“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Friday, January 13, 2012

Gingrich and Perry narrow the GOP field to two

I'm not a big fan of Mitt Romney as my President. I doubt seriously his dedication to actually shrinking government rather than slowing the rate of expansion and he has shown no desire to scrap the labyrinthine tax code in favor of a flat tax. Who knows to what extent he'll actually deregulate business, lower taxes, drill for oil everywhere, or rid us of the useless departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, and seriously reign in the EPA. Essentially, I think as President, he'll be George Bush v2.0.

That said, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are attacking Romney for participating in the capitalist process as if venture capitalization and free-market creative destruction were immoral. For their phony, populist attacks on the free-market process, not just that Romney was involved, I cannot vote for either.

Being libertarian, I cannot vote for self-styled choirboy Santorum either. That leaves me with a choice between Romney and Ron Paul. Ron Paul may still get my vote in Alabama's primary, but we'll see. The question for me is electability. Can Ron Paul appeal to enough social conservatives to beat Obama....I think not.

4 comments:

david said...

Ed, I'm with you mostly. But Ron Paul -and all other Libertarian candidates before him - are always portrayed as quacks. Maybe they are? RP has good ideas but his presentation - his fault or others - is awful. I find myself thinking he's a quack when I know his ideas are generally good.

Newt - out
Santorum/Perry - out
Romney - ineffectual but maybe the least worst Republican candidate
Paul - ?

Another Presidential election just begin me to abstain due to lack of a good choice. Instead I'm offered the least worst choice. I'm fed up with this!

Ed said...

I'm with you Dave. I think RP is sort of a flake on foreign policy, but his ideas on the domestic role of the federal government are pretty good. He can't win the presidency, but he can force the nominee(Romney) to embrace publicly the auditing of the FED, getting rid of some agencies, slashing the DC bureaucracy, etc. If he can persist up to the convention he can get a perverbial seat at the table.

Isaac A. Nussbaum said...

"...RP is sort of a flake on foreign policy...."

How so?

david said...

IMO, RPs influence on any would-be president will be limited. If Romney gets elected as the lease-worst Republican candidate I expect very little positive change. He just LOOKS disingenuous to me. He also seems to be trying too hard which is surely a mask covering either dishonesty or some known lack of skill or ability.

This system is broken because the electorate are too ignorant to demand better.