It’s enough to make one’s head spin, right round, like a record baby.

When it comes to Obama VS Romney on gay marriage, perhaps everything you need to know, in a single sentence is: Obama For (sort-of), Romney Against (sort-of).  According to this article, while Romney is against gay marriage being considered “a marriage”, he does support the concept of civil unions and even the allowing of gay couples to adopt (as a state’s right).  Obama was against it before he was for it, although due to his political bedfellows, by the time the election rolls around, he may be unequivocally for.

Has anything you’ve read here, or anywhere for that matter, made up your mind as to where Obama VS Romney stand regarding gay rights?

Here’s the bigger question regarding Obama VS Romney, and it isn’t really about gay rights, but individual rights.  Because, what gay rights is about (at least in the eyes of this article’s author) is being equal (not better or favored) under the law.  According to The ACLU, Obama Ranks 3rd in Grades for Civil Liberties – Romney below, but interestingly, Ron Paul ranks 2nd, and Gary Johnson 1st.  The article posted as of this January.  For current stats on Obama VS Romney and your congressman, scope out the ACLU.

What’s interesting about that is candidate Gary Johnson is a full on libertarian receiving the Libertarian party nomination, while Ron Paul is a Republican-Libertarian, or perhaps a Libertarian-Republican depending on one’s perspective, while Obama VS Romney are full on democrat vs full on republican.

To put things flatly, if you support gay rights but don’t support individual rights, you really have no moral high ground when it comes to debate because in the end, you’re perhaps lobbying on behalf of yet another special interest for its right to extort “liberty” out of the system — no matter how ‘good’ the initial intention.  To get a sense of what the Law should be, read Bastiat’s timeless piece, for the ninety minutes it takes to plow through it, you’re political vision will be clear for years to come.

What, I for one, would like to see in the Obama VS Romney debate is how close they come to using gay rights, not as a platform for morality and justice of the individual, but for personal political gain.  And by personal political gain, we can assume that to mean the extent that gay rights are presented as privileges at the expense of straights or perhaps as the ignorance of straights at the expense of gays.

If it feels like you’re reading one of those riddles where you’ve got a character telling you “I always lie and he always tells the truth, which one is a liar?” and the other telling you “I always tell the truth and he always lies…” it’s OK.  I feel that way, too.  So perhaps a reframe is in order:

In considering Obama VS Romney on this particular topic, reconsider them as abstractions of what their arguments represent: Gays at the Expense of Straights VS Straights at the Expense of Gays.  In terms of Obama VS Romney, as people though, the ‘other’ could be taken to represent the argument that one’s constituents fear.

As a final exercise in thought, to help you determine what sounds most accurate not only in terms of Obama VS Romney, but in life, let’s consider the gist of what Gary Johnson and Ron Paul present as the debate: People at the Expense of The Government.

Of all the abstractions, what sounds most accurate to reality?

-Straights at the Expense of Gays
-Gays at the Expense of Straights
-People at the Expense of The Government

The thing about Obama VS Romney is that to a certain extent, they’re actually both FOR a government solution when it comes to individual rights.  When it comes to economic rights, Obama much more than Romney, but ‘much more’ is a relative statement because compared to Gary Johnson or Ron Paul, Obama and Romney have more in common with each other than either of them with Gary Johnson.

The thing to figure out, for you, is not necessarily… Obama VS Romney? but what is true and what is false.

The first way to answer that question is to ask another question- what do we as a society want with regards to drugs? This, after all, is ultimately the question that the Obama vs. Romney campaign machine is trying to avoid. I’m not going to try to explicitly approach it from the libertarian perspective, but to consider it as an average, sensible, open-minded American. I think we want drug use to be safe, both for the user and for those around him or her. We want those who need help to be able to get it. And we don’t want it to be a huge drain on taxpayer money unless there’s a really, really good reason.

Sadly, none of these goals are being met by Obama vs. Romney, or by the decades of two-party politics that they represent. This is clear in that longest of all ‘muhrican military conflicts, the Drug War. The costs of the Drug War were detailed last year in an AP article picked up by Fox News, usually no great friend of silly things like civil liberties or numbers. The AP reports that since its inception in the Nixon era, the Drug War has cost around $1 trillion. That’s trillion with a t. Almost $450 billion of that has been spent on imprisoning 37 million nonviolent drug offenders.

And for what? Well, not much. The article quotes current US Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, who says that 40 years after the first shots were fired in the Drug War, “the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”

So what does Obama vs. Romney have to do with this?

A couple weeks ago, Reason.com published one of many excellent articles on President Obama’s empty rhetoric on slowing down the Drug War. As the article shows, Obama supported ending the war when it was politically expedient (that is, in 2007, when the word “Bush” was toxic), but vowed to continue it when that was politically expedient (in 2010, when Obama’s PAC was afraid that pushing to legalize marijuana would hurt Democrats in Congress, even though it wouldn’t).

