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Name: Brandon
Birthday: 1/5/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: Learning how to love.
Discerning the Good, the True, the Beautiful.
Friendship.
CC.
Expertise: Ultimate frisbee, being a Matron, ancient philosophy, American History, RISK, outdoorsy stuff, bagging groceries, ensuring the extinction of the Humpback Whale, growing a fro
Occupation: Student
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  bzimmmy
Member Since:
2/23/2004
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| Dear Rezendez and Klotz, Thank-you very much for your responses to my long post. I especially appreciated the article that Timothy referenced on Obama's tax policies. I will be thinking and praying a lot this election. I am still struggling to synthesize Roman Catholic social teachings with new (for me) ideas of federalism and old pieces of undigested populism that I picked up in high school. Some quick thoughts: 1. Sex education class, which I remember as mostly consisting in how to avoid the natural consequences of sex, should be replaced by classes on anthropology (in the classical sense), which tries to place sex and its emotional, spiritual, and biological consequences in the context of human life and society. By nature, such a class would have students arguing and debating different views, including controversial ones; but it might also be engaging. If contraception is to be taught in public schools, it is only fair and responsible to bring up its critics and its limitations. 2. If the data in this article is correct: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/09/ST2008060900950.html, then I support Obama's tax plan, though it is disingenuous to call it a tax cut. While I entertain more free market ideas that I used to, I still think the government needs to protect citizens from the power of large interstate and international companies (a la T. Roosevelt) and that the government has an interest in preserving the middle class by at least partially distributing excess wealth (a la Madison in the Federalist papers). 3. Can someone lead me to a defense of socialized medicine? of universal healthcare? 4. The choice of Palin has energized my support of McCain. Say what you like, she has been effective at fighting corruption in Alaska. Peace, Brandon | | |
| Obama's speech: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080829/ap_on_el_pr/cvn_obama_text
Skeptical Wall Street Journal Article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121997396071782159.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
I am conflicted over the 2008 election. I would appreciate your comments, clarity, and information.
I must admit that I do not follow politics as much as I used to. I read
things on the Internet, look up the occasional speech, and glance through
my housemate's National Review. That's about it. I am well aware of
my ignorance.
I would have voted for McCain in 2000 if he had run. Since then, he has seemed to try to align himself closer, if not to Bush, to the center of the Republican Party that still supports Bush (the unassailable 30% approving). I worry that his campaign reform has mostly benefited incumbents. I'm not sure that he has much of a vision for domestic and economic issues. I agree with him, however, that we are not in a true economic crisis, at least not in the way that the media presents it. We still have relatively low unemployment and inflation, amazingly, has not reached crisis proportions (as in the 1970's). I can still buy many Trader Joe's products at the prices I could in undergraduate. It is good that the value of houses has gone done. You can't complain about a housing bubble and then moan when the values drop. Also, it is not a unqualified tragedy when airplane and financial companies go belly up. Yes, I realize that it is bad for the employees and that they are often screwed over by executives that more or less steal what money is left, but it is good in the long run when companies that had stupid business practices fail, as this clears the way for innovators. If the federal government bails out companies and individuals that make poor financial decisions, then what incentive do they have to become wiser? When an individual loses his or her job, the government, especially the federal government, is not the place to turn; rather it is to family, friends, and local civic institutions that we should go to for help. If we cannot turn to them, the people whom we actually know and love and interact with, then America is a broken place, a lost society and no amount of federal government spending will fix this.
I do not believe in Obama's rhetoric. I do think that I should be called a cynic because I do not want a welfare state, because I want the national government to be smaller and less intrusive and state and local governments to have more real control over how people live. I do not think that Obama is actually a centrist, I think he is on the far left. I do not think that most of his ideas are that new. I think that they are a rebaptizing of LBJ's Great Society domestic program. What is new is that no politician has pushed for such a domestic program since LBJ, rather we've had nearly 30 years of debate on continuing and refining its skeletal remains (with Bill Clinton doing much to curtail it). Thus, I am suspicious of Obama, as he often comes dangerously close to defining partisan politics as politics that do not agree with his positions and approaches.
It would seem that Obama and many others (including myself) were wrong to oppose the surge in Iraq. The surge was more or less McCain's plan and we should remember that he upheld it in the face of incredible pressure for the US to simply cut its losses and leave (remember the Congressional report that said the war was impossible to win?) I am not justifying the war that Bush started in Iraq. All I am saying is that McCain seemed to have figured out how to end it well.
