Another explanation of why republican voters vote against their own interest.

Utah County republican residents seem to revel in the fact that this is the 'reddest' place in the country. The psychology behind this is complicated, but knowable. What is incomprehensible is the logic used to justify One Party rule as the 'best' for them. Allow me to explain. . .

In a republican government, competing interests elect representatives that will give effect to the aspirations of the largest number of constituents, and these representatives are replaced or preserved by their efficacy in actually creating the policies and laws wanted by their constituents. If they are unwilling or able to represent their constituents, then the institution of elections provides a means to replace them with another who can convince a majority that they will do a better job.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as we have all heard. Elective representation is a means to separate the power of government from the person of the governor, and hopefully enforce virtue in the government by (hopefully) prompt elimination of bad actors and creating a vital link between the governed and the government.

This only works, though, when interests can compete in the marketplace of ideas. When the marketplace of ideas fails, then you have the political equivalent of a market failure due to monopoly. The technical problem of monopoly is that the information feedback mechanism that is the basic virtue of a functioning market is silenced. With no alternative source, information about demand is excluded, and the monopolist is free to charge prices dictated by whatever he can get his hands on, rather than needing to charge a competitive price or lose the sale.

Many residents who call themselves conservative republicans believe and vote Republican because there is a feeling of solidarity and safety in being part of the Party in Power. We all crave power, because that can lead to greater security in this hostile world. This would be rational if the political system was a robust market of ideas and competing interests had to provide better alternatives in order to be entrusted with the power of government, and those interests or Parties actually had to strive for and provide better government in order to preserve their positions. Competition would lead to improvement, and improvement would lead to better government, that is better for all of us.

So, back to Utah County.

The Republican Party has had only one challenge to their County Attorney Pick in the past 12 years that I can discover. And that one challenge was during the dark days of the George W. Bush administration, when the country collectively ran ourselves off a cliff, and Utah County was actively supporting the administration more solidly than almost anywhere else in the nation. Put bluntly, Utah County is a One Party Government.

“How bad can that be, if I'm in The Party?!” I'm in power, and there is none to molest or make afraid. THIS IS THE BIG LIE. The error is in the word “I'm”.

When there are two sides to a question of government, each voter is important. If your side is winning, you must appeal to each individual voter in order to maintain that voter in your camp. The government must listen to the individual. Even if you're on the losing side of the question, your voice is important, both to the government, who doesn't want to miss the development of an improvement that would replace them in power, and to the opposition, who needs your vote to replace the current regime, and so must listen to your concerns to win your support.

When there is only one party on a ballot, as seems to be the goal not only here in Utah County, but for the GOP nationally, then everybody who is not Republican is unimportant. This is easy to understand. What is obviously misunderstood in Utah County, and among Republican voters in Utah, is that in this situation, everybody who is not part of the Republican ruling clique also is unimportant.

Ask yourself this question: If there is no challenger to the Republican nominee, what reason is there for that nominee to ask me how I feel about or where I stand on any given issue? If he doesn't really need my vote to win, since he's unopposed, then why should he care about me as a republican voter?

But it's actually worse than that. Newtonian physics dictates that ever minute spent listening to or trying to serve a voter who isn't needed by the candidate is, actually, a drain of energy and time on the candidate who actually does have a job to do – namely, please his real constituency.

What is his real constituency? It is the Republican Party 'leadership', such as it is. It's the mayors and councilmen and legislators who use their positions to enrich their donating cronies, and usually themselves with tax money stolen from the predominantly republican registered voters!

So, to sum it up: People like to be in the 'in crowd'. Once 'in', they seek to eliminate competition. But in blindly supporting the in-crowd eliminating all competition, they make themselves just as exposed, weak, powerless, and vulnerable as the out-crowd. It is only when good people vote for the person and issue, rather than Party, that the democratic process works. In Utah county, the One Party Rule has made democrats and independents powerless, but what most republican voters don't understand is that it has also made them equally powerless and irrelevant.