And Romney? On the issue of drug policy, a recent article on truth-out.org shows him as anything other than a laissez-faire capitalist with faith in the marketplace. His policy, if he has one (and, not surprisingly, it’s unclear whether he does), is to try to convince marijuana users to put down the joint, to end drug use through advertising. This is perhaps the single greatest sign that the computer code for the Romneybot was written in the 1950’s. Did he miss the “Just Say No” campaign, which, as the AP reports, cost $33 billion and failed to curb teen drug use?

In the issue of drug policy, Obama vs. Romney is a false choice because neither is especially concerned either with convictions or with solving problems. Instead, we must put our faith in freedom, even (especially?) if our fellow citizens choose to exercise that freedom in different ways than we do. We must stop basing our decisions on what we believe is the popular, conservative option (and besides, we’re often wrong about that anyway). We must move away from the Obama vs. Romney, two-party noise machine. That’s the choice the Libertarian Party offers.

He says he will propose a balanced budget for 2013 and cut spending by $1.4 trillion.  He also promises to veto any bill that causes spending to exceed revenue.  As New Mexico Governor he vetoed 750 bills. The vast majority of the vetoes were sustained.

Johnson would also immediately end the war in Afghanistan. He supports marriage equality and opposes drug prohibition. He advocates legalization of marijuana. He is also pro-choice.

He’s run for public office only twice -both times as a Republican for New Mexico Governor – and won both times in a heavily Democratic state.

Here is CSPAN video of Friday’s debate between Gary Johnson and his opponent Lee Wrights.  Check out Gary Johnson’s Campaign here.

1) Income tax. The income tax allows write-off on debt and taxes equity twice. This special-interest policy towards the banking sector creates too much debt in the economy, and with it, crises as the Fed manipulates the interest-rate. There should be a flat income (or consumption) tax (or more politically feasible a two-tier tax), without any write-offs for anything.

2) Lender-of-Last Resort (LLR) policy. Given a central bank, the rules for making liquidity available to avoid crisis need to be reigned-in and clarified to prevent special-interest treatment to large well-connected institutions. Liquidity should be made available for short periods of time, for high (penalty) rates of interest and with good collateral. The Fed’s discount window should be made available equally to all financial institutions, and only under these conditions, with no exceptions and this should be overtly announced as Fed policy.

3)“Too Big To Fail” policy. The whole idea of 2B2F should be abolished, as this opens the door to special-interest treatment to the politically well-connected and creates unnecessary policy risk. With a reformed LLR as noted above, there would be no need for a separate 2B2F.

4) Inflationary-bias in central bank policy. Again, given a central bank, the Fed should have a single mandate, price-stability. However, unlike the current price-stability mandate, prices should be able to drop as well as to increase within a given band (say 3% annual aggregate price movements in either an inflationary or deflationary direction). The current upward price-bias in policy means that savers are penalized to the advantage of borrowers. Savings provide the capital-base from which investment is made, and only with real investment are standards-of-living able to increase. In addition, inflationary-bias in policy hurts the less wealth-off in that they have less discretionary income to spend on increasingly more expensive goods.

5) Housing policy. The policy of the US government for the last 75 years has been to encourage people to buy homes they are not yet ready to afford. This has been done through the Community Reinvestment Act, Federal Housing Administration policy, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 100% mortgage-backed bond guarantees. This misuse of society’s resources discourages entrepreneurial activity and prevents people from moving to find employment. All of these bad policies should be eliminated as soon as possible.

Then of course we have the National Export Initiative where the self-same president wants to double exports by 2014. Let’s examine how silly this is. In the first instance we are penalizing American companies – those that are still listing their stocks here as opposed to elsewhere, for now – for investing abroad (outsourcing in the pejorative). Then we are trying to encourage these same businesses to sell their stuff to overseas markets. So on the one-hand we have a policy to reduce the purchasing-power of overseas markets (“in-sourcing”) and on the other hand we are trying to sell more to these same export markets. It’s a bad joke.

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Do you want us to be the Party of Principle? If so, you have only one choice for our LP presidential nominee: The Wrights Choice!

For 2012, the top two contenders for our nomination are Lee Wrights and former Republican, Gary Johnson. Based on his campaign rhetoric, I’m concerned that if Gary Johnson is our nominee, he will say things as our standard bearer that will cause confusion about the LP brand. That happened in 2008; we don’t need for it to happen two presidential election cycles in a row.

Lee Wrights promises to support slashing taxes. Our two-time presidential candidate, Harry Browne, was fond of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the income tax and replace it with nothing.” Our 1988 presidential candidate, Ron Paul, is saying the same thing in his bid for the GOP nomination. Lee Wrights will proudly champion this libertarian position. Read entire article

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