Democratic Debate Roundup

I apologize for missing this past Sunday’s weekly post, but had some personal commitments that prevented me from getting to it. To make up for that, I’ve put this post together. As always, I aim to be fair and provide critiques of both the Democrats as well as the GOP, so here’s my take on the Democratic debate that occurred last night (10/13/15).

DISCLAIMER: As a libertarian, I find the State to be inherently detrimental to liberty, so I am biased against any positions that embrace State intervention vs. allowing the true free market to function.  I’ll provide as brief of a summary as I can on my impressions of the candidates and their policy stances.

Lincoln Chafee – Let’s just come out and say it – he’s by far the worst candidate on the stage. He has switched parties when it was politically expedient, and when you feel the need to say “I have high ethical standards” in your opening statement, I immediately question your ethical standards. If you have high ethical standards, why the need to make that statement? It’s like someone who prefaces a statement with the phrase “to be honest” – should I then assume all your other statements are dishonest? He did profess an aversion to getting into another “quagmire”, referring to a war – that I support. Other than that, I’m not sure he actually said anything worth commenting on. I wouldn’t be surprised if he dropped out of the race next week, because I can’t imagine him getting elected.

Jim Webb – My first impression of him was….BOOORING. He seems like a robot. I actually imitated a robot walk for my wife when he first started speaking.  However, he actually is the only person on stage that is close to the old traditional democratic positions. I feel like day by day, the democrats become more Marxist. However, Jim Webb seems like an old-school Dem. He showed his strong support for the 2nd Amendment and I *loved* when he called out the hypocrisy of Democrats who, with their armed guards by their side, call for restricting law-abiding citizens’ rights to defend themselves with firearms. He did, however, seem to flip flop on affirmative action. He says that he supports affirmative action for African Americans in this country because of their historical exposure to slavery and Jim Crow laws. A few thoughts on this. First, I’d like to ask, “Do you support affirmative action for those African Americans that are immigrants to this country and are not descendants of slaves nor lived through the Jim Crow era”? I think this is a relevant distinction to make. Second, remember that the existence of Jim Crow laws, and the abuse and discrimination that resulted from them, wasn’t the product of racism exercised through free people alone, but were rather statutes enforced by the State. If everyone in the south was vehemently racist, there would have been no need to pass laws and enforce those laws with the guns of the State. The reason the State had to enforce segregation was because the free market and free peoples would have embraced integration of African Americans into the economy. That said, if there was one person onstage that I think would be the least harmful to liberty, it would be Jim Webb.

Martin O’Malley – He seems pretty stiff to me. I wasn’t overly inspired and didn’t really hear any policies that I thought would be a benefit to the country. He was bad on guns, kept bragging about raising minimum wage, and thanked President Obama for all that he did with the economy. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I wouldn’t say we’re in a booming economy right now. He also wanted to make college a “debt free option”, which is a great thought, but who will pay for it? He didn’t say – shocking! He repeatedly called climate change the biggest threat to the country and harped on it over and over. I’m going to write an entire post on this topic, but I’m not sure the church of climate change is really being self critical. I’m not sure imposing trillions of dollars of penalties on the US while other countries continue to emit carbon dioxide will actually shrink the “rich-poor” gap he was complaining about. Overall, he’s really nothing to get excited about.

Bernie Sanders – As most of you can imagine, Bernie is the hardest person for me to stomach. As a professed Socialist, his positions are diametrically opposed to liberty. I can understand the appeal he may have for many people who feel like they are victims of the current economy or are envious of the success of other people. However, many of these people fail to realize it’s not capitalism (which we no longer have in this country; we have corporatism or crony capitalism) that is to blame for their woes, but rather the distortion of the market brought on by government intervention. Let’s drill down on a few of the positions that Bernie addressed:

