I’m planning on voting for Mitt Romney in November.  If by some very strange fluke he is not the Republican nominee, I will probably vote for whoever is the Republican nominee.  But that appears extremely unlikely.

I often hear people say that they are not willing to vote for the “lesser of two evils” and therefore will not vote for Romney.  People say we should vote for principle, not party.  Sometimes the complaint is that Romney is “socialist-lite”, not really conservative, and not worthy of our vote.  Sometimes people refuse to vote for him because he is a Mormon.  I’ll address that later on.

Romney is not a movement conservative; I don’t think anyone confuses him for one.  He has taken positions I was not fond of.  I had other first choices.  But the party has settled on Romney.  If I thought Romney was likely to do the country harm, then I would not vote for him, party loyalty notwithstanding.  But I believe he will do the country good.

What we need right now, more than anything, is to get the economy going again.  To do this I believe the government primarily needs to remove disincentives to investment and risk-taking.  I do not believe the government can or should do a great deal to make the economy strong, but it can do a great deal to make the economy weak.  Excessive regulations, punitive and complex tax policy, and direct investment by the government in the economy all work to hamper a truly free and vibrant market, and we are doing all those things in spades.  The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) greatly increases the burdens on employers- it increases their costs and increases their regulatory burden, both making it harder for them to hire new employees.  The direct investment by the government in various industries (Solyndra being the most notorious example) is not only a waste of taxpayer dollars, it is also a disincentive to investment.  When economic success in an industry becomes tied to who is politically connected enough to get favorable government deals, private investment becomes paralyzed.  There is just too much risk of being in the position of betting against the government.

Bain Capital
Romney worked for many years at Bain Capital.  That company invested in struggling companies to try to turn them around.  Some of the complaints against Bain have to do with outsourcing jobs or laying off workers.  But any successful businessman knows that hard choices sometimes have to be made in order to help a business succeed.  His job at Bain was to maximize shareholder profits, not to preserve everyone’s job.  But as president, his job would be different- his job would be to foster conditions that would make business success most likely.  His experience at Bain makes him very well suited to know what those conditions are; what conditions encourage businesses to succeed and what makes them more likely to fail.  As the president, he will not have control over all of those conditions.  But he will have control over many of them.  He will know why CEOs have to make tough choices to lay people off or offshore jobs.  He will know that CEOs don’t make such choices because they want to, but because they have to.  As president, he will be uniquely well-suited to changing the conditions so that CEOs don’t have to make those hard choices quite as much.

Romneycare
He was also the governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.  He did much good there, reining in spending and balancing the budget.  He also passed a controversial piece of legislation often called “Romneycare”, which is similar in some respects to Obamacare.  Many conservatives will not vote for Romney because of this piece of legislation.  The differences however are profound.  Romneycare includes a mandate that people buy insurance or pay tax penalties; it also provides means-tested subsidies for those who cannot afford insurance.  These are the two major similarities.  Romneycare however does not create a huge new regulatory structure, does not effectively take over the health care industry, does not require thousands of new bureaucrats.  Romneycare was an 80-page bill; Obamacare is over 2000 pages long.  The individual mandate, as offensive as it is to many conservatives (including me), is really only the least of the problems that Obamacare brings.

Even where there are similarities, however, major differences must be kept in mind.

First, Romneycare is constitutional.  The states can do things like impose mandates on their citizens.  Whether it’s a good idea or not is a different question.  Obamacare is a federal law, and therefore violates the constitution.  The requirement to buy insurance was passed as a mandate, and a majority of Supreme Court justices ruled that as a mandate it violates the constitution.  It would violate the constitution whether the Supreme court said it did or not.

Secondly, and this I think is the key point:  The context is completely different.  Massachusetts is a liberal state that had already passed a number of provisions making insurance very expensive.  They had passed a requirement that people be covered regardless of preexisting conditions, and had many expensive coverage mandates, things like infertility treatments and substance abuse counseling.  The insurance market in Massachusetts was already broken.  These measures were politically popular, however.  Given this situation, the most conservative, free-market approach to fixing the existing problem, Romney and his advisers thought, was to require people to buy insurance and not simply to wait until they got sick to do it.

