2012 Election Night

Just wasted a whole bunch of time babysitting the electoral college vote results to see if I'll be winning the office pool tomorrow. But the one reason I watched the main news networks rather than Comedy Central was to see the concession and acceptance speeches. Romney just gave his concession speech, and I must say, that was the most gracious, genuine concession I've ever seen in a presidential election. He thanked his supporters, lent his support to Barrack Obama, and moved on without looking like he had just been punched in his soul. That's a great way to lose.

One commentator said of Obama's win was that, while he had to admit that though things are not as good as he had hoped, and that this has been an imperfect 4yrs, he also succeeded in convincing the people that he is genuinely on their side. That's an interesting perspective that I definitely agree with, and I like the notion that you don't necessarily have to run on accomplishments, because those are always relative to the times and opportunities, but can really run on core values.

And Obama's speech... somewhat of a long winded thesis, but wow did he bring it home in the second half. He laid it all out: What makes us great is our ability to hold together as such a diverse people; the recovery will not be a one man show, but rather we need to take to heart Kennedy's words; we are not as divided as we make ourselves out to be, "not red states and blue states, but the United States"

Also, Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz... not my favorites.

Invisible Hand Democracy

A few notes from a conversation we had at the Mondragon Co-op documentary viewing:

• The individual has rights to protect him/her self and property against other individuals, power structures and other market participants
• A sole proprietorship would be part of an individual's property and would also need similar protections under the rights of that individual
• If a business had multiple owners, that business would still need protections as the collective property of the owners
• Shouldn't that scale to corporations needing protections?
• Do protections of corporations undermine the protections of the individuals
• Protections grant power to corporations, and in the presence of conflict, yes, this does undermine the rights of individuals, usually in how much money can be thrown at resolving the dispute in court.
• Therefore, corporate rights should be setup separately such that it does not have equivalent protections as individuals
• Invisible hand is a form of democracy, voting with money rather than ballots
• The invisible hand is mob rule; a handful of individuals who are having their rights infringed upon cannot vote with enough money to fight the corporation
• It's worse than normal democracy though, because it's a mix of plutocracy and democracy (more money = more votes). Also, all you can do is not do business with the company (or sue it), which if you never did business with them in the first place is meaningless. If their customers aren't the ones impacted, then why would the company care?
• So if libertarians hate democracy so much, how on earth do they like the invisible hand?
• Is there such a thing as a democratic libertarian?