Analysis of Nader’s Platform - 2008

As of March 5, 2008, Ralph Nader’s campaign has now placed a preliminary platform online. You can find it here: http://www.votenader.org/issues/
Let’s review the items one by one.
1. Adopt single payer national health insurance
As I understand it, this would work by having, in essence, a single, national, government-run health insurance agency. There are two [...]

Libertarian Party Passes Anti-Iraq War Resolution

According to Eric Garris, in a post at Antiwar.Com:

February 18, 2008.
The national Libertarian Party (LP) organization has taken their strongest position in favor of withdrawal from Iraq. At their national committee meeting yesterday in Las Vegas, the following resolution passed overwhelmingly.
WHEREAS the government of the United States should return to its [...]

Countering Political Evil

At the Watchblog Third Party Website, Joel S. Hirschhorn wrote an good article titled The Evolution of Evil. He identifies as an essential problem the current two-party system. To quote Joel:
Most corrupt and legally sanctioned forms of tyranny hide in plain sight as democracies with free elections….  Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections. [...]

Game Theory and the American Two-Party Racket

This is a short post. I’m experimenting with various strategies to gain more site visitors. One is to make more short, focused entries like this one, to produce search engine “hits” for a wider range of queries.
Here we refer again to a recurring theme of this site: how American politics is, under the [...]

Flat Tax

Let’s continue to hammer away at one of the core problems with the current presidential race: Republicans and Democrats are both part of the status quo; part of the System that wants to keep people distracted, divided, oppressed, and afraid. They want to keep attention away from ideas that would promote real [...]

On Voting the Lesser of Two Evils

So the presidential race may come down to a contest between McCain and Obama. Since each candidate is scary in his own way, many people would then vote based on the principle of choosing the lesser evils. Let’s examine that principle here, and also tie some concepts of decision theory.
First, regardless of which candidate [...]

America’s Malaise: What is the Real Problem?

In her Huffington Post blog, Middle-East expert and columnist Judith Kipper recently added an article titled “America’s Malaise“. She made some good points. At least it’s good to see someone explicitly addressing the problem. America does suffer from something – you can call it malaise, severe uncertainty, a crisis of confidence, [...]

Politics: Inner and Outer

A fairly little-known fact is that Plato’s Republic, a work often taught in government and political science classes, is really about psychology. If you read the Republic closely, you see that Plato (through the character of Socrates) introduces the ideal State as a metaphor for the human soul. The idea is to, using [...]

Nobody for President

Lately I’ve heard some people say, “Hey, maybe this Barack Obama guy is just what the country needs; someone really different.”
The thing is, Mr. Barack is not really different. He’s an orthodox Democrat. More importantly, he’s a Republicrat: he represents the same two-party system that’s gotten the country into its present mess.
Let’s review how this [...]