I Wish I Had The Chance To Write This First. . .

But Can You WIN?

Written by: Andrew Nappi

Posted By Andrew Nappi, FL TAC State Coordinator
Written by Ken Matesz, Candidate for Governor, State of Ohio

Recently, I had a brief email exchange with a tea-party member. He likes everything I have to say, but says he probably won’t vote for me. According to him, tea-partiers must unite around the candidate who a) most closely matches the tea-party ideals and b) can win. He wrote to me and asked very plainly, “Can you win?” Here is what I wrote back:

DearSir:

Until voters realize that this is not a horse race, liberty-minded constitutionalists will never win and never get any significant votes. Not this cycle and not the next one either, nor even the next. I find it incredible that thousands of tea-partiers will go out and circulate a petition to nullify Obamacare with a constitutional amendment, then steadfastly promote the idea that they must vote for the candidate who can win, though that candidate has clearly shown himself to be only slightly less statist than his opponent. That amendment is 100% unnecessary when you have candidates who support the Ohio Constitution, which already nullifies much of what Congress does.

People keep asking me, “Can you win?” as if this is a foot race. When I was in high school, I ran track and was one of the fastest in our district. If someone then asked me, “Can you win?” I could confidently answer, “Absolutely.” It was all up to me and I was a great runner.

This one is not all up to me. In fact it is only marginally about me at all. It’s about you. You say you want liberty. You say you want elected officials who are constitutionalists. You say you want representatives who will nullify unconstitutional acts of Congress. You say you want regular citizens to be elected. You say you don’t want career politicians. You say you want reps who aren’t funded by special interests.

But when the jig is up, to you, it’s all about who can win. So, fair go. Vote for Kasich! He can win! Before the primaries in April, he had over $7 million in his campaign coffers. I haven’t checked what he has now. (You might do that; it’s very educational.) He’s been bought by all the usual suspects. His donations largely come in blocks of $11,000 at a time. Are you one of the people donating that money? How about all the unemployed people, are they the ones donating those huge amounts of money? This scam has been going on for 100 years, and you’re still buying into it after all your recent activism.

While Kasich and Strickland circle the state in their expensive tour buses and do full-time campaigning, I’m here in Northwest Ohio running a small family-run business. I’ve done more to create jobs in the last month than either of these two clowns have done in twenty years of politics, because I participate in capitalism and attempt to operate in this not-really-free free market that the likes of Kasich and Strickland have slowly destroyed over decades.

I’ve found that people such as yourself are completely immersed in the veil of party politics. Though you attend tea parties and write to your Congressman, when it comes to candidates, you cannot step out of the two-party, special interest-supported system in existence. People ask me, “Why aren’t you getting your name out more? Why aren’t you doing radio ads? How come I never heard of you till today? Why don’t you show up in any polls?” And my favorite: “Your PR person is doing a terrible job of getting your name out.”

Sir, going constitutional and back on the route of our founders means stopping. It means quitting the game, and entering reality where the only wasted vote is the one you give to someone you don’t really believe in. It means actually doing what Madison expected when he wrote his share of the Federalist Papers: Just elect your neighbors who are upright individuals – they might be farmers or merchants. Once upon a time – like with George Washington – people were elected because of who they are, not by how well they do in the horse and pony show or the three-ring circus we call campaigning. Once upon a time, it was not about who can win. It was about people and their rights.

Do you know what? Getting elected doesn’t take ANY money. It doesn’t take millions of dollars wasted on unproductive (from the market standpoint) radio or television ads or campaign literature that all goes to the dump after November 2. Getting elected only takes votes. All it takes is for normal people to say, “I’m done with party politics, I’m voting for ____________________ because it’s clear he’s a good man who isn’t on a power trip and making his living off the public dole.

