In the latest election, the people bypassed a man of enormous integrity, character, and competence, and voted for a glib, clueless fool, largely because of the color of his skin. This, after the fool had already been elected once and had driven the country into a ditch, domestically and internationally.

This has served to finalize my growing skepticism about democracy. The founders were right, democracy always destroys itself. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” He also said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

The founders were well aware of the perils of democracy, which is why they designed a government intended to prevent democracy from rearing it’s alluring head: very limited voting franchise, the Senate not popularly elected, the electoral college as a responsible buffer between the demos and their representatives, and severe limits on what Congress and the President were allowed to do.

The franchise is now universal, the Senate is popularly elected, the electoral college is now not much more than a formality, with cries to eliminate it altogether, and the Constitution has been gradually interpreted to mean that Congress can do anything it wants as long as it involves interstate commerce, with an almost unimaginably broad definition of what constitutes interstate commerce. President Obama has now discovered that he can just exercise Presidential fiat if Congress won’t pass the legislation he desires. Executive orders and bureaucratic regulations can do pretty much everything that laws can do.

Greece is not only the birthplace of democracy. It is the perfect example of what democracy leads to. For democracy’s opening act, Socrates was sentenced to death. Now the demos riots in the streets because the people they borrowed money from want to be repaid. I fear our democracy’s days are numbered, and the $16 trillion dollar debt (which is a lie. The real debt is incalculably north of that already incomprehensible figure) will be the mechanism of its demise.

How can anyone say that Obama has not made clear his agenda for the next four years? If you listen to his stump speeches and what he has said in the debates, it is crystal clear what his agenda will be:

1. More money for Big Bird.

2. Eliminate obsolete weapons system, such as bayonets and ships.

3. Eliminate the use of binders in the administration.

4. Free birth control.

5. Jail for any film maker who produces a video that insults Islam.

I worry about the world. I worry about my country. My wife doesn’t worry about these things. She worries about the reality of what is happening to us, in our little world. She is impatient with worries about things over which we have no control.

We live in Tennessee. No matter who we vote for, Romney will win Tennessee. We used to live in California. No matter who we voted for, the Democrats always won in California.

She is probably right, but I can’t help it. I have the disease of those who prefer the large and abstract over the immediate, those who imagine they are somehow playing on a world stage, while they neglect their own lives’ reality. It might be understandable if I were Gandhi or Ronald Reagan, but obviously I am not.

People talk about the impending fiscal cliff. Near as I can tell, we jumped off the fiscal cliff some time ago, years ago, decades ago, but it’s a long way down. So, so far, so good. The bottom is coming. I doubt very much that anyone can prevent the inevitable splatter of Wile E. Coyote on the canyon floor.

The vast majority of human beings on planet Earth are clearly crazy. Muslims, the French and Greek electorates, the populations of Africa, South America, India, China, Korea. The Enlightenment is barely a flicker. The scientific method has not really caught on, even among scientists, especially climate scientists.

I am not a fan of universal suffrage. The fewer people who vote, the better, in my opinion. Black people always vote for Democrats, no matter what. Hispanics mostly vote for Democrats, no matter what. Felons and illegal immigrants always vote for Democrats. Single women who want free abortions and birth control vote for Democrats. Unions and public employees vote for Democrats. Food stamp recipients vote for Democrats. Young people whose idealism has been corrupted by our Marxist higher education system vote for Democrats. Anyone who believes what they read in the New York Times and the Washington Post, or what they see on ABC, CBS, and NBC, vote for Democrats.

Republicans have their own benighted constituents of course, but the GOP is definitely losing the war for hearts and minds.

Whoever lies the most convincingly, to the most special interest groups, wins. Barack Obama is a liar’s liar. His whole life is a lie. His books are all lies. His advancement at Harvard and the University of Chicago and in Chicago politics is all built on lies. As a liar, he makes Bill Clinton look like a piker. The polls are skewed of course, to favor the Democrats, but, skewed or not, I do believe that Obama is ahead.

It looks like the self-destruction of democracy to me. We gave up being a republic when we gave the vote to whoever wanted it. No identification required, let alone any more stringent requirements. Whoever promises the most unsustainable goodies to the most ignorant, wins. To paraphrase H.L. Menken, nobody ever failed to gain power by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

The very idea of a republic that takes care of the roads, jails thieves and murderers, provides for the common defense, and otherwise leaves everyone alone, exists only in the world of “crackpot” fantasy. It doesn’t look like it will ever have the votes.

And so, I worry.

In the spirit of the fantasy that this blog has a mass audience, let me ask a question of the millions of readers out there. Do any of you know anyone who is undecided about the upcoming Presidental election? In other words, people wondering, “Who should I vote for, Romney or Obama. It’s so hard to decide?” Anyone? Me neither.

Minds are made up. The older I get the deeper the realization becomes that almost nobody ever changes their mind, about most things, but especially about politics. When people change their minds about politics, it is a very big deal. Most never do. Those few who do, usually do it once in a lifetime.

