustrates so elegantly how the major political and social movers and shakers are utterly incapable of considering a solution to a problem that involves less government meddling, and not more.

This is an issue draped in more nonsensical rhetoric than any issue in my lifetime and virtually no one has the courage to address it honestly and without prejudice.

First things first... homosexuals do not have the right to get married, sorry GLAD. Then again, no one does. What you do have is the right to not be prevented from entering into a voluntary agreement, not exactly the same thing.

Of course, I should also point out that gay marriage wouldn't destroy the institution of marriage either... feminists and government already did that, just kidding... but only a little.

Please don't take that lame middle-road and go for domestic partnerships because that actually is discriminatory, not to mention idiotic. Then again, much of what comes from continental Europe is.

This isn't about bigotry, equality, or any other such nonsense. This issue is about the roles of government.

Politicians want to use the state to shape and manipulate their social and cultural environment, which is exactly why this issue is hot right now and also exactly why marriage is regulated by the state in the first place. The belief was that marriage, in it's most traditional form, was good for society and thus government should regulate it and encourage - you can thank John Calvin and the Protestants for being the first to do this but the idea can be traced back further than you would ever think.

Thus marriage between a man and a woman was given the governmental stamp of approval and everything else was... well, illegitimate. Thus if the government allows polygamists, or homosexuals, or anyone else to marry then they are giving equal approval to that. Oh no! Gay marriage and straight marriage equal? The horror.

Of course it isn't that straights don't want gays to be in love, have medical benefits, etc. In fact, it isn't even the concept of marriage that really bothers them... at least not deep in their souls. What upsets them so much is the idea that their community, state, or country not only approves of gay marriage but encourages it. After all that is what marriage recognition is all about... it's about encouraging marriage.

And I don't disagree.

I don't see any reason why the state should encourage homosexuality... of course I also don't see a reason why the government should encourage good nutrition,  hospitals, sobriety, heterosexuality, or anything else.

The state has no business regulating marriage. Marriage is social, religious, and/or cultural institution that is recognized solely by the members of or adherents to said culture or group. It is their right to recognize, regulate, and encourage or discourage marriage.

If the Catholic church doesn't want to recognize a gay marriage then no one should be able to force them too, on the other hand nothing compels anyone else from recognizing theirs either. 

Of course that isn't exactly kosher to some segments of the homosexual political activists because they don't want to be simply tolerated, they want to be accepted and are more than willing to use the state to do it. This is an assault on our basic liberties which include the right to be a bigoted, racist, sexist idiot and that's a right that I've no interest in giving up. Not because I have a problem with homosexuality but rather because I don't want the state telling me who I can or can't hate... because quick frankly, I hate almost everybody anyway and so I'm a little touchy about criminalizing my misanthropy.

Back to the point... the key issues are those of legitimacy and equality. If the question of legitimacy is entirely left to the judgement of the observer than that problem simply disappears. If you find a certain marriage obscene or illegitimate then you are free to not recognize it or approve it. The question of equality however, is another issue entirely but one that can, and should, be solved through contract law.

Issues such as alimony, divorce settlements, medical care, survivor benefits, etc. are all issues for contract law (with the exception being child-support but that is a different matter entirely) and have no intrinsic connection to marriage. Anyone, married or not, regardless of their relationship, can engage in contractual arrangements with anyone else and it is the states job to enforce those contracts. It should be easy to develop standard marriage contracts which cover all that we associate marriage with today. The states only role would be to deal with disputes and enforce the contract when necessary. Recognizing or approving the marriage wouldn't even enter into the equation.

Thus, my solution is simply to remove all government recognition and regulation of the institution of marriage. Discrimination is province of the individual and not the state. 

How I grew to love Bill Clinton

I've long believed that Bill Clinton is a groveling, shameless, borderline sociopath and yet I find myself wishing that he were running for office this year...

Don't get me wrong, my views of Clinton have not changed but I would accept his needy, self-indulgent pragmatism over McCain's  authoritarian imperialism or Obama's LBJ revival any day of the year.

The tragedy of Corey Maye

Corey Maye is a particularly tragic victim of one of this nation's most disturbing domestic trends: the militarization of our police forces.

Please read up on him and this issue at Radley Balko's great blog theagitator.com.

Delusions of failure

Matt Welch over at reason's hit & run has a great post about this insane article from Greg Anrig. Read and enjoy...