Obamacare, on the other hand, imposes both the coverage requirement regardless of preexisting conditions, and the mandate to buy insurance.  Romneycare was trying to fix a broken system in Massachusetts.  Obamacare breaks the national system even more than it is before trying to fix it.  Obamacare not only imposes the individual mandate that Romneycare had, it also imposes all the expensive, system-breaking rules that made the individual mandate necessary in Massachusetts.  These differences are really key.  Even given these differences, I think Romneycare was a bad idea, and I think subsequent history bears this out, but it was an attempt to fix a broken system, and given the preferences of a very liberal state, it was a good try.  Romney has repeatedly said that what might have been a good option for Massachusetts would be a very bad option for the whole country.

Mitt Romney was also instrumental in turning around the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002.  The Olympics were on their way to being a disorganized mess.  But Romney stepped in and turned it around, and it went on to be a glowing success.

A Record of Execution
These three examples- Bain Capital, the Salt Lake Olympics, and his governorship of Massachusetts, all show Mitt Romney to be a problem-solver.  He has made a career out of stepping into very difficult situations and finding solutions.  Most of the time he has succeeded.  He is a believer in free markets, limited government, personal accountability and freedom, and his history has shown this.  His pick of Paul Ryan as vice president shows a commitment to conservative principles as well.

On other issues of concern to Christians, he is solid.  He is anti-abortion, supporting exceptions only in the case of rape, incest or the life of the mother.  He is opposed to gay marriage, though supporting some limited domestic benefits.  He is not perfect, but still would be a huge improvement from where we are now.

Of all the candidates that ran for this office on the Republican side this year, none brought more of exactly the kind of experience we need in this situation than Mitt Romney.  Some candidates brought more red meat for the Republican base.  Some had more of the “correct” opinions.  But being a good president is about more than having the right views.  It is about the ability to get things done.  He is the chief executive; he must execute.  Romney has shown an ability to execute far beyond any other Republican candidate.  His very well-run campaign is proof of his ability to execute; that ability is why he is winning the nomination.  He has shown great personal discipline, one of the major reasons he has defeated many of his erratic and scandal-plagued opponents.

Romney is surrounded with highly influential and very conservative advisers.  Men like John Bolton (foreign policy) and Robert Bork (judicial appointments) have been on board the Romney campaign from early on.  The Ryan pick solidifies that- Paul Ryan has the most conservative, most tangible plan to actually rein in entitlements, cut the budget and balance the books.  The Ryan budget is not perfect but it’s a whole lot better than anything else that has been seriously proposed.

So I’m not voting for the “lesser of two evils”, except from the perspective that Romney isn’t perfect.  If that’s what is meant then we’re always voting for the lesser of two evils, unless Jesus is on the ballot.  I’m voting for Romney because I believe he has the plan and the experience to do a great deal of good for the country right now.  I’m not just voting against Obama; I am voting for Romney.  Romney is not well-suited to do all the things that need done, but no president ever gets a chance to do more than three or four important things.  If we don’t get the economy going, rein in spending and begin to limit government’s reach into our lives, nothing else is going to even be possible anyway.  Romney is patching up the gunshot wound before we attend to long-term care.

I’ll address the Mormon issue in a future post.  (UPDATE:  Here it is.)

God is a holy God, and is highly interested in holiness- not just forensic, imputed holiness but real, actual, personal and perfect holiness.  Any understanding of Christianity that downplays the ultimate importance of real, actual and personal holiness is not true to the nature of God.  No lie, no perversity, no corruption, no murder, no sin will ever dwell within the jasper walls.  Revelation 22:15.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/09/virginia-farmer-threatened-with-fines-for-selling-produce-and-party-hosting/

One of the main reasons America happened in the first place was that an awful lot of people were sick to death of Europe.  It wasn’t the geography or the cuisine or the language or the culture they were sick of.  It was the governments.

