First a couple of definitions:

Violence: Using force or the threat of force to do something to someone else against their will.

Immoral: Something is immoral if it makes life worse.

These are not a perfect definitions but hopefully they help to describe what I mean.

For starters I have to admit that the quote “You can’t legislate morality” is a bit vague and easy to misunderstand, but that’s almost always a problem with these easy to say/remember axioms.

A longer, less ambiguous way to say what I mean would be:

Just because something is immoral does not mean there should be a law making it illegal.

Another way to put it would be:

If you want to justify a law to make X illegal you need a better argument then just demonstrating that X is immoral.

And:

You should not try to legislate morality.

And:

The standard for having a law to make X illegal (and punishing people who are guilty of X) should be that X is an act of violence not just that it is immoral.

Here’s a picture that might help too.

So all the stuff in the big circle is immoral stuff (stuff I do not want people to do). However in order for me to think we need a law to make any given immoral act illegal it also need to be a violent act.

Why? I’m glad you asked. There are lots of reasons. However this is the main one.

It is bad to be the aggressor. So the first person to resort to violence is the bad person.

If someone is doing something immoral but is not being violent and someone else uses violence to stop them from doing it they become the aggressor and are now also acting immorally.

This is what’s called the Non-agression-principle.

The non-aggression principle is an important part of my moral framework and it should be a part of yours.

This was my first time voting absentee and it was super easy. The lady at the election office was nice too, she kept calling me “this nice guy” (or something like that). It was kind of strange, but she was very helpful.

I voted.

I packed last night so after voting I threw the gear in Carol and hit the road. I listened to some pod casts including a good one from this American Life about unconditional love. I also started the Omnivores Dilemma. It’s pretty good so far. I kinda wonder if he’s not being too pessimistic and too hard on the industrialization of agriculture, but there’s a lot of book left so we’ll see where Mr Pollan goes with it.

Carol, ready for the big trip.

I stopped in Eau Claire for lunch. I didn’t know this until I did some research for this trip, but pretty much all McDonald’s have free Wi-Fi.

The wind today was crazy. I think I heard on the radio near Madison it was gusting up to 60mph. I had keep both hands on the wheel most of the time especially when I got closer to Madison. Carol is not very heavy and the wind was smacking her around quite a bit. The most “exciting” moment was when an 18 wheeler in front of us almost flipped over. Well… it looked like it almost flipped over, the back tires on the windward side of the trailer all got off the ground. I guess I’ve never seen a truck flip over (in real life) so I don’t know how close it really was… but I was close enough my heart didn’t slow down for the next half an hour.

Anyway, I got to Madison the meet up with Kate and Jeff (Kate is a friend I meet in college and Jeff is her husband). I had forgotten to call them until a couple of days ago. I lucked out though and they were able to hang out. Jeff made an amazing dinner. The main dish was a pork curry with cocoanut and rice. They showed me around Madison and we went to a really good donut shop. Madison is a pretty cool town.

The first is a two part youtube video is only about 10 minutes long. This is my favorite explanation so far. It’s very well done.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized – Part 1

The Crisis of Credit Visualized – Part 2

The second is from the NPR show “This American Life“. It’s a recent episode called “Bad Bank“. It is longer, but it’s also very entertaining. They go into a little of of the “why” and “how to fix it” too. Personally I find there treatment of those questions wanting, but their explanation of how banks work and what the current problem is, is quite good.

If you read their notes on the show you will find a CSPAN video where Treasury Secretary Tim Geither praises the episode. This make me nervous, I have some serious disagreements with Geither policies. However I suppose that could be considered a sign that the show is just a good explanation of what is going on.

Naturally once you understand these two explinations, it’s time to move into asking more detailed questions about why this happened, and how to fix it. Hopefully I will write some more posts soon hilighting my favorite ideas.

1.  Monetary Policy, protecting the strength of our currency. Inflation is the worst kind of tax,  and we can do a lot of things right as a nation, but if our money is not worth anything, making things better is going to be much harder.
2. Foreign Policy. We need to start minding our own business. Initially we need our attitude to change so foreign governments do not view us as a threat. Long term, we need to get military bases out of foreign countries and end “entangling alliances”.
3. Protect personal freedom and privacy.
4. Fiscal responsibility. Get rid of the national debt as soon as possible.

As far as I can tell neither of the presidential candidates plan to make any of these a priority. Am I wrong?

I would like a presidential candidate who agrees with me on 3 out of 4 of these issues.

Who could I vote for?