Time to Decide: Part One

As much as I would love to have a viable third party, this is not the election.

True, Ralph Nader fights the good fight. He strives to protect us from corporate greed. That is an important fight in a capitalist country, but it is a fight that is not meant to be won. The battle is crucial. Not the victory. A compromise here, and backdown there. That is what gave us strong unions, a strong economy, a strong labor force. But to elect Ralph Nader is to succumb to the Workers-of-the-World-Unite mentality and to lose the private business sector we rely upon so heavily because business is what supports us all.

I had a conversation with some communists who were trying to unionize a small factory in a small town. The workers needed a union: they had unsafe working conditions – fatal industrial accidents were an annual event; unhealthy working conditions – long time workers ended up reliant on oxygen and hearing aides; low paid workers – who could not afford to purchase the very products their sweat had made. The people who actually produced did not share in the wealth.

I learned an important lesson that day. The longer I let them talk, the more I learned about the depths of their beliefs. It is amazing how much you can learn with your mouth shut and your ears open. The more they explained their goals, the more bizarre their ideal world became until all peoples were workers and all workers worked eight hours a day. Doctors, artists, teachers, scientists were not defined as workers; they were hobbyists. To earn the right to food and shelter, everyone must work eight hours a day with their hands to produce, make, create, or farm something tangible. They deemed everything else frivolity. Anything spiritual or intellectual or philanthropic had no value.

For the communal good, of course.

That is a very interesting goal for the world. All proletariat serving one massive machine. Till we die.

Sigh. As much as I like Nader, he does not get my vote this year. Part One is an easy chapter.