Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.

                                         -Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

I have to admit that the title of this post isn’t original, I read it in a brilliant column by Mark Steyn called “Point of No Return.”  It is one of the better columns I have read that outlines why we as a country should seriously reconsider electing Barack Obama as president on Tuesday.  Of course this isn’t the only article written for this purpose.  Yours truly wrote the following blog back in June:  Obama’s Biggest Weapon.  Since I wrote this article back in May, we still have a surprising lack of information on how this guy is going to govern if he gets elected.  The media has given him a pass, his voting record only paints a picture of one who won’t take a stand on anything, and he had the fortune of getting to run against someone who is intellectually inferior.  Although I still think Obama has remained nebulous, I am able to come up with a list of 6 reasons why you should not vote for him.  All of them illustrate what I and Steyn mean when we say a vote for Obama would be the equivalent of signing a Declaration of Dependence.

1.  He believes in confiscating the wealth of some citizens and giving this wealth to others.  John McCain has let him and the media get away with describing this criminal behavior with the euphemistic term “Wealth redistribution.”  Redistribution of wealth happens every day in a free market economy, and although free markets aren’t perfect, at least they tend to be more indifferent than politicians and bureaucrats.  I agree that governments have the right and obligation to levy taxes on the governed in order to finance the functioning of the government.  Using taxes as a means of confiscating wealth from one group and giving this wealth to another group should be a criminal activity, and I would love to hear how this is constitutional.  Where this belief is fundamentally criminal in my opinion, I am even more concerned about the potential for Obama’s “wealth distribution” policies to create increased dependence on the government.

2.  Socialized Medicine – We just had a baby, and while we were in the hospital we watched some local politicians debate how and why our healthcare system is broken.  As I sat in our clean, state-of-the art hospital room with my healthy new daughter, I looked around and said to my wife, “It looks like this health care system is working to me.”  We have an individual health insurance plan that we have been paying for.  We budgeted our money to pay for the deductibles.  We paid our hospital bill, and we couldn’t be more satisfied with the service we received.  I don’t see how the government could have made it any better.  Once again, I don’t see how making millions of Americans dependent on the government is a worthy goal for a nation whose birth was announced by a Declaration of Independence.

3.  He is more likely to raise taxes on small businesses – I predict that right now many small businesses are one small tax increase (like 1-2%) from going out of business.  If the businesses you are taxing go out of business, your tax revenues will be $0.00.  

$0.00 * .39 = 0.  Even with a 39% tax rate, your tax revenues will still be zero.  I am sure that Obama probably understands this, but I am more worried about what legislative gifts an emboldened Democratic Congress might place on Obama’s desk.

4.  Empathy is not blind.  Charles Krauthammer describes the kinds of judges that Obama will appoint in another recent anti-Obama article:  

Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama’s publicly declared criterion: “empathy” for the “poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old” — in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice entirely blind to one’s station in life.

Empathy is a religious, ethical, and moral project – not a judicial one.  Also empathy that is forced is no longer empathy, so theoretically empathy can’t be legislated and therefore cannot be adjudicated.  Obama’s ideas for the judiciary would require that America’s moral compass come from its judiciary branches of government.  Dependence on government for a forced moral guidance sounds more like Iran than America to me.

5.  Affirmative Action – Whenever voters get to vote on this with ballot initiatives, they vote against affirmative action.  I don’t believe that Obama would vote against it despite most Americans’ hostility to this institutionalized form of racism.  Certainly Affirmative Action takes independence away from Americans and replaces it with a form of racist dependence.

6.  The right to bear arms – I am worried that he would enable the government to confiscate weapons from American citizens.  Not only would this be unconstitutional, it would entrench American dependence on the government for self defense.  This would take the self out of self defense.

Anyway, I could come up with more reasons, but these are some of the main ones.  I suspect that if I were to actually meet and discuss some of these issues with an Obama supporter they would agree with me.  However, they would probably still vote for him.

The following quote from David Sedaris is a good one to end on:

“I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of s—t with bits of broken glass in it?’

“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

p.s. I found most of these articles from David Rodeback’s blog where you can find other great arguments against an Obama presidency.