I'm Voting for Gary Johnson but.......

Jill Stein is my preferred candidate on the issues, but I think Gary Johnson would do a better job clearing a path for third parties. He will be on the ballot in all 50 states, he is polling double digits, he has bi-partisan appeal (which means when it comes to picking up votes from the major parties, he is the best third party candidate to get it done), he is getting unprecedented media coverage, and is picking up big name endorsements (like from the Marijuana Policy Project, for example). That's why I plan on voting for Gary Johnson in November. This election is about third parties. Hopefully, if all goes well, 2020 can be about the issues.

 

Johnson is more Republican than he is Libertarian when it comes to "capitalism" and "employment" based upon his stance on Employment.

First and foremost we don't have a problem with the number of jobs. The official unemployment rate is below 5% which is typically considered "full employment" because there's always a transitional group that is between jobs. We don't need to create more jobs.

What we need are better paying jobs that provide more than the "cost of living" so we don't require more government spending to mitigate the effects of poverty in the United States. The necessity for wealth redistribution, advocated by some, is due to under-compensation for employment where the person/household isn't earning a descent living from employment.

Poverty necessitates welfare assistance, which creates a bigger and more expensive government, and Libertarians want to shrink the size and cost of government by reducing the necessity for spending.

This is one place, that as a libertarian, I support something that FDR said in the 1930's.

I agree with FDR on this statement because the "Right" that's being referred to is the "Natural Right of Property" as expressed by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Chapter 5. By not providing adequate compensation for a descent living of the employee the enterprise is denying the "support and comfort" to the worker that the natural right of property is ultimately based upon.

So FDR is correct. "No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country" because if it does then it's violating the natural right of property to it's workers. The purpose of our government is expressly about protecting our natural/inalienable rights and not to allow others, such as the owners of enterprise, to violate them.

 

I don't disagree with any of that. I was merely correcting a false statement. Gary Johnson is not for open borders.

and really, the fact that Gary Johnson is only libertarian-leaning rather than a true libertarian will only help him in the election. He's not pure, that's why he actually has a shot. Any candidate that expects to be taken seriously should compromise to an extent. Not so much that they become flip-flops or panderers, but enough to get things done and actually pick up a significant share of the votes.

 

In point of fact if we allowed all immigration for peaceful purposes and focused on border enforcement related to those that would enter for nefarious criminal purpose the border enforcement becomes stronger because we're not wasting vast amounts of limited financial resources on those that would do us no harm and that benefit the US economy.

 

the libertarian gary johnson does not have a plan to create better paying jobs, he does not stop too big to fail crony capitalism.

the wealth has to be redistributed where the average people can take on more risk to start businesses and create jobs, without being too leveraged to pay their bills.

high paying jobs shouldn't be dependent only on the rich for innovation.

 

I've actually put forward the argument that because Gary Johnson is a libertarian-leaning Republican he could be the next president even if he comes in a distant third and this is my argument.

All Gary Johnson needs to do is capture enough electoral college votes so that neither Trump or Clinton "win" based upon a majority of Electoral College votes. If that happens then the next president would be determined by the House of Representatives where the GOP has majority control. You might think they would all vote for Trump but many Republicans in the House really don't want Trump to be president and Gary Johnson offers them a "libertarian-leaning Republican" that they could elect as president and they would also receive support from Democrats that know Hillary Clinton won't be president and that are highly opposed to Donald Trump.

Do the math. If all of the 187 Democrats, knowing that Hillary Clinton would never be elected by the House, switch and support Gary Johnson then it only requires 31 Republicans to join them and elect Gary Johnson instead of Trump. I believe there are far more than just 31 Republicans in the House that would rather have Gary Johnson as president than Donald Trump.

Of course winning enough Electoral College votes to turn the decision over to the House is problematic but it's possible because there's an awful lot of "Never-Trump/Never-Hillary" voters in America. They just need to know that they have someone other than Trump or Clinton to vote for.

 

Agreed which is why I point out that he has too much "Republican" ideology and not enough "Libertarian" ideology.

This is also reflected by the fact that he wants to reduce welfare spending but doesn't address the fact that under-compensation for labor is the primary reason for the necessity of government welfare programs. Most welfare dollars spent by the government are to provide for the minimum/mandatory expenditures of working families.

To reduce welfare spending we need to reduce poverty and that can only be done by ensuring that jobs pay enough for people to live on.

No, we need wealth "distribution" and not government intervention to "redistribute" the wealth. Redistribution reflects a failure to property distribute the wealth when it's created. Fix the problem which is inequitable wealth distribution when it's created as opposed to addressing poverty that's only a symptom of the problem with wealth redistribution.