In Europe, every time you turned around you had to ask some duke or baron for permission to breathe.  They had guilds that dictated who could practice what particular trades.  They had lords that controlled most or all of the land and a large percentage of the work you did had to go to support that lord.  That’s why they called America the “land of the free”- it wasn’t because in America you had freedom to publish pornography or abort babies.  It was because in America you could buy a plot of land and could do what you wanted on that plot of land.  You didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to grow crops and sell them, or build whatever kind of house you wanted.  As long as you weren’t hurting your neighbor, you were free to do with your property what you wanted.

Now, I have to pay a town inspector to come by for permission to shingle my own roof.  My brother-in-law runs a business, a furniture store, and he tells me that he’s constantly having to pay fees to have bureaucrats come out to inspect something or other.  Some guy comes out, glances at something, says it’s fine, and demands an $80 fee.  Every one of these laws can be justified with some kind of benefit- well the state makes sure my roof is properly shingled so that the wind doesn’t destroy it.  Limon now requires that we use more expensive 30-year shingles despite the fact that every decade or so we have an incredibly fierce hailstorm that destroys everyone’s roofs, 30-year shingles or not, which then are all replaced by insurance.  Every new law that’s passed, every new regulation, every new inspector, can be justified by something.  New professions get licensing requirements, to protect the public from the dangers of unscrupulous businessmen.  And in exchange for all these possible (but questionable) benefits, we get saddled with the very real costs of a million parasitic bureaucrats sucking the life out of the private sector.

As I said in the last article, the tyrants of the world always claim to be helping the little guy.  They always claim to be protecting us from the evil men who will destroy them if we don’t turn our freedom and wealth over to the tyrants.  Andrea posted this on her FB page recently:

I just talked with my mom. My dad had a bad weekend because he has to
tell the mothers and fathers who work for a Black Hills Power plant that
the EPA has made it impossible for their power plant to stay open. He
has to tell them that they no longer have the good jobs that have so
well provided for their families. I’m
sure it will be a great consolation to them to know that  Father Obama
will hold their place in line at the welfare agencies. And to all my
friends who will see higher energy costs as well-running power plants
shut down to be replaced by uber-expensive new plants, I’m sure Obama
will provide you welfare, too, to keep your home heated this winter and
food stamps to subsidize the higher cost for food production. It is a
lie by the left that the managers don’t care about the people who work
for them. My father started out at power plants as a mechanic and
worked his way up to upper management. He was successful at management
BECAUSE he cares about the people who work for him. All of my dad’s
children grew up with the experience of being stopped by strangers who
would express their admiration and care for our father, their boss. It
is really, really hard for my dad to give this awful news. It is the
bureaucrat, with no personal involvement with people, who are cold and
uncaring about the destruction their petty power plays and rules cause
for others. Perhaps if the EPA officials destroying the power industry
had to face those whose livelihood they are destroying by their blind
devotion to bad environmental superstition, they would examine the
actual facts behind the power industry and move a little slower to
destroy the good jobs providing the abundant, clean power Americans have
enjoyed and that has fueled our prosperity for so long.

This is just another example.  Are there tradeoffs for burning coal?  Of course there are.  It would be better if we all had magic unicorn power beamed directly from the sky castle into our homes (except I’m sure there would be a unicorn tax associated).  But there are tradeoffs with everything, because this is a cursed and fallen world.  When someone comes with an offer that’s too good to be true, it probably is.  When a government bureaucrat comes and promises you free money, that money is coming from somewhere.  When a government bureaucrat promises to protect you from the possible danger of your neighbor opening a slaughterhouse next door, by setting up complicated zoning requirements and building codes, the tradeoff is not potential or possible, it is very real.  It is the tradeoff of everybody’s property being worth less than it would be otherwise because they have lost a substantial amount of freedom to do with their own property what they see fit.

