I saw The Incredibles yesterday.

I highly recommend it. It was fun from start to finish. Great writing, cool animation.

An enjoyable time for people of all ages.

Lots of people are trying to explain exactly why the election went the way it did.

There are a lot of theories, and I’m sure that many of them explain part of what happened.

I don’t claim to know what most people were thinking about every issue or how they decided the way they did.

The bottom-line, I think, is that more people felt more comfortable with Bush as president than Kerry. Not because of deep strategic planning, or because they thought that a complex function of all of the issue positions resulted in a stronger alignment with Bush; but because they just felt better about Bush as a person being more likely to do the right thing when it matters.

I think they were right about that.

I don’t agree with some that there was never a chance of a Kerry victory, but it’s gratifying to know that there are still a lot of sensible people here who aren’t easily manipulated by celebrity endorsements or shrill attacks or terrorist threats.

Yay America!

UPDATE: I agree with this David Brooks Op-Ed. The “moral values” explanation has been overblown, and is mostly an excuse for liberals to evade their defeat on the real issues of the day.

Last month, the british newspaper The Guardian sponsored a letter-writing campaign to independent voters in Clark County, Ohio. Clark County was chosen because it was a well-known pivotal county in a pivotal swing state. The Guardian hoped to influence our presidential election by appealing to the sensibilities of american voters.

Among the most disgusting of the letters published was one by Richard Dawkins, whose idiotic politics I have complained about before.

Well, it turns out that Clark County went to Bush by 2% (the spread was 1% before the campaign; I’m not sure which way). I like to think that people in Clark County, and elsewhere in Ohio, moved over toward the Bush camp as a giant “Fuck You!” to the shoddy arguments of the anti-Bush crowd.

As many of you know, I’m happy that Bush won re-election. Congratulations to him and all of his supporters.

Some say that he won by pandering to religious bigotry. While I’m sure that some of his success was due to anti-gay/anti-abortion sentiment, I don’t think it was the major part. Most people who voted for Bush did so because they are significantly aligned with his other plans and policies.

In his statement today, Bush mentioned his commitments to reforming the tax code and Social Security. I’m looking forward to him taking advantage of his opportunity to make significant progress in these areas. He should know that many of his supporters took these promises seriously and expect him to follow through on them. I support these and other market liberalizations. I will certainly criticize Bush for failing in this area.

I’m also optimistic that Bush will nominate, and the strengthened Senate will confirm, good judges; especially Supreme Court Justices, during this term.

Mostly, though, people voted for Bush because they support his approach to the very real threats to our security. Many of us think that he and his advisors understand the threats, and how to deal with them, better than Kerry. Regardless of how much some people would like to pretend this isn’t true, the American voters have exercised excellent judgement about this; the most important criterion for choosing a president.

Congratulations to all of us on our improved chances for progress.

Well, today is the day.

I can certainly understand those who decide that voting doesn’t make sense to them because they don’t think it’s worth their time (since it’s so unlikely that their individual vote will make an instrumental difference to the outcome).

But, for those who think that it’s worthwhile to express their preference publicly via voting; and if they prefer Bush’s approach to the War on Terror to Kerry’s (whatever that is), and they prefer Supreme Court Justices like Clarence Thomas to those Kerry is likely to appoint, and they prefer Bush’s Ownership Society reforms to increased socialism; you should probably vote for Bush.

If you don’t, then you probably shouldn’t.

That was the scariest post title I could think of.

I was considering going on with fake stories about Kerry opening peace talks with Osama Bin Laden, and appointing three young Supreme Court Justices, but I didn’t want to be responsible for any serious injuries.

Happy Halloween!

Check out this South Park video explaining the meaning of the Puff Daddy (or whatever he’s calling himself these days) Vote or Die campaign.

UPDATE: Yes, I know the link above is dead. If someone sends me a working one, I’ll use it.

UPDATE: I finally came back to this and changed the link to point to a valid video on youtube.

I recently came across this nice, short, old article by Russell Roberts. It contains a great analogy explaining why it’s so difficult to constrain federal spending:

This destructive justification reminds me of a very strange restaurant.

