In the first post this series, Does Planned Parenthood Use Taxpayer Funds To Pay For Abortions?, we considered how Planned Parenthood effectively uses Federal funds to pay for abortions.

Why do the doctors and nurses at Planned Parenthood do abortions? Do people become doctors and nurses to do abortions? Well, most of them don’t.

1 Timothy 6:9-10 New King James Version (NKJV)

⁹ But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. ¹⁰ For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

Of course, voting and supporting our favorite candidates goes beyond the subject of abortion. Although many voters use a candidate’s position as a litmus test, government has a larger objective than preventing abortions.

Laws That Conform To The Golden Rule

Even as the abortionists at “Planned Parenthood” profitably deliver dead babies from their mothers, that management of “Planned Parenthood” portrays their organization as people who care about women. Therefore, even as some note the hypocrisy, others defend the hypocrisy. Thus, Steven Hoyt put up a series of comments following the THE PRECIOUS HUMAN LIFE AND THE ABORTION FACTOR.  argued that before Christians had the right to condemn the practice of abortion, they had to somehow “prove” their own holiness.

Is argument Biblical? What if we generalize ‘s requirement for judging the sins of others? What if before we call any conduct a sin we must first demonstrate our own holiness? Since the Bible says “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10), none of us would be qualified to call anything that someone else did wrong. Therefore, if we are going to follow ‘s suggestions with respect to declaring abortion wrong, we may as well scrap of all our laws.

Given that the Bible itself contains the Mosaic Code or the Mosaic Law, does it make any sense that God wants us to scrap all laws? Is it not more likely that God wants our laws to conform to the Golden Rule.

But What Do Conservative Voters Think?

In Coalition Politics, Necessary and Proper evaluates the Conservatism of the American electorate using various sorts of polling data. Why?  What is the point of  ‘s careful and well presented analysis (That is, even dummies like me can easily follow his logic?)? is trying to figure out which of the Republican presidential candidates deserves the Conservative vote. Here is his conclusion.

For what it’s worth:  The limb I have walked out onto via all this tortured speculation, along with my observation of the two televised debates, convinces me that Marco Rubio is the most conservative Republican candidate who is persuasive and articulate enough to appeal to a 48% span of the general voter population and win the 2016 Presidential election.  You will draw your own conclusion.  My goal was only to get you to think about the consequences of your primary voting strategy. (from here)

Because the American electorate has become so divided, does not think a solid Conservative would win. Therefore, advocates voting for an electable Conservative.

‘s thoughtful post earned a string of comments. Because they have the give and take of thoughtful discussion, these are worth reading.  All the commenters applauded the care took in preparing his analysis, but tannngl challenged his conclusions, preferring to vote for the most consistent Conservative, Senator Ted Cruz. That led to this fascinating defense.

About Ted Cruz, you said “He is my candidate.” In the primaries, each of us should not picking our personal candidate. We’re picking the candidate for others — for millions of voters (greater than 48%).

As I said, the further right a candidate is, the better he/she must be at articulating and persuading. And I don’t mean persuading you — I mean persuading the 10-15% of voters who are uncommitted swing voters and are ideologically quite a distance from the candidate. (from here)

Whereas advocates voting for the best candidate, advocates voting for the best person to be our president.

Which of them is right?

Back To That Preoccupation With Money

Which is right? or ? Before we try to answer that question, let’s consider a bit of conventional wisdom. Because Conservatives don’t want to pay the high taxes for their social programs, Socialists like to call Conservatives selfish and mean. Are Conservatives selfish and mean? Rarely do we closely examine what goes into this Socialist accusation. Unfortunately, most of the news media is of the modern Liberal or so-called Progressive persuasion. So when reporters see a problem, they soon magnify it into a massively dire problem, one that only a massive Federal Government program can fix. Of course, massive Federal Government programs don’t come cheap, and the fact they are generally quite poorly run does not help. After all, isn’t government waste the stuff of legend ( see here, here, and here)?

That being the case, why would we want any massive Federal Government programs, especially when there are other alternatives? That is, how do politicians persuade us to vote for massive Federal Government programs? Well, they use a variety of bait and switch schemes. Their favorite enticement is to offer to make the “rich” pay. This is in fact an age-old practice of demagogues, and it is one the framers of our Constitution specifically designed our system of government to thwart (see THE ADVANTAGE OF A REPUBLIC OVER A DEMOCRACY). Unfortunately, we have failed to heed the framers’ warnings and make the system they created work. We have found the bait too attractive. Each of us sees that big pile of money the Federal Government has at its disposal, and we want some.

What should we call trying to use the government to get at other people’s wealth? Isn’t it stealing? We don’t seem to think so. Yet consider several examples.