Other people say to me, “Run for mayor first. Get some experience. Then maybe I’ll vote for you.” Experience? The job of governor or mayor or house member or senator is a job of making decisions. Every person on God’s green earth makes thousands of decisions every day. We all have experience. The only pertinent question when it comes to candidates is HOW will they make their decisions. For me, it’s easy because it has nothing to do with popular opinion. Here it is. Are you ready? If it coincides with the original intent of liberty and freedom as outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution and first ten amendments (Bill of Rights) then I ratify it. If it violates any of these, I vote against or veto it. It’s that simple. I dare you to figure out Kasich’s criteria.

So, again, go ahead and vote for Kasich! He’s got a good chance! And in 2014, vote for the next statist Republican (they’re all morphing into statists, the more we support them.) By 2014, even more people will be dependent on government for unemployment benefits, welfare, social security, medicare, Medicaid, health insurance, home loans, auto loans, etc. etc. Who wants to vote for the constitutionalist then? No one, because more millions will be getting their monthly check from the government. Why would they cast a vote that puts that in jeopardy? This is why Kasich, for example, supports the smoking ban: it’s a populist position; wholly unconstitutional, but popular. Who cares about private property rights when it means votes? Same with gun control. And as for the economy? I bet he actually believes we’re in a recovery and he actually thinks that jobs can be created by government acts.

I wish you well, sir. As I stated in my one essay, on my website at _______________________, you get what you elect. I’m polite enough, that when the time comes, I won’t even say, “I told you so.”

Sincerely,

Ken

Andrew Nappi is the State Coordinator for the Florida Tenth Amendment Center. He lives in the Tampa Bay Area with wife Tammy and dogs Emma and Bud Lite.

Like I said. . .

This blog is the place that I say what needs to be said.  I will have a campaign website up presently, where I can sound-bite and sloganeer to your heart's content; but this blog is where the grown-ups talk.

'Immigration' is the topic du jour.  Here is my position:  The Welfare State as we know it must end.

"Huh?" you say. . . I thought the topic was immigration!

It is.

I spent a summer in the early 90's working in El Paso with the U.S. Border Patrol while I was in the Air Force.  We had a provisional Police Squadron set up to support USBP working the downtown area of El Paso/Juarez.  One of our jobs was to tally how many people crossed the border each hour of our shift.  From 0700h to 1000h, and again from about 1600h to 1800h an average of 2000 people per hour crossed at each of our positions.  That is approximately 10,000 people each day going back and forth.

Being Air Force Security, and therefore most apt at drawing a line (perimeter) and threatening to kill anybody who crossed it, we suggested to the Border Patrol guys that we could have this problem solved in about 48 hours, given the right equipment and enough ammunition. . .

Their response was instructive, and needs to be more widely known:  First, Mexico had let it be known that they would consider that an act of war, whether it was the military, or the Border Patrol doing it.  If you're the type that says, "Fine! Bring it on!(tm)", just consider what type of misery and disruption a cold war on our southern border would cause the country as a whole, and our home here in particular.

While you're thinking about that, the second thing they told us was that no less than the Hon. Senator from Arizona, and several of his colleagues had told Border Patrol and DOJ officials that if they completely shut off all illegal border crossings, then the economies of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Illinois, and a couple of other midwestern states would completely collapse within 30 days.  Not partially.  Completely.

The anti-immigrant sentiment in this country is shameful.  How many of you have a last name of Christiansen, or Jensen, or Smoot, or Mc[anything], or or any other Irish, English, Italian, Scandinavian, or Germanic spelling or derivation?  And how many of you have done your genealogy and have stories about great-great-great-great Grandma coming to America because of famine, or war, or crushing poverty, or fleeing persecution because they held religious beliefs that weren't government approved?

How many of you know what the inscription in the Statue of Liberty says?

It is not immigrants.  It is us.

