October 30, 2008

Why I will vote for Obama.

Change is good. The Republicans have held sway in Washington since 1980. Clinton was president for 8 years but for six of those years the Republicans controlled Congress. It is time for a different view of government and its place in America. Ronald Reagan said that government is not the solution, it is the problem. This has been the mantra for nearly thirty years, even though the government has grown in size and power. But government power under Republicans has not always been used for the good of the all of the people. Senator Obama now says that the government can be our friend. That it can be used to better our lives, all of our lives. He says that the upper class in this country has a disproportion of the wealth and that trickle down economics has not worked. I think he is right. At the very least I think it is time to try another way of governing. The country is truly not better off now than it was four or even eight years ago, and while all of the problems cannot be blamed on Republicans it is clear that the country now needs to go in another direction with a new philosophy.

October 20, 2008

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.

Ronald Reagan January 20, 1981.

If this is not exactly what is happening now in Washington I must be crazy. The same people who caused the housing bubble and the following financial crisis are now going to bail us out of the mess. Even the Washington Post is now admitting that Congress, with the complicity of the Clinton adminstration, encouraged lenders to make unwise loans in furtherance of what they call the worthy cause of home ownership. The bubble burst and the whole house of cards came tumbling down. My fear is that in our haste to dig out of the rubble of this disaster our leaders will take us down the road to socialism. As Winston Churchill once said: " The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socalism is the equal sharing of miseries."