My Political Truisms

If you want to decide whether you favor the passage of a piece of legislation or not, or You wish to decide whether you really support a candidate or not, you only need consider two things. I call these things my two political truisms. They will work for you no matter where you stand on the balance of government vs the individual.

1) Any time that the government is tasked with managing some aspect of life, the individual loses control or has less control of that aspect of life.

2)Any law, legislation, regulation, executive order, etc, will eventually be used to it's worst possible effect no matter the intentions behind it.
---a post script to this is that generality in a law makes it much easier to twist said law.

A lesser note to the two truisms above is that precedent is a powerful thing.

So to decide where you stand on something,

- First consider the control you will lose as an individual.

- Second take that something and try to twist it to put it to the worst use you possible could if you were corrupt and wanted to increase your power. In the case of legislation, try to look at the language of the legislation. Any gross generalities are dangers.

An example of a generality is 'for the public good.' This in itself says nothing. It is open to interpretation and abuse.

Also open to abuse is the word 'Fair.' There is only one piece of legislation I know that uses the word 'fair' and does not choke on it. That is because the word fair is in the name of the proposal and the 'fairness' is spelled out in detail in the body of the proposal. Still, I would prefer that these types of phrases and word we left out of the legislative lexicon.

Precedent is another danger of laws open to interpretation.
If one thing is done for the public good......it makes it easier to do another thing for the public good......


So if you are ok with the individual control lost, you are ok with any possible twisting of a certain piece of legislation, and you are ok with the precedent set - then favor the legislation. If you are not ok with any one of these aspects, the you must oppose the legislation.

In choosing whether to support a candidate, look at his voting record and his/her stated stances. Do the two align?? If not, is the candidate a liar?? Does the voting record and stances indicate a preference for more individual control or more government control? If you agree with the candidates stances overall and his overall voting record, then vote for him or her. It is usually not good to judge a candidate on a single issue. If a candidate aligns with you on 90% of the issues that will be good enough.

Now for me, there is an issue that determines my way of voting. This is an issue that affects all other issues and completely shifts the balance of the relationship between the individual and the government. I will leave it to you to figure out what that issue is.