This election is not about “independents”. There are no independents. This election is about firing up the base, on both sides. That’s why it is so nasty. The base is all there is. It’s all about turn out. It’s all about demonizing the other guy. Best demonizer wins.

It is thoughts like these that turn me to becoming a monarchist. As has so often been said of democracy, it is not a good system, but it is perhaps better than all of the others. Sometimes you get a good monarch, sometimes not. When it’s good, it’s very very good, and when it is bad, it’s horrid. Were I a British subject, I would much rather have been ruled by the current Queen Elizabeth than by the many Prime Ministers and Parliaments that have come and gone during her reign. On the other hand, I’m not so sure about Prince Charles, but how much worse could it be?

The argument for democracy is that the extremes tend to be more muted, further towards the middle of the bell curve, and they don’t last as long. Voters act as a damper on the powers of the monarch.

Me? I’m a Republican. I used to be a far left idealogue. I’ve had my once in a lifetime change of political principle. I have been willing to be excommunicated from the community of “good” people rather than insult my own intelligence. I have seen the light. Vote Romney/Ryan.

Watch this clip of prominent Republican Congressman Paul Ryan talking about what this election is all about. You will have to put up with a couple of introductions in which people say nice things about Nancy Reagan, but forebear. They don’t last long.

Now watch this clip of prominent Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters giving her explanation of what this election is all about.

If you can’t see the difference, then nothing I could possibly say will make any difference.

I have a small business. I am fortunate to be competing in the relatively free market for Macintosh software, a market that is comparatively unburdened by excessive government regulation and monopoly control. This is a temporary window of opportunity that exists only because Apple’s market share is, so far but not for much longer, small enough to have flown under the radar.

The government is after me. The city, county, state, and federal governments all have their hand out. They all want a piece. They all want my money, which they had nothing to do with earning. I already pay property taxes and sales taxes and income taxes. My business is on the internet. I don’t use any city, county, or state services. Now they want city business tax, county business tax, state business tax, city business property tax, double federal payroll taxes (employer plus employee), and they all want voluminous paper work that takes up more of my time than I can afford, but which is trivial for large corporations with legal and accounting departments. Fortunately I don’t, yet, have to worry about the EPA or OSHA or the NLRB.

The majority of federal business regulations are designed to enable large corporations to crush small competitors. This is inevitable. Congressional politics is funded by lobbyists and campaign contributions funded by large corporations.

I might as well be cooking meth. As far as the government is concerned, small business is a criminal enterprise. All small business men and women in this country feel more or less the same way. We all pretty much vote Republican, but it doesn’t do us any good, because for one, there are not enough of us, and for two, the Republicans are almost as corrupt as the Democrats.

Microsoft, for example, crushed competitors by using their desktop operating system monopoly to make competitor software vendors’ application software fail to function in Windows altogether, or at least not as well as Microsoft application software. Windows was purposely designed to generate error messages and crashes for non-Microsoft applications.

The Microsoft Internet Explorer browser software became dominant, putting NetScape out of business, by making IE free and an integral part of the Windows operating system, and by coercing hardware vendors to bundle Windows with all PC hardware purchases. Hardware vendors are forced, by contract, to pay for Windows, including Internet Explorer, whether they want to or not, for every hardware system that they sell. So, of course, they bundle it. God forbid that they should alienate Microsoft.

This is patently illegal. It is every bit as egregious as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil competition-crushing illegal practices at the turn of the 20th century, whereby the railroads that Standard Oil owned charged higher rates for non-Standard Oil shipments. But Microsoft has been given a pass by the U.S. Justice Department, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, because of the money poured into D.C. lobbyists and Congressional campaign coffers.

Small businesses like mine are only allowed to exist in small niches that have not yet been targeted by government-supported big business. Once the market has reached a size to be of interest to the big boys, it very quickly is no longer a free market. Once it is worth doing, the small fish are driven out of business by the big fish, with the government as their indispensible ally. Large government-connected corporations are no more fans of free enterprise than the most fanatical Marxist.

I wish that the federal government were a check against the monopolistic practices of large corporations. That would be great, but the reality is that the government is the friend of the monopolist, and I fear it always will be. Given that reality, as a small business man, I would rather that the government stayed out of it entirely. The big guys will continue to crush small competitors ruthlessly, but at least they would no longer have the government helping them.

I am forced to conclude that the only solution to the inevitable dominance of monopolistic control of the free market, is less government interference. The tiny mammalian shrew-like creatures that eventually prevailed against the dinosaurs did so without government intervention. Apple’s eventual triumph over the Microsoft dinosaur has and will occur without the help of the government. The inevitable demise of the geriatric music, TV, movie, and newspaper monopolies will happen in spite of federal legislation paid for by said industries, thanks to the internet, which has not yet been overtaken by the disingenuous cries for net neutrality and “fairness”.

In the long run, serving the customer will prevail over screwing the customer, because the customers are not as stupid as they look. The government can only delay the inevitable. That is my naive hope and prayer.