• Free College – Mr. Sanders has professed his desire to make “college free for everyone”. This is impossible. Nothing is free. Yes, he may make college free for the students, but someone will have to pay for it, namely the US tax payer. He stated that a college degree is now on par with what a high school degree was in the past. What he doesn’t bring up is why that may in fact be the case. As a result of the federal government’s existing programs to make college more affordable we have actually devalued those degrees. Just like every intervention of the State, it has had the opposite effect of its intention.  Additionally, by guaranteeing or directly extending loans to almost everyone, the demand for college education has increased dramatically. Just as basic supply and demand would tell us, a shift in the demand curve at a greater rate than the supply curve will result in an increased price. Mr. Sander’s proposal will exacerbate this, leading to more expensive college costs, paid for by the tax payer.
• Gun Control – Mr. Sanders gives us a bit of a mixed message when it comes to gun control. On the one hand, he has refused to go along with many of the restrictive proposals being put forward by the Democratic party. On the other hand, he opened the door to making gun manufacturers liable for crimes committed with their firearms. On this last point, he even went so far as to express a scenario that is nearly impossible to realize. Mr. Sanders claims that “manufacturers that knowingly give guns to criminals should be prosecuted”. How would a gun manufacturer ever knowingly sell a gun to a criminal? Gun manufacturers typically sell guns to retailers, who then sell them to individuals. To get to the principle of the issue, what crime has the gun manufacturer committed when selling a product? The act of selling a product does not constitute a criminal act. If an individual commits a crime with a firearm, that individual has committed a crime and is solely responsible for their own actions. We need to stop trying to blame and shift responsibility to others for an individual’s own actions.
• Healthcare – Bernie Sanders wants to make health care universal. He stated that the United States is the only industrialized country that doesn’t provide healthcare to its citizens as a right. I oppose this on two main levels. First, healthcare isn’t a right. Rights are those intangible things that individuals possess inherently. We do not possess a “right” to force another person to provide a service to us. That would violate the other individual’s right of self determination. Essentially, forcing other people to perform a service, as well as other people to pay for those services, is coercion and in itself a violation of rights.  The second issue I take with his position is an economic one – who’s going to pay for this? Again, nothing is free. Someone has to pay. Currently only about half of the US citizens are net tax payers. To force half the country to pay the medical bills of the entire country is absurd.

Overall, I can’t really find any position on which I agree with Bernie Sanders. It should be no surprise, since Socialism is the antithesis of the Libertarian position. Please, PLEASE America, don’t go down the road to serfdom.

Hillary Clinton – drum roll…HILLARY.  I have so much to say about Hillary Clinton, and I won’t pretend that there will be much positive commentary. I will however, start with the positive. She was the most polished and personable person on stage. She is head and shoulders above all the others in debate skills, public speaking, and being a politician (which makes sense as she’s done it all her life).  I did love that Anderson Cooper called her out for changing her position to whatever is most politically expedient, which she does. I also found it amusing that AC called her out for saying her email scandal was just politics, when the FBI is conducting a criminal investigation. Now to her policy positions.

• College Affordability – She indicated that she wants to allow students to refinance their college loans to lower interest rates. Again, similar to Bernie Sanders, she’s painfully unaware that the State’s intervention into the college market has distorted that market, and that we’re now sitting on a huge college debt bubble to the tune of ~1.4 Trillion dollars. Who’s going to pay for all of this? Well, we are, the tax payers.
• Taxes – She has the standard Democratic position. The rich pay too little, the poor pay too much. She wants the rich to pay “their fair share”. It’s interesting that she didn’t define what “fair” was. Personally, I don’t think it’s fair that our tax code is progressive. Why is it fair for someone to be punished for having additional success (i.e., why should your tax burden increase due to increased productivity)? Regardless of your definition of fair, even if you confiscated all the income of the top 1%, you still couldn’t close our budget deficit. The problem is spending, not that the rich don’t pay enough in taxes.
• Foreign Policy – Typically the one thing I appreciate about Democratic candidates is their aversion to war. Hilary is a glaring exception to this rule. To me she seems like a war monger. She advocated for and got the military action in Libya, which turned out to be disastrous. She also wants to “make it clear to Russia that it’s unacceptable to be in Syria”. This is an absurd notion. What gives the US the right to tell Russia they can’t assist their ally? Last I checked, Syria is the one who can dictate who can or cannot be in their country. Russia has longstanding military bases in Syria. Was that unacceptable? I never heard Hilary complain in the past about those. In general, I don’t like her disposition to use military force when the US isn’t getting its way.

I have a lot of other opinions regarding Hilary Clinton, but I won’t get into those here as they weren’t explicitly tied to the debate.  I do know this much: if Hillary Clinton gets elected President of the United States, just as if Donald Trump gets elected, I may start looking for a new country to reside in. Hillary is a career politician who will say whatever she needs to say to get elected. While I adamantly oppose Bernie Sander’s views and policies, at least he has principles he lives by. Hilary has no such principles. My belief is that she’s willing to do anything for a price. I don’t necessarily blame her for that – she’s in a market too! Politicians are in the political market, but the difference between her and others is that she’s acting solely in service of her personal agenda and self interest. I’m not ready to trust the fate of 300 million people to just any individual – but especially not her.

Joe Biden – The will he or won’t he “invisible” candidate. My favorite candidate of the night! He didn’t say anything, so didn’t signal his intent to deprive anyone of their liberty or enact policies that will be destructive to the economy. I’ll admit though, I do appreciate “Uncle Joe’s” usual gaffes. He probably would have made watching the debate much more entertaining. I’ll keep an eye on Joe to see if he’ll jump in the race and shake things up a bit.