“Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
– C.S. Lewis
This scenario seems to have infected the Republican Party.
We were told that George W. Bush was a racist, that John McCain is scary, and that Mitt Romney is dangerous and has to be stopped. Now there’s nothing left to say of Donald Trump when we really need these words – Republicans have become acclimated to these words and political discourse has suffered to the point where it no longer impacts their supporters.
The Donald has suggested that we kill families of evil people. Killing innocent people is literally sociopathic. One of my family members was involved in drug trafficking and one particular deal had gone horribly wrong; in order for the drug lords to recover their money they began to threaten other members of my family - people who had no involvement whatsoever and this was easily the most disgusting thing I’d ever encountered until I heard the applause for a politician who proposed this situation on a national scale.
I’m told of his assets as a leader is that he’s fiscally savvy. Predictably, for a man who’s declared bankruptcy four times, his business acumen isn’t remarkable upon inspection. His businesses don’t outperform market averages. He’s made his money in real estate and real estate investing is one of the most facile and mindless ways to make money - I know this because I do it myself and because I sell mortgages and speak with these individuals every day - Trump simply had more startup capital than me and most of my clients. With the Art of the Deal, a successful financial endeavor, the concept was proposed to him by Random House Publishing and executed by a ghost writer named Tony Schwartz. He’s not a savvy businessman; he’s a self-promoter.
Milton Friedman once said in one of his speeches (I can’t remember which) that free trade is the greatest form of consumer protection. If Canada can produce lumber for a cheaper price than an American company, and an American farmer can produce corn for a cheaper price than a Canadian farmer, then the ideal situation is that the Americans would receive cheap lumber and the Canadians would receive cheap corn because that’s the situation in which our purchasing power goes the furthest - the situation in which our incomes are the highest. With the money we’ve saved we spend it elsewhere generating further employment; free trade is the situation of the highest incomes and the highest employment. Thanks to NAFTA we have something approaching this ideality. The absurd situation is one in which the governments step in to protect us and charge tariffs on imports, saving the American lumber companies and Canadian corn farmers and impoverishing the rest of us. There’s far more productivity, i.e. wealth for everyone, in Canadians focusing on lumber and Americans focusing on corn. The Donald doesn’t like the ideal situation. He wishes to plunge us into economic nescience by rescinding NAFTA - this is the descent into higher prices and inefficient employment, it’s the descent from prosperity into poverty. Far from being fiscally-savvy it’s his fiscal ignorance that is on full display.
Another pillar of liberty is that of open borders. Socrates established this in Plato’s Crito dialogue in which we are bound to laws as long as we have the freedom to reject the laws and move elsewhere. Operating under the assumption that Mexican immigrants are rapists, the Donald has sold an idea to his supporters of building a wall. One Republican leader fought against racism by abolishing slavery. Another Republican leader stood in front of a wall and admonished Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall. Barriers used to be thing to be overcome so liberty could be ushered in by the GOP. On America’s famous emblem of liberty the words from Emma Lazarus are inscribed: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The message of liberty has been lost in this Republican campaign. Somehow, for reasons legitimately beyond my comprehension we have the infamous example of a butterfly has morphing into a slug.
Another group Trump intends to victimize with anti-immigration are Muslims. I was under the mistaken impression that America preaches freedom of religion and the freedom of expression where individuals have the right to declare their submission to God in any manner they wish, provided they don’t harm other Americans. Trump will reverse this. Unable to give an quotation of a single Bible verse from his favorite book, Trump doesn’t strike me as a theologian and yet he wishes to bring in a theological test for admittance into his country. Muslims from Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey could be the most effective allies in the fight against terrorism and yet he paints them all with a broad brush of terrorist suspects. This is the definition of discrimination and bigotry.
In short, the Donald is a sociopathic, economically-illiterate racist and bigot. He’s evil. He’s something worse than evil. The only argument I’ve heard respectable people give toward voting for Trump is that he’s the lesser of two evils. With that I’ll end with Charles Spurgeon’s exhortation: Of two evils, choose neither.
Brandon Kirby
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