The 'Anyone But Obama' Trap

I REJECT THE 'ANYONE BUT OBAMA' CONCEPT FOR SEVERAL REASONS AND WILL NEVER VOTE FOR ROMNEY OR ANY 'LESSER EVIL' WHO I BELIEVE COULD BE EVEN WORSE FOR AMERICA IF THEY'RE CUT FROM THE SAME CLOTH AS OBAMA IS.

Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito
~from Vergil's Aeneid, also the motto of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, meaning "do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it."

I've been avidly watching the buildup to the 2012 presidential election for some time, especially as an admirer of Dr. Ron Paul and his message of liberty, sound money and non-interventionist foreign policy. I took an instinctive liking to the man back in the 1990s while my own views were still evolving and coalescing, as I've documented earlier in this column. That liking has only increased in the intervening years owing to Dr. Paul's consistent support for those issues I just mentioned, his refusal to compromise his core beliefs for any reason and an admittedly subjective but firm conviction on my part that he is simply a decent man.

I've been asked how I, as a staunch adherent of anarcho-capitalism as the key to the most free and prosperous path a people can choose to travel in this most imperfect world, can support a process to place a single person at the top of a hierarchic structure that has historically led to so much misery and death, most notably during the post World War II period, a catalogue of depredations that's dwarfed even the past dreadful chapters in our earlier history like chattel slavery and the atrocioustreatment of Native Americans that accompanied the development of our country. A starting point for understanding this is the fact that side by side with all these negatives, America was notable for the most rapid growth in prosperity for the most people of any nation in history before it, at least in its heyday before the decline in that prosperity began in the early twentieth century. That for me is an undeniable affirmation that a genuinely free market works exactly as predicted by the Austrian economists I've admired for years, one of Ron Paul's guiding philosophies. Another tenet of anarcho-capitalism is strict observance of the Zero Aggression Principle, and that too is one of the pillars of Ron Paul's belief structure.

That he's of the Old Right school in the tradition of gentlemen like Senator Robert Taft, Garet Garrett, and my own role model as an essayist, H.L. Mencken is beyond question for me, but these factors tell me that Dr. Paul is really an anarcho-capitalist at heart, whether or not he's internalized that himself. I strongly believe that he would be guided by this philosophy were he to be elected president, and not for any disingenuous reasons on his part, either, rather because that philosophy is more nearly in line with what I think of as the Constitutional framers' intent. To expand on that:   click here to read more...

BY:  Glenn Horowitz was born in 1961 and raised in New York City. He earned his commercial pilot and flight instructor certificates in Gaithersburg, Maryland where he worked as a flight instructor and air taxi pilot from 1986 through 1990. From 1990 until 1993 he worked in the Cincinnati, Ohio area as a civilian contract pilot for various branches of the U.S. military, predominantly the (USTRANSCOM) Defense Courier Service. When that company failed, he was hired as a line pilot flying mainly bank documents and canceled checks from Nashville until 2006 when disability due to multiple sclerosis ended his flying days. Glenn is currently living the disabled life in Nashville.