Liberty Maven

American voters will have a choice between the lesser of two evils yet again in the Presidential election of 2008.

It is the equivalent of choosing mint chocolate chip over strawberry ice cream. Sure they taste different, but the end result is the same. You will still get fat. Or in the case of the election you will still get evil. Like ice cream, evil comes in many flavors. This year your featured flavors are fascism and socialism.

On the Democratic side you have the choice of two flavors: light vanilla socialism or french vanilla socialism. On the Republican side your only choice is a single scoop of soft serve fascism. Unfortunately, the political reality is that an independent or third party flavor will likely melt away into non-relevance unless enough of us truly want change.

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Nick Bradley on the LewRockwell.com blog today posted some thoughts I found very interesting regarding Obama. In comparing Obama and Hillary I immediately gravitate towards Obama as a lesser evil. His post investigates it much further, and arrives at a similar conclusion.

After reading Koffler’s piece, I decided to look at Obama’s official platform. Looking at it, it appears thoroughly statist, calling for a hike in the payroll tax cap, new pro-union legislation, blocking insurance companies from denying coverage, a home foreclosure bailout fund, cap payday loan interest rates, carbon cap-and-trade, triple the size of AmeriCorps, double foreign aid contributions, and increase the size of the military by 92,000. On the other side of the coin, Obama does offer a few market-friendly programs, such as increased child care and education tax credits (which Paul also supports), exempt payroll taxes from the first $6,500 of earned income, exempt seniors making under $50,000 from income taxes, supports clean coal (most democrats despise hydrocarbon energy production in general), supports carbon sequestration (moreGenocide Intervention Network, which uses private money and nonstate social action to stymie genocide. market-friendly than carbon regulation), limits agricultural subsidies to farms earning under $250,000 a year, will reinstate PAYGO, has pledged to get all troops out of Iraq within 16 months, opposes war with Iran, and supports the

So, is Obama a left-libertarian? No; Obama’s platform is more akin to “Soft Paternalism“, a gentler, less threatening approach to controlling people’s lives (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Libertarian Paternalism).

Read more at LewRockwell.com