Why I Could Have Cared Less About the Massachusetts Senate Race

So finally the race to fill Ted Kennedy's seat is over with Scott Brown winning 53% of the vote in a three-way race against Martha Coakley and Joe Kennedy.

I suppose if I was voting, I would have chosen Joe Kennedy since I'm not inclined to vote for any proponent of expanded government regardless of party label. But all in all, I could care less. So yeah, they still claim that they can "[c]reate jobs, reduce pollution, and stop sending billions overseas for foreign oil from countries that would do us harm." It is the same old argument every election cycle, but nothing changes.

Presidential candidates in 2008 spent over 1 billion dollars. That is on top of the very individuals who take 50% of our money in the form of taxes and run up debts in the trillions of dollars in order to fund things like animal mating habits, swine odor and manure management or recreational grounds. We donate money and vote for candidates on the basis that they will make our lives comfortable or make our problems go away, the very problems they create in the first place or they make worse by meddling where they have no business meddling.

With $1 billion dollars, the food banks and pantries could purchase enough food to feed five million people every day for a year. Around the world in a year, around 10 million people starve to death and close to a billion people are malnourished. Is it due to the Earth outgrowing it capacity? No, it is something else entirely. As Walter Williams so succinctly put it, "[The] problems are really a result of socialistic government practices that reduce the capacity of people to educate, clothe, house and feed themselves. Poor countries are rife with agricultural restrictions controls, export and import controls, restrictive licensing, price controls, not to mention gross human rights abuses that encourage their most productive people to emigrate. The most promising anti-poverty tool for poor people and poor countries is personal liberty."

With $1 billion using $100,000 as a baseline, 10,000 housing units could be built. Depending on how many people live in each unit, we could give tens of thousands of people housing while they could then be able to work on whatever caused them to wind up homeless in the first place whether it is job loss, depression, alcoholism, etc... It beats having to return to sleeping on concrete or cardboard boxes every night while they can have the chance to put their lives back to together and it beats having billions being wasted on social welfare programs overseen by career bureaucrats who have an interest in keeping the status quo going.

Hopefully, this will be something to think about the next time you head to the polls. As for me, I'm thinking about writing in None of the Above.