A reading list

In my humble opinion, the most important intellectual attribute is the capacity for clear, conceptual, rational thought. That might not be apparent in my the garbled gibberish that dots this blog but I don't proofread or re-draft here... maybe I should.

Still, here is a reading list for those that would like a nice example of what I value:

Eric Hoffer - most people reading this will have never heard his name but a paragraph into The True Believer and you will know just how remarkable this man truly was.

Saint Thomas Aquinas - the Summa Theologica is his premiere work and Catholic or not, this man was and is one of the truly sublime logicians in history.

Sir Francis Bacon - anyone who goes through their life without reading his essays will almost certainly be the worse for it. In terms of his clarity of thought and efficiency of prose, he is stands rivaled only by Mr. Hoffer.

Ayn Rand - apologies for her rejection of biological human nature, interesting if incomplete philosophy, late-life paranoia, cultish tendencies, and irritating literature. Other than that, she was a powerful, creative, witty, and often profound thinker who is far too often overlooked by serious intellectuals in large part because of how off-putting her devoted followers are.

Rudyard Kipling - has ever a man more important, more significant, and more praised than he been so quickly and completely dismissed? I can think of none. Kipling has cruelly and unfairly labeled many distasteful things and his poetry and literature, once a staple of western education, are now virtually black-listed by modern academia. Few men have ever spoken to the truth of human nature as he.

Aristotle - shame on you if you don't read something from him at least once a year. Aristotle may very well have been the most brilliant mind in human history. Organon and the Nichomachean Ethics are his two most relevant works but his wildly inaccurate work in biology and physics are valuable, if not for their accuracy, but for his intellectual process. It is a wonder to see how the mind of a genius works, even when it's wrong.

Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz - one of the few people on this earth of truly transcendent genius. The scope of his work ranges from history and theology to biology, linguistics, and most famously mathematics and probability. 

The clarity and elegance of these great thinkers makes them not only intellectually and philosophically valuable but also accessible and dare say, entertaining.

The Ron Paul effect

This article from last week in the AP concerns itself with the notion that Ron Paul could have an effect on the election in some of the western states. 

"In Nevada, there's absolutely enough to have an effect on the election," said Chuck Muth, a leading conservative activist in a state in which early polls show McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama in a statistical tie.

Of course it's a long way till them general election and the popular support for outside the mainstream candidates often declines as the election approaches so I have my doubts.

A more interesting quote is this one:

"I think that you will see not just Libertarians who always vote for the Libertarian candidate but conservative Republicans saying we've had it, we've had enough and they're going to go ahead and vote Libertarian," Muth said.

Is the republican party finally showing signs of fracture. Is the small-government wing of the party finally fed-up? Again, I have my doubts but let's hope so.

What should a conservative stand for?

I would think that the most important political position of an American conservative should be pro-capitalism.

He should believe in the absolute protection of private property, freedom of association, and commerce and every right so rationally derived.

Liberty should be his banner in the political war, capitalism his aim, and government his nemesis.

He should seek to constrain and restrain the state and never forget that government corrupts and should never be used to further his ends, because when government is unleashed it will devour liberty first.

Oh lament the conservative!

To lament the conservative one first must know what he is and what he must do.

Evelyn Waugh once said:

"[Kipling] was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms."

There are not many statements that more clearly and concisely illustrate what it means to be a conservative and the troubling nature of a liberal.

Conservativism, in any culture, has respect for said culture and it's traditions; the conservative isn't afraid of change but rather of liberal recklessness because he knows how hard civilization is to achieve and how easily it can be destroyed. A civilization, no matter how great, can quickly descend into chaos and the conservative knows it. He is the defender of civilization and tradition is his weapon.

Liberalism is the catalyst for cultural change both good and bad. The liberal is dynamic, experimental, radical and often intellectual. He challenges tradition and fights for change. Violence and revolution are the means to his ends but a lack of judgement is his curse. The liberal will destroy civilization more often than he improves it, but he can improve it.

Given a rational foundation, those two competing ideologies work in partnership. With liberals driving a society forward and conservatives steering away from danger, a nation can move forward indefinitely. It is only when irrationalism takes root that civilization decays from within and irrationalism is the hobgoblin of liberalism.

