Lions and Eagles

A Facebook friend posted this link and asked for opinions. Here is my take:

A good friend from church sent me a forwarded email, one of those "Trump is bad but still have to vote against him to stop Hillary" things. This was the reply I sent back to him:

PROPOSED CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS I'm going to have to do some jumping around here, but I'll make up for summarizing at the end. Items #1 and #3 are each standalone, but each of them has a bunch of story that is not being told on the ballot that has to be shared. #2 and #4 each seem to follow a pattern that I want to explore, to make sure that I can vote with principle and consistency, so that I can decide not just the question of whether this particular proposal is good, but whether this type of proposal is sound.

I'm not going to write about the Presidential race. I'm done with it. Let's go down the ballot. For United States Senate JOHNNY ISAKSON (Incumbent) Republican Talks conservative, but votes liberal.  https://www.conservativereview.com/members/johnny-isakson/liberty-card/ . JIM BARKSDALE Democrat Typical Democrat party line of being “for the little guy”... With more taxes, regulation, Federal control. ALLEN BUCKLEY Libertarian Seems to be a Libertarian of the “not wacko” sort, really for bringing Washington back to its proper place. For Public Service Commissioner TIM ECHOLS (Incumbent) Republican ERIC HOSKINS Libertarian During the primary I voted for Echols’ Republican challenger. Echols’ website bragged on some great causes that in my mind are very worthy for private undertaking but not related at all to the role of Public Service Commissioner. Now, I'd like to give the Libertarians a chance, but Hoskins doesn't even seem to b...

Maybe it's a dream, or a parable, or maybe just the invention of my wild imagination...  Picture a D&D-type setting, if you will. Two great dragons are preparing to battle for dominion over the land. But rather than fight directly, each is recruiting armies of supporters from the land's population. One dragon is Neutral Evil. She claims to be Lawful, but her misdeeds are well known, in spite of the fact that bards dare not speak of them and no one has the courage to hold her accountable. The other dragon challenging her is Chaotic Evil. He has claimed a recent conversion to Good, but this dragon has a reputation for deceit, and everyone knows that a dragon doesn't change their scales easily. Besides, before this contest began, this dragon was best of friends with the other. I am but a low level Paladin. Lawful and Good. I have friends who have tried to convince me to side with one dragon or the other. Some say that the Chaotic dragon will be less of a d...

I've had this idea rolling around in my head on the economic effects of health insurance coverage mandates. It started in my mind over contraceptives, but could be applied to just about anything, from prescriptions to doctor visits. My wife had an economics teacher who told her, "If you don't know about supply and demand, you will fail!" You have to understand supply and demand. Quick Micro Econ 101 review. Look at the graph over here. If you've taken an econ class, you should have seen variations on this again and again. The blue line shows that as price goes up, the number of people willing to jump in and buy goes down, and vice versa. Red line shows that when price goes up, sellers are more excited about selling. Somewhere in the middle, the quantity of product that buyers want to buy meets up with the quantity that sellers want to sell, and there we have what we call market equilibrium. That market equilibrium price is what you will pay without insur...

I've been lurking lately in a NeverTrump discussion group on Reddit. A Trump Train guy dropped in recently to ask, very respectfully, how NeverTrumpers were going to react personally should Trump win the election. I thought that it was a question worth thinking about, and after I finished writing my reply below, I decided to hold on to it. I might need it in the near future, and some of my friends are bound to be in the same place as I am. Here's what I said: Thanks for asking, and more than that, thanks for asking in a spirit of kindness. No matter what our differences of opinion, we need to be kind to each other, that's the only way forward . Speaking only for myself, when Obama was elected to a second term, I was initially very frustrated. Had to tune out of politics for a short bit. Nothing new or unusual about that, when you stand on principle you have to get used to siding with lost causes. After the frustration faded, and my wife and I spent some time in ...