This election is truly about freedom.  It is pivotal to America's future.  The issues are not partisan.  The issues at their core are about what it means to be an American, and whether that way of life will continue.  The issues condense to a question of freedom versus slavery. Examine all the candidates and their messages, and vote for making your own decisions about life, and granting that same respect to others.  Think for yourself.  Stand up for your rights.  Register to vote.  Go to your state caucus, and vote.

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. "

William Hazlitt

I wanted to post the preliminary Iowa Caucus tallys.  The following represent voting results with all but four counties results in.  From the initial results some of you may think my posts and optimism regarding Ron Paul's prospect are the result of a misspent youth and hallucinogenic substances. 

Ron Paul captured 5th place with just 10 percent of the vote.  However this misses how close that vote was.  I believe my original contention is correct, Ron Paul can win, but it is not the shoo in I predicted.  He'll do better in New Hampshire - his freedom message should play well in the "live free or die "state.  He did do quite a bit better than polls predicted, but not as much so as Huckabee.

	#Votes	% Vote	Pre Polls	Variance
Huckabee	35401	34.35%	29%	5.35%
Romney	26167	25.39%	24%	1.39%
Thompson	13834	13.42%	13%	0.42%
McCain	13556	13.16%	11%	2.16%
Paul	10040	9.74%	6%	3.74%
Guliani	3590	3.48%	8%	-4.52%

To be fair, Guliani did not campaign in Iowa and should not be expected to do as poorly on the east coast.  Huckabee's Evangelical support will be much less on the coasts.  This campaign is still young.  Ron Paul continues to build momentum.  Without any mainstream media support, he got  10% compared to McCain and Thompsons 13%.  

On the Democratic Side, the Peace Candidate won.  Obama was the clear winner with Edwards second, barely edging out Clinton.
 
There is a lot of time and many more caucuses before the election. 

The ethical underpinnings of economic thought and political systems warrants understanding.  At the root ,ethics is not that complicated.  Ethics, economics, philosophy, and psychology are in my opinion highly related and must be incorporated into any evaluation of political philosophy.  So in the words of Thoreau, simplify, simplfy, simplify.

Let's consider a simple foundational concept in ethics, the golden rule.  This idea is included in one way or another in almost every religion or spiritual teaching on the planet in both eastern and western thought.  This idea is expressed as: do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or variations like Karma, you get what you give, the law of attraction and other statements.  If this simple principal is incorporated into discussion of the world's society, many illusory philosophies of good become transparent.

Marxism socialism and  even perhaps fascism are sold as ethical political philosophies, yet they violate the idea of reciprocity contained in the golden rule.  The idea that one is justified in the interest of some nebulous poorly defined "collective good" to usurp property rights is based upon greed and envy, not ethics or compassion. 

There is a rational case to be made that the inherent illusions in plunder in the name of campassion, sacrifice for the sake of community, wealth and property ownership portrayed as evil, and the resultant redistributive efforts of self sanctified saints and sages is inherently dishonest.  The lie is disguised as virtue, but  when stripped of illusion, reality is that these "virtuous" philosophies advocate violence, theft, and are destruction of society.  These philosphies are based upon win/lose transactions of enforced kindness.

Force is not tool for freedom, it is a tool for slavery.  Under a slave system, natural human self determination is derailed.  Without natural guideposts of self interests, human effort falters.  There is no natural motivation toward collective betterment, particularly at ones own expense.  Motivation in such a system must be applied externally to initiate acts of  supposed virtue.  These acts when coerced further lead to reduction of civility in the world creating what is actually an anti-civilization.

Such philosophies penalize work, success, true kindness, and ethics.  They undermine motivation for productive effort by reducing rewards for work, and effort. Such philosopies reward failure, poor judgement, and incompetence.  By promoting action destructive to sustaining human life, and discouraging constructive focused effort, which sustains life, such systems or philosophies are actually proponents of death. 

Is it any surprise that the moral code is represented by the term sacrifice, and the focus of life diverted to a questionable reality of life after death.  The logical and moral inconsistencies of such systems reduce standards of living creating myriad immeasureable hardships and the need for even more sacrifice.  Until, in the end death is welcomed as a blessed respite from the twisted reality and inherent hatred of humanity such illogical approaches to community, ethics, and kindness create.

Forced kindness is an oxymoron. 


This is a repost of my comments inspired by a thread about Marxism in The Age of Turbulence Pod.

I'll leave you to your own speculation as to why this technology is not the lead story on every newscast, and front page news on every paper in the world.  The Energy crisis is manufactured, not real.  Like the six million dollar man, we have the technology, we can rebuild our economy to one based on water energy, this is not a difficult transition.  But who has advocated it?  Why haven't they.  Abundant free energy is availble now without huge infrastucture change or investment.  Oops that would create a huge economic shift from slavery and control to individual freedom.  
 
You can read more about this at http://waterpoweredcarplans.com/

I've always loved George Carlin's wit  and wisdom, this video is no exception.  Fair warning, George is always profane and this video is no exception, but it taps into the collective unconscious that shows how we get such poor representation and results from our political leaders.  And, it's funny.  How do you beat that?