Ed Gonzalez, who I met in San Francisco at a Mises Circle meeting earlier this year, is running to represent California's 16th district in the US Congress.
Poke around his site a bit and you will see he is a pretty strong limited government, free market guy and he understands Austrian economics.
Good luck, Ed.
(ViaBobMurphy)
Blah...Blah...Blah...when are you ever going to learn? Gonzalez may have great intentions but the incentive in politics are for bigger government, not less. And human nature will defeat any plans he has to stop the looting.
ReplyDeleteThe only answer is to stop voting, it only encourages them.
Who's human nature? His or someone else's? Cynical determinism won't help.
ReplyDeleteBy human nature I mean those characteristics that make us uniquely human. Not those traits that make us Bob or Jack or Jill. Like the characteristic to survive, to live well and even to live as well as we can on as little effort as possible. A kind of biological efficiency that has helped humans become one of the most successful species on the planet.
ReplyDeleteThis drive for the good life can result in stealing and killing other humans if one can get away with it. And politics is the best way ever discovered to get away with it. Its incentives are to increase power, steal from some people and use some of the loot to reward your supporters. Than rationalize your behavior.
So yes I am cynical but history has never shown any politician to ever reduce their own power. However I've never considered myself or other humans as total deterministic beings. I believe we can use our rational ability to develop systems of incentives that will guide our behavior in more productive ways. But the politicians won't do this because human nature and political incentives are too powerful. And if we ignore human nature we will simply continue to get what we have always gotten...bigger government and less freedom.
I'm catching up at EPJ, hence commenting on this older post.
ReplyDeleteGonzalez may be a good guy in general, but I'm baffled by this: "I believe that abortion is wrong [he equates it with murder elsewhere], but I am against government intervention, whatever the level, in abortion."
From where I sit, this is a major misunderstanding of libertarianism. While libertarians are certainly wary of police action, I don't understand that to mean no law and order measures. To call abortion laws "government intervention" makes no more sense than calling laws against murder or theft government intervention.
I realize there are anarchist formulations where this would all be handled through non-state means, but that's not the framework Gonzalez is working from.