Average people, while they can be very competent when it comes to producing goods or providing a service are typically unqualified to operate a business. That's why four out of five new enterprises fail. Very few people are actually trained and competent in operation of an enterprise which is completely different than being competent in producing goods and/or providing services.

We also see this at very high levels of enterprise. For example Donald Trump has proven he's not really a good businessman because four corporations, where he was the CEO, failed and had to seek bankruptcy protection. He was even removed from management of his Taj Mahal Casino by the bankruptcy court because it was determined that he was incompetent in running the enterprise.

The wealthy don't create high paying jobs and, in fact, they create few jobs at all. Jobs and the expansion of enterprise are based upon consumption and not investment and few external investments even provide capital for enterprise. Example of this can be provided.

Solyndra received about $1 billion in investment capital and loans and failed because it couldn't sell it's products. It didn't fail because it didn't receive enough money from outside sources but instead because not enough people "consumed" the products it produced.

Very few "investment" dollars fund corporations where the money is used for capital investments. Direct investments are called "primary" investments while the vast majority of investments are "secondary" that have nothing to do with the funding of enterprise. Based upon a study I did of one month's SEC transactions and stock offerings by corporations less than 0.00005% of the investment dollars went to corporations where they would be funding enterprise.

Understanding that consumption, not investments, drives our economy reveals something else. The higher the income of the household the lower the percentage of income that's used for consumption. A low income household with only $30,000/yr in income arguably spends all of that $30,000 on consumption. A high income household with $30 million in income probably spends less than 1/2 of that on consumption and "invests" the balance which doesn't increase the GDP. Basically 1000 households with $30,000/yr in income, for a combined income of $30 million, generate $30 million in GDP while one household with $30 million in income only generates $15 million (or less) in GDP. The low income and middle income households create jobs, including high paying jobs, because they spend their money on consumption.


Low to middle income households drive the US economy and not wealthy households because the low to middle income households spend a much higher percentage of income on consumption.

 

too big to fail crony capitalists will never allow their wealth to be freely distributed to the poor, it has to be redistributed through government force.

henry ford was an average person, even bill gates was an average person, America was built on entrepreneurship of average people, not the rich.

4 out of 5 enterprises fail because people are over leveraged when they start businesses, the rich can afford to tolerate more risk because they have more money to lose.

Donald Trump turned a million dollar loan into billions, imagine if wealth was redistributed through government force to people who didn't have the privilege of inheriting it like Mr. Trump did.

redistribute wealth to the poor so they can increase consumption, and become job creators themselves.

that is also the reason why low to middle income households would be the best business owners, they know what they want to consume not the rich who consume differently.

 

While government force is arguably required the redistribution of wealth is not. Simply creating a "living compensation" minimum wage law that ensures that all working households have the wages and benefits necessary for a descent living avoids any necessity for wealth redistribution.

I agree that America was built on entrepreneurship, not necessarily by the rich, but Henry Ford and Bill Gates were far from being the "average" person. They were exceptional businessmen. For example Bill Gates and Paul Allen signed a contract with IBM to provide an operating system that they didn't own but they did know who had it and that they could purchase it. Gates and Allen weren't the first people contacted by IBM but they were the first to instantly sign on the dotted line to provide an operating system. That was great business sense that isn't common with the average person.

If they were business people then they would have created a business plan and they would not have attempted to start the enterprise if it wasn't properly capitalized to begin with. Most people that own businesses don't have a written business plan, they don't update it, and/or they don't follow it and that's why their business fails. If they succeed it's in spite of the fact that they're not good business people as opposed to by design because they are good business people. If you want to see a good documentary on this happening I suggest "All Things Must Pass - The Rise and Fall of Tower Records." The founder had great ideas and the business expanded and made a fortune but two years after it's highest gross income it went bankrupt because the owner wasn't a good businessman and didn't have a business plan that was adapted to address changing times in the record and music industry.

There's no doubt that Trump's fortune was due to inherited wealth. Had Trump done nothing but invest his $150 million inheritance in the S&P 500 he would be worth over $2 billion today and he's not worth much more than that in reality.

The problem is that the "redistribution" wouldn't accomplish much. For example if we divided the $150 million he started with to all Americans that only equaled about $1/person at the time. If we equally divided $2 billion of his current wealth (about 1/2 if I recall) then it's less than $6/person.

$1 or $6 doesn't really help low income households. Even if we multiplied that by 10,000 the money would soon be all gone.

There's a line in a Grand Funk Railroad song that says, "Tax the rich, feed the poor, 'til there are no rich no more" but the problem with that is as soon as there are no more rich then the poor starve.

Wealth redistribution accomplishes next to nothing while income distribution accomplishes a lot.

