It looks obvious

One have to wonder if political campaign is the only event were two man argue who has less and smaller. If this is the case, and it is so different from normal human behavior, what does it say about the entire process credibility, and those who playing it?

There is one theme rising above all others in this election cycle that really worries me. It isn’t the prospect of higher taxes and it isn’t the likelihood of the continuos irrational foreign policy and the complete blindness in the way we confront the radical terrorism and it isn’t the fear of deep recession. The issue that really makes me worried is the new call for national service and the notion that both, McCain and Obama, will welcome such development.

Don’t mistake the calls for national service with campaign populism, it isn’t. It is rooted deeply in both candidates core ideology and it is pushed by very broad and influential organizations. Wrap in a package of highly ideological and promises organizations, like the Time Magazine, lobbying , and preparing the public opinion, for enslaving broad portion of the population.

It is a unique moment for the idea of national service. You have two presidential candidates who believe deeply in service and who have made it part of their core message to voters. You have millions of Americans who are yearning to be more involved in the world and in their communities. You have corporations and businesses that are making civic engagement a key part of their mission.

Last September, our cover story “The Case for National Service” caused an outpouring of interest in and support for citizen service across the country. This year, in addition to publishing another issue on the idea of service, we are convening–along with the Carnegie Corporation of New York and with presenters AARP and Target–a national bipartisan summit in New York City that will bring together hundreds of leading Americans to plan and lay out a bold blueprint on citizen service. The event will start on the evening of Sept. 11–that solemn anniversary seemed an appropriate time to launch this effort–and the meeting itself will occur the next day, Sept. 12. The summit will also be the first major public event for ServiceNation, a national campaign of more than 100 organizations–ranging from AARP to the National Council of La Raza and Habitat for Humanity–that collectively represent some 100 million Americans. My co-chairs at the summit will be Alma Powell, Caroline Kennedy, Carnegie president Vartan Gregorian and AARP CEO Bill Novelli. The summit will be opened by New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who himself is an exemplar of citizen service, and will be closed by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is the first governor to create a cabinet post to oversee service and volunteering.

The great American promise to protect “Life Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness” is being in direct attack since national service is neither life and liberty nor the pursuit of happiness. In a big push to eradicate the American promise those organization calling for to transform the American society to a big labour camp with forced labor prisoners as a condition for citizenship, which is their right by nature.

There is one hope, however, that despite the growing popularity and the willingness of many americans to put their head under the harness of slavery this idea will not pass. The only hope is that the supreme court will not allow legislation that is, by its nature, in direct contradiction to the 13th amendment:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

When I was reading this I could not avoid make the reference to the “Blame the speculators” trend among the Presidential candidates here:

Zimbabwe announced Wednesday that it is knocking 10 zeros off its hyper-inflated currency — a move that turns 10 billion dollars into one.

[...]

“Entrepreneurs across the board, don’t drive us further,” Mugabe warned in a nationally televised address after the currency announcement. “If you drive us even more, we will impose emergency measures. … They can be tough rules.”

I only wonder who should be more worried from the comparison - Mugabe or McCain and Obama…

I guess I’m not the only one that was not impress with Obama’s visit in Israel; after all it was as useful as any campaign visit usually is, none at all.

On the other hand Obama deserve some credit: unlike his rival he didn’t confuse between the different factions in the Islam and their long rivalry….

The campaign as a musical, it never looked more appealing…

This is a very good post, on the issue that become more worrisome this election:

Which brings us to a wider point, which is that I do not like the idea of service to the nation or to the community being equivocated with service to the government or through the government. Putting aside the specifics of which services will count, I don’t want the State adjudicating what helps society in general. I don’t need Fearless Leader directing brigades of Citizen Junior Workers to enact his Grand Vision. The State already spends enough of my money telling me that they know better than I do how I should be spending the rest of my money and my time. I don’t want to put great swaths of extra time at their disposal to start deciding what should be done with it. The less labor, and fruits of labor, central planners have to work with, the better.

Finally, I can’t help but think these plans also feed off the perniciousness of the same anti-profit sentiments discussed by Roberts and Munger on this week’s EconTalk. There’s a common disposition in a large swaths of society that making a profit on something is greedy, conducting commerce is crass and that if you’re making money then someone, somewhere, must be loosing money. This Bobo, zero-sum, anti-Protestant-work-ethic is the second pillar of this drive for national servitude, along with the aforementioned ageism. Put politely, this view is fallacious. Put more directly, I have seen more cogent points of view encapsulated in the Tupperware containers that have been pushed to the back of my fridge and left to fester for weeks.

