Tonight I had a discussion on voting with Allison. She asked me what it meant. I explained, “It’s like when mommy asks you if you want cereal or toast for breakfast, and when you pick one that is voting for it.” She said, “Or pancakes?” I said, “sure, or picking pancakes over the other choices.”

I then added the democratic majority wrinkle. I explained, “If 10 people were asked to vote, and you said you wanted pancakes, but the other 9 wanted toast, then you would all have to have toast.” She said, “I wouldn’t like that.” I said, “Sometimes I don’t like it either.”

Michelle had talked with her earlier about voting and told her about my decision to not vote for any of the Presidential candidates. So she said, “Mommy said you didn’t vote for one.” I told her, “If you had to vote for food, and you had to pick tomatoes or sausage (two things she doesn’t like) which would you pick?” She said, “I wouldn’t vote for either.” And neither did I.

In other news the barbie lamp won in a historic vote, defeating fish by a narrow margin of one vote and “play games on iPhone” defeated “go to sleep now” by a similarly narrow margin.

“A government of laws, and not of men.” -John Adams

This statement rang out loud and clear to me when I saw the Extent of Federal Regulation made concrete, here.

What John Adam’s statement makes clear is the essential fact in a proper government that the law must be knowable and objective not subject to arbitrary whims of arbitrary men.

This does not mean 25 feet thick of books of regulations, and 6 feet of laws. When both are being added to at a rate of thousands of new laws and regulations per year, you have a situation where it is not possible to know in a single lifetime what is permissible action in a free society.

I do not advocate anarchy, rather objective law. It is impossible to have objective law when every action could require months or years of research to determine if it is punishable by the state. This of course is only the Federal regulations. Every state and town has their own collections of law books.

The solution, stop and repeal. The obvious starting point for repeal is any and all regulations that handcuff industry. And stop all of the regulation mills. There are many government agencies that issue Rules. Congress has delegated it’s law making responsibility to faceless, nameless, and unaccountable bureaucrats.

Dr. Leonard Peikoff, friend and intellectual heir to Ayn Rand, publishes a podcast approximately every other week. Despite the fact that he generally refuses to talk publicly about narrow political questions, he took some time in his October 20 podcast to discuss the current batch of candidates. He managed in a few sentences to say the obvious about each of the candidates in a way that would be funny if one of these gangs wouldn’t be the head of the Executive branch of the United States of America on January 20th.

I think McCain comes across as a tired moron. Obama as a lying phony. Biden as an enjoyably hilarious windbag. And Sarah Palin as an opportunist struggling to learn how to become a moron a phony and a windbag.

He gave some additional brief commentary as to why none of the Presidential candidates is fit to take office. If you think there is still some reason to choose one over the other but aren’t sure which you may want to listen, it could give starting points for further investigation.

I decided some time ago that I will not vote for any presidential candidate. It was with that decision in mind that Dr. Peikoff’s statement takes on a tragic humor and does cause me a brief chuckle.

Today Alan Greenspan stated, “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

He’s shocked? That’s surprising. He, himself, wrote about the result of government intervention in the economy, in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Maybe he should pick up a copy and try and understand his role in the destruction.

I came across a blog post, by David P. Reed regarding the recent FCC order on Comcast. His post, FCC Order on Comcast - a good job, the order and his formal response to the FCC are offensive to the concept of private property.

His blog entry solicits comments, so I submitted one quoted as follows:

“The Internet is a world-wide system that does not belong to any one operator, whether providing access lines or backbone transport.”

And without the individual operators, who built, operate and own their parts of the network where would your world-wide system be?

Taking away the use and disposal benefits while retaining the pretense of private ownership is socialistic, immoral and wrong.

And if the moralistic view is to abstract, then consider, who will bother to innovate and create the networks of the future when eventually some mob is going to claim their collective non-contractual “rights” over this innovation. Especially now that we are all officially on notice that, “the C