When you eat there, you usually spend about $6—you have a sandwich, some fries and a drink. Of course you’d also enjoy dessert and a second drink, but that costs an additional $4. The extra food isn’t worth $4 to you, so you stick with the $6 meal.

Sometimes, you go to the same restaurant with three friends. The four of you are in the habit of splitting the check evenly. You realize after a while that the $4 drink and dessert will end up costing you only $1, because the total tab is split four ways. Should you order the drink and dessert? If you’re a nice person, you might want to spare your friends from having to subsidize your extravagance. Then it dawns on you that they may be ordering extras financed out of your pocket. But they’re your friends. They wouldn’t do that to you and you wouldn’t do that to them. And if anyone tries it among the group, social pressure will keep things under control.

But now suppose the tab is split not at each table but across the 100 diners that evening across all the tables. Now adding the $4 drink and dessert costs only 4¢. Splurging is easy to justify now. In fact you won’t just add a drink and dessert; you’ll upgrade to the steak and add a bottle of wine. Suppose you and everyone else each orders $40 worth of food. The tab for the entire restaurant will be $4000. Divided by the 100 diners, your bill comes to $40. Here is the irony. Like my neighbor at the theater, you’ll get your “fair share.” The stranger at the restaurant a few tables over pays for your meal, but you also help subsidize his. It all “evens out.”

But this outcome is a disaster. When you dine alone, you spend $6. The extra $34 of steak and other treats are not worth it. But in competition with the others, you’ve chosen a meal far out of your price range whose enjoyment falls far short of its cost.

Self-restraint goes unrewarded. If you go back to ordering your $6 meal in hopes of saving money, your tab will be close to $40 anyway unless the other 99 diners cut back also. The good citizen feels like a chump.

And so we read of the freshman Congressman who comes to Congress eager to cut pork out of the budget but in trouble back home because local projects will also come under the knife. Instead of being proud to lead the way, he is forced to fight for those projects to make sure his district gets its “fair share.”

This problem can’t be solved unless people’s attitudes change. We need to get to a point where lining up at the public trough is seen as a source of shame, rather than pride; when people would prefer to be productive participants, rather than parasites.

If you think IQ tests measure something interesting (I think they do, but there’s a lot more that they don’t measure), then you might find it interesting to read Steve Sailer’s analysis of what a few published test scores can tell us about the intelligence of the young John Kerry vs. the young George W. Bush.

I’m pretty confident that I’m smarter than both of them. Partially because of my higher test scores, but mostly because I have no interest in obtaining that awful job!

Robert Bidinotto has posted this Open Letter To Libertarians by the first Libertarian Party presidential candidate, philosophy professor John Hospers.

Hospers makes a passionate call for libertarians to vote for Bush this time. In closing he writes:

When the stakes are not high it is sometimes acceptable, even desirable, to vote for a “minor party” candidate who cannot possibly win, just to “get the word out” and to promote the ideals for which that candidate stands. But when the stakes are high, as they are in this election, it becomes imperative that one should choose, not the candidate one considers philosophically ideal, but the best one available who has the most favorable chance of winning. The forthcoming election will determine whether it is the Republicans or the Democrats that win the presidency. That is an undeniable reality. If the election is as close as it was in 2000, libertarian voters may make the difference as to who wins in various critical “Battle Ground” states and therefore the presidency itself. That is the situation in which we find ourselves in 2004. And that is why I believe voting for George W. Bush is the most libertarian thing we can do. [emphasis mine]

We stand today at an important electoral crossroads for the future of liberty, and as libertarians our first priority is to promote liberty and free markets, which is not necessarily the same as to promote the Libertarian Party. This time, if we vote Libertarian, we may win a tiny rhetorical battle, but lose the larger war.

For what it’s worth, I bit the bullet and voted for Bush (absentee ballot) last night. I urge those of you who wish to express your support for liberty to do the same; and to encourage others to follow suit.

I have many problems with Bush, but I’d rather have those problems than count on Kerry’s consistently worse policies being stopped by gridlock. I’d rather have better policies that we can continue to improve on than horrible policies that we might be able to recover from.