"Most Americans don’t want much. They don’t want the whole pie. There are some who do, but most Americans feel blessed just being able to thrive a little bit. But that is becoming even more out of reach. The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more." - Michelle Obama

Sounds good, right? Sacrifice for those who don't have as much. The problem with this is that it is based on the assumption that there is only one pie of a fixed size. The reality is that we are continually baking more pies. We generate new wealth through work. If I gain, it does not mean that someone else must lose. The quote above was included in a post over at another blog. The author had this to say in response:

Let's all work harder to share the wealth with our less able brothers Michelle believes, while wearing a $900 suit. I too ponder on such sentiments, usually when I've re-read Atlas Shrugged, a book perhaps meant to be historical but becoming more prophetic.

The present state of our nation, the political events, and ideals of today are so grotesquely irrational and so disturbingly true to the base points of the book, that it can't be anything else.

Later, she lays out the choice we face every time we go to the polls and vote in a partisan election, one which is especially stark this November:

As this election looms, we are in a struggle between capitalism and socialism attractively packaged as "change". With someone and their supporting party, talking of controls and "sacrifices", taxes, and coercions they would impose, what arbitrary powers they would enact, what "social remedies" they would hand out, without really telling us, the American people, what groups these gains would be expropriated. What they do imply, though with their vague promises of health care, and free education and free this and free that, is clear. That is, with the help of increased taxes and more from the pockets of the working classes, their power over a nation's economy, any kind or degree of said power, rests on the basic principal of statism, the principal that the working man's life belongs to the state.

Obama talks about Change. Obama talks about freedom. Freedom in the political sense means freedom from government coercion. It does NOT mean freedom from an employer, from a landlord, freedom from the laws of supply and demand, or freedom from the laws of nature. Laws which do not guarantee prosperity to every man.

I was not looking forward to voting for McCain, though his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as running mate will make it easier for me to do so. The alternative is summed up in the penultimate paragraph:

What this "change" appears to me to be is a social system based on the "nanny state", an altruist society, with its code of self sacrifice, rather than the building of individual wealth, the antithesis of capitalism. It is socialism, which, in all it's mutated forms, fascism, Nazism, Communism, treats us as a sacrificial animal to be plundered for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the state. The final product of which would be a country in which the best and the brightest put down their thinking caps, and let their talents languish, as they derive no personal benefit from it.

We all have a choice to make. I only ask that you think about it before you make it. Use your brain, and don't base your choice solely on your feelings.