Saturday, October 22, 2016
Candidates from Hell: Interlude #2
Yes, the rest of the world, including North Korea, *is* the appropriate standard of comparison. That's because there's a complete lack of perspective among many of our fellow citizens. To listen to the most vocal, it's the end of the world for America. "This is the Flight 93 election, we are all going to die anyway so vote Trump." "Trump is a Nazi." It doesn't matter what side one is one, we can all agree, "the end is nigh."
No! That's just not true. It's buncombe. Hillary Clinton is dangerous, but this is not the "flight 93" election. Donald Trump is a mentally unstable scoundrel, but he's not Hitler and Trumpkins aren't brownshirts. Our candidates are bad, our politics may often be bad, but in many ways we live in paradise, and we do indeed have opportunities to fight statism. We shouldn't forget this.
Both of these terrible candidates propose awful policies, things that have been discredited long ago, centuries ago in many cases. Our task is to keep fighting bad ideas, keep spreading good ones, keep resisting evil, and keep doing good.
Economist Mario Rizzo of NYU was once asked why Austrians keep saying the same things. His response,: "because people keep making the same mistakes." Paul Krugman says same about free trade. Almost everyone is wrong on this issue except for us, the economist." Freedom is crucial for the survival and advance of civilization, and we need to keep patiently making this point. This is not Flight 93. After Hillary Clinton, or perhaps Donald Trump, or even (please GATU) Evan McMullin is declared the winner, we will continue or work for freedom. 2016 is a bad patch, but we need to simply run through it and keep running, that is, keep fighting for liberty and
Night photo of Korean Peninsula with borders added.