And it is not just us lamenting our economic situation.  It is us, the citizens of Utah, and Utah County, that are acting just like the (economically crushed) Germans in the aftermath of WWI.  They were being impoverished because their own government had led them into an economically and militarily disastrous war.  Rather than confront the truth, and find the integrity to change their government, they blindly followed the conservative, trusted, (geriatric) Von Hindenburg, and began blaming the 'other'.  In voting 'conservative', they consented to the ushering in of a madman who destroyed their nation.  (Point to remember: Germany was no third world country filled with uneducated rubes.  They led the globe at the time in their cultural, technological and financial expertise at the time.  Sound familiar yet?)

So, back to my answer.

The reason we have economically dislocating illegal immigration is because our national policies encourage. . . no, demand it!  Who wouldn't move from a home blighted by crushing poverty and unemployment to go to a country that provides free social security, medicaid, education, and citizenship to you and your children?  Let me be clear about this:  Every one of you who is supporting the RepbuliCrat's orgy of blame-diversion and hatred would do it in a heartbeat.

Hayek was pretty clear about the economics of this.  Mises is very clear about the economics of this.  When the government stops being about who can get the most of other peoples money (DeToqueville, Democracy In America, Vol 2, Ch. 20, see the second paragraph), then the citizens begin to address human suffering and well-being on the basis of equality and fairness.  They share with their neighbors and refuse to tolerate the suffering of those blighted by Fate.  They make free decisions about who to assist and who to refuse knowing that they may face the same blight tomorrow.

Instead, todays yammering political culture is a predatory, zero-sum game where, if you get yours, it used to belong to someone else.  That is how you start to hate immigrants.  It's just one more person you have to steal from to survive.


So, how does the County Attorney fit into this?

Not all of us are worse off today than we were 5 years ago.  There are some among us who have made a tidy profit for no other reason than they had the keys to the government, or knew someone who did.  They are vacationing in Vail, or Maui, or Switzerland with your money.  This is where the County Attorney fits into this.

These people should know that instead of knowing that their Political Party Favor will 'find' that insider deals that bankrupt entire communities were just business as usual, corrupt political insiders better expect a visit from my investigators, and subpoenas, and warrants, and charges.  Instead of targeting the easy-to-push-around, low-level folks who were just jumping on the 'innovation' bandwagon (shameful enough as it may be), I'll direct my attention to the top-level 'executives' who pocketed millions of your futures, and hopes.

Sure, they'll have lawyers, and political friends, but I'm not afraid of doing the hard work to preserve the long term integrity and safety of this county.  I chased international terrorists across the globe, and caught them.  Do you think I can't do the same here in our community?

Instead of picking on the weak, who's main crime is to not compliment the aesthetics of the rentier's planned communities, I will prosecute the true threats to our community: the corrupt, the corrupters, the predators, the demagogues, and the bandits that hide behind masks of respectability and trustworthiness.  I will be unimpressed by police agencies that ignore the hard work of investigating and finding the real criminals in favor of picking on the defenseless and vulnerable for a couple of bucks in municipal revenue.

There will, inevitably, arise the pestilential braying of "Tough On Crime!!!!!"  If all you want is tough-guys showing off their biceps, then you'll get a culture where corruption and violence are the highest values, and your Liberty and Property are just points to be scored.  The most dangerous criminals don't go out in a blaze of gun-fire and emergency lights.  They are led, broken from the long hunt, slowly to a nondescript cell to wait for the light of day to shine on the shockingly boring details of their life-destroying, community-poisoning crimes.  Those are the ones I will find.  Those are the trials I will not lose.  I will not disrespect you by filling up the courts with cases filed only to cadge a couple of hundred dollars out of whomever lost the crime/tax lottery today.


Don't fall for the easy sugar-high of hate and intolerance while the Republicans and Democrats are picking your pocket and laughing at you.  Stand up for yourself.  Vote for an Attorney who owes nothing to the political machines.  Vote for an Attorney who knows more about the world than political party favor jobs.  Vote for an Attorney who cares about, and respects your vote.