When I think about the issue of compulsory volunteering, as the writer of post nicely called it, boil down to the question of who we are putting in the center: the collective or the individual. The questions of efficiency, although conveniently serving my point, are less important to me. In other words, even if the observations will suggest that subjecting the individual to the needs of the collective generate better economical results for the collective, I would still be against it. However both, the efficiency and the moral question, tend to generate the same answer - enslaving people is wrong morally and is bad practice.

(Via Cafe Hayek) 

I was worried about the increasing collectivist tone coming from the Obama campaign. The resemblances other are finding to FDR making Obama even less attractive candidate.

The general feeling of looming disaster makes Obama more likely to become a President, mostly after the shameful results of the “conservative”. With a cooperative legislature body he might be able to achieve big portion of his agenda which will make our recovery from possible depression even worse than the last round. unfortunately I can not argue that McCain is less dangerous.

How do one reconcile between the concept of “The Pursuit of Happiness” as a fundamental human right and this:

“That’s what history calls us to do, because loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it.”

“There is a lesson to be learned from generations who have served: from soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines, suffragists and freedom riders, teachers and doctors, cops and firefighters,” he said. “It’s the lesson that in America, each of us is free to seek our own dreams, but we must also serve a common purpose, a higher purpose.”

Apparently by saying one thing and its exact opposite in the same sentence….

The real sad thing with Both Obama and McCain subjecting us to serve at the pleasure of the collective is that it doesn’t make any real noise. The idea that individuals will be coerced to serve, and not volunteer to serve if the want, should have drive us to revolt in protests - but it doesn’t.

For a while now I was considering Obama as the lesser evil of the two main candidates. I don’t like McCain’s idea of subjecting ourself interest to some national greatness and I was worrying about the implication of such philosophy. But apparently Obama shares the idea that we are the servants of the state:

Tomorrow, Obama heads to Colorado Springs to “lay out his comprehensive national service agenda, which will create new opportunities for Americans to serve and direct that service to our most pressing national challenges.”

I never understood the appeal of Kennedy’s famous statement: “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country” and I’m very worried about the unanimous agreement between the major candidates of the individual as a servant of the state. Our choices never looked so gloomy before…

One approach to look at the soaring price of Oil is to blame it on speculators. Following the footsteps of Lenin both McCain and Obama using very harsh language toward the “speculators”. The reality, as usual, is slightly different:

To a large extent, this theory, if it is anything more than just populist capitalism-bashing, is a result of extreme ignorance. There are an incredible number of people involved in the oil markets every day in numerous countries with numerous different incentives, such a large number that it is impossible to imagine a conspiracy. There have been a couple of cases of proven petroleum commodity price manipulation in these trading markets - most of these have involved manipulation of prices at the end of the day on certain futures expiration and/or Platt’s pricing windows. The time frame for these manipulations have been on the order of 1-2 minutes.

But here is the best argument against this manipulation for higher prices, and it is amazing to me that no one ever thinks of it. Sure, there are a bunch of really savvy people in the commodity trading business who are long on oil and want the price to be higher. But for every seller, there is a buyer on the other side, someone who is at least as savvy and is desireous of lower prices. Yes, I know it is a complicated concept, but for every trader selling there is one buying. If there is an extended conspiracy to push up oil prices by speculators, do you really think the buyers are just going to sit on their hands and take it? And do you really think the exchanges are going to be happy with this behavior, threatening the integrity of their trading system (really their only asset)? Just ask the Hunt family, which attempted to corner the market and drive prices up in silver, only to have major buyers and the exchanges stop them cold, driving the Hunts in the process into bankrupcy.

Obviously this populistic rhetoric is being used largely because of the election, however it is being fed on existing notions and is feeding unfavor public opinion. It is convenient to blame the bankers (it used to be even more convinient when the “bankers” was code name for jews) - it distract the attention from the real issues, it provides common enemy and a great excuse to add more power for those who will “protect” us. Will it solve the problem? of course not, but who cares we can always blame the evil corporations.