Monday, August 10, 2015

More on Trump and Sanders and Representative Democracy.

Apparently some columnist wrote that Trump and Sanders were this years Ron Paul and that their ideas were things that the "majority" of Americans did not support. Hmmm. Do you really believe that the majority of Americans are against controlling the borders and keeping out illegal immigrants or regulating banks better? I then read another article that said that Trump had not stated his policies. These two things seem to contradict one another. Either he has policies that would not be popular with the majority of people or he has no policies, you cannot accuse him of both.

I am much more liberal than most of my friends of my age and they are almost exclusively Republicans with many being ex-military and not one of them has been upset by Trump. They don't feel they are being listened to by their party and why should they when they are ridiculed along with Trump for believing that they are not being well represented?

I am not an Obama supporter and disliked Clinton and the Bushes as well. Having said that, I will ask a question that Ronald Regan asked when running for President. Were you better off after Bush was elected? Remember the stock and housing crashes occurred while Bush was in office. The answer is slightly different for Obama as when Bush left we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month and under Obama we have seen "some" job growth; but, my question about him is different. Did he do the things he promised he would. I can only thing of one and that was the healthcare change, you may not like it but he at least kept one promise. Neither put the countries interest ahead of business and big money.

The battle ground today is a very simple question. Who do you think will attempt to keep their election promises? Let us say for the moment that 60% of Americans were in favor of becoming a "social democrat" nation where there was universal healthcare, government control over the printing of money rather than the Federal Reserve (a private bank) controlling the money supply and getting the interest from the government and a guaranteed minimum standard of living. Now as an ardent anti-socialist and Republican against all these things, if 60% of the people voted for it and their candidate was elected, would you support him doing the exact opposite of these things? Would you support him not representing the people who elected him? I am sure you can flip this question on Democrats fairly easily, my answer would not change. I believe in Democracy and think that if we vote for someone, they should do what they were elected to do.

While I personally would vote for Sanders over Trump, I think Trump has a better chance of being effective than Sanders at getting his policies through. The real issue in this election is not whether or not we lean left or right; but, whether or not we force our elected officials to represent us or accept the way things are. Does it matter who you vote for if they don't try and do what they were voted to do?