. . . but you have a Special Victims Unit.

The New York Times has this article that is, astonishingly, not 'news'; at least to anybody who lives here.

“The industry’s not legitimate,” said Norman Googel, assistant attorney general in West Virginia, which has prosecuted debt settlement companies. “They’re targeting a group of people who are already drowning in debt. We’re talking about middle-class and lower middle-class people who had incomes, but they were using credit cards to survive.”

(update 201019JUN:  I just read this article claiming that Utahns have been scammed out of $1.4 BILLION.  Good thing there is somebody protecting us. . .)

When I was growing up, my grandparents lived in Provo.  (In fact, my father grew up where the chapel on the east side of the new stadium is located.)  I remember all of Utah County as populated by good, hard-working people; home to a major, respected University; and a particularly well-educated and honest place.  I don't see that any more.

In my past career, I used to brief senior government officials about the CIA, and gave some comparisons of its size, using the FBI as a comparison.  While I was researching those facts, I found out that Utah had the largest fraud squad in the entire Bureau, and much of its operations were centered in Utah County.  This breaks my heart; but I think I understand why that is.

I've said before that when law enforcement is in the hands of people who did not have to run for the office, or who depend on the Republican or Democratic parties for their continued political survival rather than on the strength of their leadership and virtue of their ideas -- at that point, the Law becomes unimportant.  Political expediency is the only Important Thing.  Justice, judgment, wisdom, and fairness just don't matter.

What ends up mattering, instead, is the embrace and accommodation of of so-called entrepreneurs like the ones in the article, and the ones promising un-limited wealth creation through real-estate 'investment' or an 'amazing marketing opportunity', or the ones selling you 'preparedness' at a 350% markup.  What ends up mattering is the building of a new conference center to benefit a couple of well-connected contractors, rather than reducing taxes for everyone.

Stand up for yourself.  Stand up for your neighbors.  Don't give your votes to parties run by cliques of insiders who have no reason to care about you.  Don't waste your vote: Vote!  Vote Libertarian!

Today was a very good day.

That is all.

Stop Digging!

From here.

The polls are opening up for early voting in the primaries.  The Republicans and Democrats are joining together in their ritual of jumping up and down to shout who-can-be-"Toughest On Crime"-to-"Save the Children" most loudly.

It is the death rattle of civilization.  (Read the Ancient Rome piece in the Reading Room; Empires always try to crucify their way out of decline.)  Collective action in response to violence or fraud is an appropriate, adult, and inescapable consequence of the world in which we live.  Without it, we would be prey.  It is the responsibility of adults in a free Nation.  State violence, on the other hand, to merely sustain the privileges of rentiers is a sign that a society has passed its apex, and faces a choice to renew or wither.

The galleries in every courtroom in which I practice are filled with brown-skin, tattoos, and worn work-clothes, that is when they aren't already stripped of their dignity and wearing prison garb.  The benches are filled with white, stylishly dressed (for the most part) Baby Boomers, charging these people for the 'privilege' of living in 'their' communities, abetted by uniformed soldiers and Political Party-Favors.

We have to get back to knowing what a real crime is.  Then we have to become, (in Utah County, apparently,) much, much more competent at prosecuting it.  

Look into it for yourself.

How.

It's June.  The Republicans are in the throes of their Wars of Succession.  The Democrats are arguing about who is Less Republican than whom.  Primaries will decide who will be elected to most offices, especially in Utah County.

I had someone ask me, "What are the Libertarians doing to fix the problem?"  Andy McCullough was with me and we looked at each other and said, "Nothing!"   We don't need a statist intervention to 'fix' the problem.  Utah's election laws are far from the worst in the country, and while we'd like to see them mostly eliminated, the last thing in the world we want is more laws/regulations/orders.