Our little church building in Limon is very old.  We are growing and the building is not meeting our needs all that well any more.  We would like to do some work on it, possibly expanding it.  To do so, we have to meet a complex set of building code requirements like putting in curb and gutter, bringing our bathrooms, plumbing and power up to code, even meeting aesthetic guidelines set by our town’s building code.  Yes, every one of these requirements has a benefit- better handicap access, better safety, better access to the property and the like.  But every one of these requirements also has a cost.  That cost is money and time.  Money to pay for it and time to understand all the codes and get it done.  Every one of those requirements results in an increased likelihood that we will simply do nothing and keep making do with our old building.

I hear this story frequently from my other pastor friends.  Their buildings are old, outdated, no longer suitable. But doing anything about it requires complying with a huge list of codes, depending on where they’re located.  Most of these churches have limited resources.  So they just make do as best they can.

And there is another cost associated with all these bureaucrats, and that other cost is all these bureaucrats.  They are, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “eating up our substance.”  Every one of them has to be paid.  So they impose a cost by restricting freedom, and they impose a cost again in requiring taxes and fees to pay their salaries.  These bureaucrats then constantly lobby for the importance and necessity of their departments, constantly working to increase their own budgets and workforces.  And this is what they do with those ever-increasing budgets.

Many conservative thinkers point out that when you give someone welfare, or a corn subsidy, or a guaranteed loan for college or for new technology, or whatever else, that money has to come from somewhere.  True enough, as far as it goes.  But it doesn’t go far enough.  If I give someone a dollar in a welfare payment, that dollar has to come from someone else, and it comes at the point of a gun shoved in that other person’s face.  They may call it “contributions” or whatever else, but the fact is, if I don’t pay my taxes I go to jail.  So the dollar in welfare payments or corporate subsidies require a dollar taken from someone else.  But that doesn’t even properly understand the problem.  If I am to pay the welfare recipient a dollar, I have to take two dollars from someone else- one dollar for the money to pay the welfare recipient, and one dollar to pay the bureaucrat who manages the program, the IRS agent who collects the money, and all of the other government infrastructure to manage the thing.  These bureaucrats constantly angle to increase their power and position.  This is why it is so hard to ever cut government, because the government itself is trying with all its might to increase its own power and influence.  Every dollar that the government spends is a little bit more of this economy they control.  That’s why even the most inefficient, wasteful, redundant, foolish programs are so hard to cut.  It has nothing to do with how effective those programs are and everything to do with how much of the economy they control.  They want it all.  They think that the problem right now with the country is that the public sector isn’t big enough.

“The private sector is doing fine.”  “You didn’t build that.”  “Repeat the success of the auto bailout with every industry”- the auto bailout that cost the taxpayers billions, stiffed the bondholders and the non-union workers in favor of unions, and resulted in major government ownership of of two of the nation’s biggest companies.  When are we going to start taking these people at their words?  They do not believe that we peasants can run our own lives without the help of a million dukes and barons and counts giving us permission to breathe every time we turn around and telling us how to do it.  How did this happen?  How did this nation that was born out of a desire for freedom from all these petty tyrants once again become enslaved to petty tyrants?

Men cannot save us from the sorrows of this life.  Only God can save us, and He has done so through His Son Jesus Christ.  Any man that comes along pretending he can protect you from every risk is just trying to enslave you and eat up your substance.  Trust God.  Don’t trust man.  Stop letting these petty tyrants terrify you into letting them eat up your substance with a million bogus promises to save you from all the evils in the world.  Take responsibility for your own life and encourage others to do the same.

The phrase “Tastes like Hate” was spraypainted on the side of a Chick-fil-A the other day, in protest against the political views of their owners.  One of the claims is that they supported a bill in Uganda to kill homosexuals, a charge which seems to be false.  But the larger issue is the question of language.  Supporters of gay marriage say that opponents of gay marriage are guilty of “hate”, a word that, like “racism”, is rapidly being emptied of all content.

I do not hate homosexuals.  I know a couple of people who do, who really just want to beat up or ridicule gay people, but they are the tiny minority of the Christian community and certainly not representative of that community or any of its leadership.  There are people who simply want to attack anyone around them for any reason, and people being gay is a convenient focus.