Candace, Sarah, Al, Morgan, and, last but not least, Candace’s mother, Mary.

When I lost my last job in San Francisco, I knew that I would never have another. Why hire an old guy who wants too much money, when you can hire a young, energetic guy for half as much? That was the conclusion my employers arrived at, and I don’t blame them. I would do the same in their place.

I like this quote about employment in the 1950’s from this article:

If you could read, follow simple instructions, and settle into a routine, you could find a job in the post-war economy.

That is no longer true. Nowadays you need to have a real skill. It can be a blue-collar skill like welding, plumbing, electrical, hvac, or it can be a white collar skill, computer programming, bio-engineering, etc., but it has to be something.

It was 2004. I was 60 years old and unemployable. But I did have skills, over 30 years worth of developing software, on every computer and every computer language of any consequence during those three decades. So I set to work on the best idea I could come up with and developed MailSteward for the Macintosh.

It was something I wanted for myself, a searchable, relational database of all my email forever. I turned my crude UNIX script into a commercial Mac application and started selling it on the internet. For the first two years, sales were $200 to $300 a month. It was too buggy, not enough features. I worked constantly late into the night, fixing bugs, adding features. We lived on savings, and when that was gone, credit cards.

After two years, it was finally good enough that people started buying it. Now it brings in, gross, about $90,000 a year. I’m still working on it all the time, though not as frenetically as in the past. And I’ve added three more apps to the mix, FileMyFiles, DiskRefresher, and WordWrapper.

The way capitalism, real capitalism, works is that everyone has to provide something of value to other people, that they will pay for with money. Money, when it is not being inflated away by the government, being a store of value. That’s capitalism in a nutshell. We used to be a fairly capitalistic society, but not anymore. Nobody is, but there are now a few nations who are more capitalistic than we are, which never used to be the case.

It is very much my sense, though I am too lazy to back it up with researched evidence, that there is a rising percentage of the adult population who are not providing anything of economic value. A certain amount of that is inevitable. We must care for the old, the sick, and the disabled. But somewhere along the line there is a tipping point, when there are too few people providing value, and too many people not providing, but consuming that value.

I think we are past, at, or quickly approaching that tipping point, here in the United States, in Europe, and in the world.

Here is what Jin Liqun, chairman of China’s vast sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corporation, had to say about Europe’s request to borrow some more from China:

The root cause of trouble is the overburdened welfare system, built up since the Second World War in Europe – the sloth- inducing, indolence-inducing labour laws.

In other words, no, we are not lending you bums any more money. China has its own problems, big time, but these are words of wisdom.

Why are medical professionals who are not M.D.’s not allowed to perform many more of the routine tasks currently reserved for doctors?
    Answer: because of government regulations.

Why are the prices not posted on the wall of every walk-in clinic in the U.S.?
    Answer: because of government regulations.

Why can’t I buy health insurance across state lines so that I could buy a policy offered in Tennessee even though I live in New York?
    Answer: because of government regulations.

Why aren’t there more openings in medical schools to train more doctors?
    Answer: because of government regulations.

Why can’t a group of doctors get together and build a hospital?
    Answer: They’re not allowed to. Government regulations.

Why are inexpensive, minimal, catastrophic health insurance policies not available in all 50 states?
    Answer: because of government regulations.

Why do individuals not get the same tax break for health insurance costs as businesses get?
    Answer: because of government regulations.

Why can’t I buy a health insurance policy that just covers what I want to have covered?
    Answer: because of government regulations.

Why is health care so non-competitive and expensive?
    Answer: because of government regulations.

What is the Democratic Party’s answer to out of control health care costs?
    Answer: more government regulations.

I was on the debate team when I was in college many years ago. I was pretty good. I’ve never run for political office, and I have no illusions about being qualified to be President of the United States. But let me tell you, I would wipe the floor with all of the clowns who are currently auditioning for the job, and that includes Barack Obama.

What the Hell!? These guys, and gal, don’t have anything else to do besides dress well and give plausible one minute sound bite answers to predictably inane questions. And they can’t do it!

If Barry doesn’t have his teleprompter, he’s completely at sea! He doesn’t have a clue about history or economics or what language they speak in Austria.

Rick Perry can’t even memorize a simple retort to a Mitt Romney attack, that he was coached to expect.

Romney’s the best of the lot, and he’s such an obviously phony, over cautious, unprincipled robot, that he’s only in the running because of the quality of the competition.

I saw Herman Cain, whom I actually like, being interviewd by Chris Wallace, and he obviously had never heard of the Palestinian right of return controversy. And he’s running for President of the United States!?

I like Ron Paul on economics, but let’s face it, he’s nuts about everything else, and I don’t even want to discuss Huntsman or Santorum or Bachmann. Gingrich is the only one whom I would consider to be a worthy opponent in a debate, but c’mon, he’s not going to be President.

What is going on? Is this it? Are these the toughest, smartest, most visionary leaders available in the U.S.A.? No wonder Chris Christie’s phone is ringing off the hook.