When I tell almost anyone (and this is really surprising) that I'm running for County Attorney, every single person, whether they are Libertarian, Republican, or Independent (I haven't spoken to any Democrats for some reason. . .) tells me, "I hope you're going to try to win this.  I'm sick of the people who are running this county."  I'd like to oblige them.

The question remains, though:  What are we doing?

Political campaigns run on awareness.  Who knows who you are; who knows where you stand; who knows that there is a real alternative to the ruling party.  Awareness requires either money or activity.

If anybody in Utah County would like to see someone other than the Incumbent as their chief law enforcement officer, then we need to work together.  Nobody else volunteered to run for the office, and that's OK; but that doesn't mean you have no part in the process.

-- People who care should want to host what are called Cottage Meetings, where we get together in your home, or at your business and you grill me about what I want to do, and why you should vote for a Libertarian.

-- People who care about our community should want to volunteer their yards and storefronts for posters or signs.

-- People who care have to consider using their money to support an alternative to back room deals and absolute irrelevance to their political masters.

I realized after about the third exchange with people that this isn't a one-man fight.  This is a time for people who have been ignored, and laughed at, for decades to stand up and say, "Enough!  Enough corruption.  Enough abuse.  Enough of turning what used to be a place renowned for education and hard work into the laughing stock of the nation, and a flock of sheep to be fleeced."  This is time for you to stand up.

You have every right to tell me what you want; to tell me what you expect; to ask me what I intend to do.  But the answer will be, "Nothing," without your support.


(I note that as of the last time I checked this post about the impossibility of doing this alone, there are zero comments, and as far as I can tell, nobody has read this. . . Without a sense of irony and humor, politics would be a truly desolate thing.)

Why?

This is why I felt that I should run for County Attorney.

And this.

And this.

Corruption.

I'm going to say this here, and then I'm going to avoid speaking about it any more:  I don't think that the current County Attorney is personally corrupt or bad.  He is merely the symptom of a decrepit political situation.

When I worked in the Intelligence Community, the professional motto was: To Speak Truth To Power.   In other words, to tell the politician who wanted to rule the world how the world would react to that (which was usually 'badly'.)

The role of Attorney is to zealously represent the interests of your client.  A huge part of that is to work as a buffer of sorts.  Some clients don't understand the law.  Some clients don't want to understand the law.  If they walk into a court of law in that frame of mind, they will suffer at the hands of the law.  Attorneys intermediate between the law and those clients:  Explaining the law to the client, making the client understand the stakes and the process, and giving them realistic explanations of what they can expect when the law is applied to their cases.  In many cases that involves telling the client that the law will not be on their side in the situation, and that they should change their expectations and behavior.  This is the essence of the legal profession.

When an attorney isn't evaluated by his competence and judgment, but rather by his loyalty and acceptability to his client, his legal objectivity fails.  His motives are different.  His analysis is biased.  His advice is prejudiced.  And most of the time, he will not even realize it.

So, here in Utah County.  After being given the office by the Republican Party, and expecting to get it again, the County Attorney pays attention to the whims and demands of the people who put him where he is.   When forced to make a decision to apply the law to a member of that cabal, he decides that nothing wrong happened.  To those who matter to him, nothing bad did happen.  They are not the ones who will be burdened by the debt incurred by the Republican Mayor of Highland.  No, the citizens are now stuck with it, while the crony-capitalists who control Utah County politics laugh all the way to the bank.

First!

Everyone I talk to, prevailing political theory, and my gut tell me that sophisticated, complex analysis and exposition of issues is not the way to appeal to the broader electorate.  So, since I've never been the one to accept advice at face value, of course I will fail to follow the orthodoxy.

In a nod to systems engineering, however, I will do it here, in a forum that one has to seek out.  I'll reserve the pithy, concise slogans for my campaign speeches and communications.

I am a candidate for County Attorney in Utah County, Utah.  One of the things I want to do on this blog is explain why I would want to be County Attorney in Utah County, using big words and wonky analogies.

Drop by often.