Virtually everyone I know really making a case against homosexual behavior or gay marriage does so because they believe that such behavior is extremely harmful to the one doing it.  If we hated the people doing it, we would simply keep our mouths shut and let them destroy themselves.  It is precisely because our Lord commanded us to love others that we feel obligated to speak up against the behavior and lifestyle that is destroying them.

That is a question of fact.  Is it actually harmful to oneself to practice a homosexual lifestyle?  According to the Bible, it unquestioningly is, because living in unrepentant sin will result in eternal condemnation.  That’s very bad, very harmful.  Even in this life, we believe that homosexual behavior leads to a great many problems.  Again, a question of fact.  Many believe that these claims are wrong, that there is no hell, or that homosexuality is not a sin, or that children raised in same-sex households are just as healthy and well-off as children raised in traditional family structures.  These are all questions of fact- these claims are either true or they’re not, or they’re partly true and partly not.

But when you start the discussion by saying that I am a liar, that I am not motivated by love for homosexuals at all but in fact by hatred for them, then the discussion is not going to go anywhere.

But this appears to be intentional.  George Lakoff argues that the liberal should never engage, should never even acknowledge that the conservatives even have an argument.  They should simply frame the debate in a way which makes conservatives look evil and keep pounding away at that message.  So we are against gay marriage because we hate gay people.  We are opposed to welfare because we are racist and hate the poor.  We are opposed to abortion because we hate and fear women and want to keep them under control.  No conservative thinker I know, academic or popular or otherwise, ever makes such arguments, either in public or in private.  I reject all of them, and any conservative who espoused them would be rejected by the conservative community as a whole.  John Derbyshire got fired from National Review just for coming kind of close.

When I read leftist sites or engage with liberals, for the most part this is all I see.  Go spend a while reading DailyKos, for example, if you can stomach it.  They refuse to deal with any of the actual arguments real conservatives make, instead asserting that the arguments we use are not our real motivations.  Their understanding of the Republican party is basically this- there are a bunch of rich white guys who control the country and want ever more and more money, and they trick the poor racist ignoramuses of the country through fears of gays and minorities into supporting them.  And that’s it.  That is their entire understanding of conservatism.  They dismiss all the arguments of Milton Friedman and Adam Smith and Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk and Ronald Reagan and Thomas Sowell and all the rest of them, and simply state that we’re stupid racists being tricked by rich white puppet-masters into giving them all the power and money.

How can we actually have a conversation?  I understand and will engage the liberal arguments.  I will accept that the liberal is trying to help the poor and oppressed.  We have a disagreement about the best way to help the poor and oppressed.  I think that government programs are the opposite of what is needed.  But they will not accept that I even want to help the poor and oppressed.  They just call me an ignorant racist hater.

So who here is guilty of hate?  Who is refusing to even talk?  Who is desiring not to help the other side of the debate, but to destroy it?

Chick-fil-A is not guilty of hate or bigotry.  They are guilty of a difference of opinion about what is best for those who experience same-sex attraction.  Liberals are guilty of hatred and bigotry.  They don’t want to engage the conservative Christian argument.  They just want to destroy conservative Christians.

In case anyone is wondering, I’ve temporarily deactivated my Facebook account.  I’m preparing for a class in a couple of weeks and need to minimize distractions.  I’ll probably be back later.  I will still post to this blog from time to time.

 Zechariah 2:7 “Up, Zion! Escape, you who dwell with the daughter of Babylon.”
 8 For thus says the LORD of hosts: “He sent Me after glory, to the nations which plunder you; for he who touches you touches the apple of His eye.”

If we understand the true nature of Israel, and what role Israel plays in God’s redemptive history, we will be a lot less concerned with Middle Eastern politics and a lot more concerned with how we treat the local church and the believers in that church.  The church is Zion, the Israel of God, the seed of Abraham by faith. He who attacks or neglects the church does it to Christ, to the apple of God’s eye.