I am also attracted to Obama, in that he is an elegant speaker and many of his reform promises are laudable - cutting the Washington Bureaucracy, supporting new energy solutions, cutting tax loopholes, and hopefully ending practices of rendition and brutal interogation - but does he have a record of transforming political environments? Did he actually bring about substantial reform in Chicago and Illinois, or did he simply give people warm fuzzies? (This is an answer I don't know). However, I am against Roe vs. Wade, homosexual marriage, universal healthcare, and the encouragement of contraception in public schools. I am against universal healthcare because I think it is treating the symptoms and not the cause. People should not need insurance just in order to have routine medical care. Medical expenses are absurdly expensive and to pass the tab on to the government is simply to ignore the underlying problem and to enable it to worsen. Why do medical expenses double every few years? Why have we reached the place where medical care needs to be subsidized in order to be affordable? Insurance should consist of individuals pooling their resources in order to support each other in hard times. Mandating it destroys all possibility of this voluntary and even charitable spirit. I think the same is true with higher education. Why does it cost $30,000-$40,000 for a year of schooling? The money certainly does not go to the teachers (at CUA, a philosophy lecturer teaching freshman philosophy earns less per class than what a single student pays for it). Why do dorms and cafeteria food cost so much? A dorm is worse than an efficiency and you have a roommate. Why does it cost far more than any efficiency ever would? But again, if the answer is simply to borrow and throw government money at the school, then there is no incentive for the prices to ever go down.
One of my real concerns this election is the national debt and the deficient. I don't know how Obama is going to pay for his ambitious social program and pursue the war in Afghanistan while also claiming to balance the budget and give 95% of Americans a tax break. It troubles me that the Wall Street Journal calls his tax cuts a fabrication. I also don't know if McCain has a serious economic strategy of any kind. He has flip-flopped on the Bush tax cuts and has admitted that he is weak on economics. I fear that he may also want to build up the military in response to an energized Russia and expanding China. However, eventually the interest on the debt will be crushing if not is not soon reduced and if the US ever defaults on its debts, then that is the end of the American currency.
So, at this point, I think I probably will vote for McCain in that I think he might do the least harm. It would be good to have a strong, experienced leader to stand up to Russia. However, I am not enthusiastic about my choice. I will read McCain's acceptance speech and I will read or watch the debates. Perhaps I can still be persuaded that Obama is the lesser evil. We'll see.
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| The date of destiny comes tomorrow, when the sheep shall be separated from goats and the fire and the rose shall become one ... Or, actually, if you have not yet checked off your blue RSVP card and put it in the mail, it's okay. Just do it tomorrow. CC and I are still waiting to hear back from many of you. If you have lost the card, then just call or e-mail or facebook one of us and tell us that you are coming. Eventually we will call you or otherwise track you down, so you should really just make it easy on all parties concerned and just send us the blue card. We are looking forward an awful, awful lot to having so many of our friends gathered in one place. If you need a place to stay Friday night and do not want to stay in any of the places listed in the invitation, please let me or CC know as soon as you can. We can find beds for people, we just need to know in advance. For Saturday, there are cabins available at the reception site for $37 a head, two bunk-beds in each room. If you would like to stay at the camp on Saturday night, please let us know. You can eat the leftovers for breakfast in the morning. Since we are planning to play frisbee, have a full dinner (barbeque!), and then have contra dancing and waltzing, we expect the reception to run late - 8, 8:30 - so if you don't want to make a long drive in the dark, you are welcome to stay at the cabins. And this has nothing to do with the wedding, but in case I haven't mentioned this before, I am the current managing editor of The Review of Metaphysics. And yes, one of the first projects I am doing is coordinating an overhaul of our website. If any of you are interested in subscribing to a state of the art quarterly in classical metaphysics, I can give you a discounted student rate of $25 for a full year's subscription! Wow! | | |
| I jumped the gun concerning invitations in my last post. They are being mailed out today. So if you haven't gotten yours yet, it's not because we don't love you, but because we are slow. CC is in living in DC now! Yay! | | |
| Dear computer savvy friends, The wedding invitations are starting to go out. When you get, you are welcome to RSVP by going here, instead of mailing back the postcard. You can also do both if you like. Peace, Brandon | | |
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