That is not what it takes to create and operate a successful enterprise. A person has to know how to do market research and then incorporate that knowledge into a viable business plan. For example you can know that people eat ice cream because you eat ice cream. But you also have to know how many eat ice cream at ice cream parlors, what times of year they eat ice cream, and how many ice cream parlors are in the community. If the market dictates that 10 ice cream parlors will provide all of the ice cream that the market needs, and there's 30 ice cream parlors it would probably be a bad business to go into because you can't hope to secure enough of the market share to be profitable. You might make the best ice cream in the world but because the market is over-saturated your odds of success are very low.

Of course the rich can be just as ignorant when it comes to business because no one has an exclusive right to stupid. Many rich are dumber than the average person when it comes to business because they don't have to be smart to generate a lot of income and they sure as hell aren't smart enough to operate a business.

 

What kind of dumb Obama administration regurgitated lie is this? It invalidated everything else he says. I'm voting third party and was voting for Jill Stein and if I wasn't rock solid in that decision, he wouldn't even be an option due to him saying this BS.

 

Moving on I'd like to address Gary Johnson's position in the environment.

So far, so good, because no person or enterprise has a "right to pollute" and by polluting they're violating the "natural right of property" that belongs to all people. We must have government regulation to prevent the "bad actor" from destroying nature and our environment because that violates the natural right of property of all people. Nor should any argument be based upon social engineering by government where it picks winners and losers but that doesn't imply that government shouldn't intervene based upon protections of the rights of the person when it comes to environmental regulation. There can be winners and losers based upon who creates pollution violating the rights of the person and those that don't pollute and don't violate the rights of the person.

Then he goes wrong reflecting his Republican ideology in the following statement.

This is a Republican rant that is based upon the wrong assumptions. First and foremost we know that unregulated enterprise will pollute and that the consumers will not prevent that pollution from occurring. It's never happened and will never happen and, in fact, Adam Smith in arguing for Capitalism in his book "The Wealth of Nations" points out that the "Capitalist" never intentionally does anything for the benefit of the people. Any benefits to society from capitalism are accidental and not based upon the intent of the capitalist that's only interested in personal gain (i.e. the capitalist is motivated by greed).

It is basically an argument the those opposing pollution must provide compelling financial arguments to end the pollution and that's backward when compared to libertarian ideology.

The libertarian ideology, that he expressed in the opening statement, is that no person or entity has a Right to Pollute because pollution violates the Rights of the Person but we know that some pollution is necessary leaving the burden of proof on those that would pollute to provide a compelling argument for the violations of the Rights of the Person.

We don't need to justify eliminating pollution but instead we have to justify the pollution itself.

He also attempts to interject that other countries don't protect the person from the violations of their Rights by allowing pollution. That is true but we're predominately concerned about the Rights of the Person in the United States over which our government has jurisdiction. The fact that other countries allow the violations of the Rights of their People is secondary and can only be addressed diplomatically.

Let me provide an example. We need electrical energy but the pollution related to creating that electrical energy has to be supported by compelling arguments. We have vast amounts of coal and natural gas that we use to produce electrical energy and more than enough of both to provide that energy for many centuries to come if need dictates. Natural gas produces far less pollution than coal while arguably costing about the same (in some cases electricity produced with natural gas costs less). So why do we allow the production of electricity with coal that creates far more pollution than the pollution created by natural gas when the costs are about the same and the amount of electricity that can be produced is the same? We're allowing unnecessary pollution that is a greater violation of the Right of the Person that can't be justified by a compelling argument.

Additionally we allow the exporting of coal that is used to produce electricity that pollutes our atmosphere even when burned in a foreign country. It is illogical to provide the means for other countries to pollute the atmosphere of the American people.

Arguably, based upon limiting the violations of the Rights of the Person caused by the unnecessary burning of coal as opposed to the same energy being produced using natural gas, all coal-fired power plants should be forced to convert to natural gas and the mining of coal should be stopped immediately. There are no compelling arguments for the use of coal in the production of electrical energy in the United States and the United States should not be mining and exporting coal enabling other countries to pollute the atmosphere that violates the Rights of ALL of the People of the planet.

At the same time, from a libertarian perspective, we know that the future development of nuclear fusion technology eliminates any pollution related to electrical power production. If our government is to reduce and/or eliminate the violations of our Rights caused by pollution caused by electrical production then it needs to be proactive both in the financial support and regulations that would bring nuclear fusion online as the form of electrical production. Not only would it eliminate the pollution in the US caused by the burning of fossil fuels that technology can be exported reducing the pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels for electrical production in foreign countries.

Once again all of this revolves around the fundamental argument that "No one has a right to pollute and all pollution violates the rights of the person."

While some pollution is pragmatically necessary the pollution itself must be justified based upon a compelling argument while ending the pollution is already supported by a compelling argument because pollution is always a violation of the Rights of the Person.