• Most of the Federal budget goes into Social Security and Medicare, supposedly guaranteed retirement programs. Self-righteous politicians abused our sympathy with by setting up programs for old people who might not otherwise have enough for old age, and then they “borrowed” money from the programs and spent it. That’s is, the Social Security Trust Fund is empty. There is no money in it. So how does the scheme continue to “work”? Our leaders tax the young to pay for the retirement of the old. Unfortunately, because of Social Security people now want retire when they should be working. So we cannot even raise the retirement age so this stupid Ponzi scheme will continue to “work.” Therefore, our leaders will either have reduce benefits or just print worthless money.
• David Boaz, in The Divide between Pro-Market and Pro-Business, observes that big business is always going to the government for handouts and special favors of some sort. He cites the bailout of Chrysler Corp. (1979) and that humongous 2008 Wall Street bailout as modern examples, and he points to the Chamber of Commerce as the big backer of such government largess.  Isn’t the Chamber for free enterprise? This clash between pro-market and pro-business is an old one.
  

  Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations” to denounce mercantilism, the crony capitalism of his day. Milton Friedman said at a 1998 conference: “There’s a common misconception that people who are in favor of a free market are also in favor of everything that big business does. Nothing could be further from the truth.” (from here)

  Just as some people are greedy for government handouts — Socialism — some greedy businessmen seek the advantages of government cronies —  Crony Capitalism.

• We pay for schools, welfare programs, highways, sports stadiums, “art,” — we redistribute trillions of dollars of wealth — without blinking an eye. We spend trillions of dollars to finance activities that we use to finance privately. Why? How does government financing make it better? Is it the “fact” that it is somebody else’s money? Easy come. Easy go. And waste by the pork barrel.

Therefore, it seems that both and are right. We should be voting for the best person for the job. Unfortunately, because politicians know how to tempt us with “other people’s money,” unless we settle for a scoundrel of some sort, we cannot get a Republican elected. That’s why we have so much trouble with RINOs.

What Does Bigger Government Mean In Practice?

Rarely do we see a straightforward explanation of what excessive government spending and regulation means in practice. We hear about government debt piling up into the stratosphere, but few can explain what those numbers mean. What is the difference between owing 18-19 trillion dollars and owing over 200 trillion dollars? With complex explanations numbers in both ranges get floated about, but how many of us care? Is somebody going to throw us into jail for not paying this debt?

Therefore, we see the debt and the absurd waste as someone else’s problem, somebody else’s responsibility. Because it is so big it is just numbers, we can ignore that huge debt and the phenomenal waste. Ohhh, we will flippantly say we will never collect Social Security, but what do we do when a politician tries to cut “our” Social Security benefits? Don’t we vote that politician out?

The benefits are here and now. Because we can put them in our pockets, we pay attention to the benefits. The costs, vague and ill-defined, we can put off and ignore.  The costs to our soul, our children and grandchildren we can put off and ignore.

For those who care to look, the costs are already evident. Don’t our schools already stink? Don’t we already vegetate in traffic for hours? Isn’t too much of what we buy made somewhere in China? Are we not suffering a deluge of poor immigrants, foreigners who expect us to speak their language and learn their ways? Is not our president an isolationist, abandoning the world to chaos, unwilling to spend money on anything except bribes: health, education, and welfare programs?

With every cent politicians spend — with every new regulation they create — our leaders steal another bit of our freedom. Increasingly, government controls how we earn our wealth, how we spend our wealth, and who gets our wealth.

• We “invest” in housing. We give our money to bankers, developers, realtors,…. Shouldn’t we be investing a larger portion of our wealth in making our nation more productive and competitive? Can we all work in service industries?
• We “invest” ever larger sums in public schools and colleges and give our money to bankers and educrats. Shouldn’t we be spending our money on private schools that actually give us some bang for our buck?
• We continue to allow our currency to inflate, becoming ever less valuable. At one time it was profitable to track pennies. Now, if we find a penny on the ground, it is not worth the bother to pick it up. What does inflation do to our savings? When everything is made overseas, how will we be able to retire or get a job?

Future generations of Americans — if the government ever allows them learn the truth — will condemn us. In fact, the government may rightly teach them to condemn us. For the sake of spending somebody’s else’s money, future politicians may rightly say we sole ourselves and our children into slavery. Instead living off our own labors and taking responsibility for the education of our own children, we believed scoundrels. We trusted scoundrels who promised us a free education, freeways, inexpensive palatial homes, early retirements, appeased and passive enemies, and so much other rubbish. Future generations may rightly be taught how we let devious politicians con us, that some of those politicians took our money and ran and others put us and our progeny in the chains of debt slavery.

These later politicians will pile upon our children and grandchildren taxes so high and rules so onerous they can never get ahead, but so what? After all, will they not have learned from our example? We cannot be trusted to rule ourselves.

Conclusion

We still have the opportunity to prove the pundits and the politicians wrong. We don’t have to vote for politicians who promise to spend other people’s money on us. We can vote wisely. We don’t have to vote for the best candidate to win the election. We can vote for the best person for the job.