Conservatism will always fall back on tradition and thus, as long as a society has a strong rational foundation then civilization is resilient and durable. Protecting a rational foundation is, above all, the supreme duty of the conservatives because when they allow liberals to infect a society with irrationalism then that societies demise is almost certain. Liberals are allowed the luxury of immediate gratification, foolish utopianism, and grand experiments because good or bad, they will flourish and feel no guilt over what was lost but will simply move on. The conservative will follow the liberal's successes but civilization will follows the conservatives failures and protecting the rational philosophy is his greatest challenge and the only one that he cannot afford to fail. When the irrational finally destroy civilization it will do so with mantle of a defender of tradition.

The modern American conservative has failed in that task. The American left has long been infected with a particularly virulent form of irrationalism, one armed ironically and uniquely with a long-term strategy. The American conservative, never arming himself with a true rational defense, was simply no match Gramsci's marxism, Derrida's Deconstruction, or the left's long march to the institutions and his defeat was as inevitable as it was tragic.

The American conservative has been in trouble for many years but has occasionally shown sparks of life with Goldwater, Reagan, and even George W. Bush gave some us hope. He appeared to be a comfortably harmless president in the mold of Taft, Coolidge, or Harding. Someone that could hold down the fort till a better, braver, stronger leader would come to man the defenses more aggressively and more fervently than he. To say that we conservatives were wrong would be the most profound of understatements. George W. Bush is the physical manifestations of the intellectual rot within the minds of the American conservative. We had fallen further and sunk deeper than we ever expected and he showed us just how far: all the way.

I do not know exactly when the American conservative died but I know for certain now that he is dead. I also know that if no one will stand up and take his place to defend the rational and traditional America then this great and brilliant nation will die a meek and violent death.

Kneel before your next president!

I sometimes have a hard time trying to decide who is worse: John McCain or Barack Obama. The basis for my confusion is that my evaluation uses only one piece of criteria: the candidates degree of and affection for authoritarianism. I'm torn between the militarized imperial state of John McCain or the socialist PC nanny-state of Barack Obama.

Let's see, what would I like to go to jail for, refusing to hand over my laptop or a random piece of paper when traveling abroad or for being a racist, sexist, anti-hopist? It's so hard to choose.

For John McCain it's a bit more clear-cut because he is a security authoritarian:

Answering a question about his approach to combatting crime, John McCain suggested that military strategies currently employed by US troops in Iraq could be applied to high crime neighborhoods here in the US. McCain called them tactics "somewhat like we use in the military…You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control."

What matters is that I am safe and everyone is safe from me and so on. He might as well cover the world in bubble wrap. Of course, who cares if I am free... he was born to be a monarch.

Barack Obama on the other hand is more of a modern leftist:

"In Africa, you often see that the difference between a village where everybody eats and a village where people starve is government. One has a functioning government, and the other does not. Which is why it bothers me when I hear people say that government is the enemy. They don't understand its fundamental role."

Great. Governments fundamental role? Governments fundamental role mr. Obama is to do as little as humanly possible in order to ensure the liberty of all and as a result the society will flourish or flounder based on the quality of its people, not it's government.

Barack Obama wants us to apologize for our past crimes:

"I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged."

"I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it’s Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds."

Unless he can raise the dead then I'm not exactly sure what he's talking about. I would have no objection to apologizing to slaves so long as I get to own one but seeing as that isn't going to happen then I don't really want that on the next presidential agenda. That is Obama though, pandering to emotions more thoroughly than Clinton ever could have dreamed. For Obama it is about hope, possibilities, dreams and very little about ideas, values, and the nitty-gritty. For this whimsical senator from illinois, governing amounts to little more than a new-age feel good session.

McCain prefers to subsume the individual man to the greater goal of national greatness:

“Sacrifice for a cause greater than self-interest, however, and you invest your life with the eminence of that cause. Americans did not fight and win World War II as discrete individuals.”

"A world where our ideals had a realistic chance of becoming a universal creed was our principal object in the last century...In the process, we became inextricably involved in the destiny of other nations. That is not a cause for concern. It is a cause for hope.” 

So there, it is our duty as a nation to re-shape the world in our image and the obligation of every citizen to put this meglomaniacal vision at the forefront of their character. The imperial presidency indeed! I don't personally have any interest in following this pied-piper of national greatness to the inevitable apocalyptic conclusion of his delusions of glory. I saw more of that than I care to with the current president, thank you very much.

So what am I to do? Wish-washy victimhood, thought police, and a resurgent socialism or watching as "national greatness" descends into the Vader presidency? Such a choice is made nearly impossible by the intangible yet palpable fear that whichever choice I make, the long-term legacy will be measured in bodies stacked deep.