Sometimes people ask me who I intend to
vote for in the next election, and I tell them truthfully: Herman
Cain. When I say this people think I'm joking. The reasons for this
seem to be:
1) Herman Cain is not a good candidate
2) I generally speak with such
Colbert-ian levels of irony that everything I say (especially this
post) is generally to be taken with a grain of salt.
But, the truth is Herman Cain is a
terrible candidate and that is exactly the reason that I am voting
for him. The fact that I honestly and truly want a bad candidate to
win underscores one of the key and rarely talked about failings of
our system: namely, that in a system based on self interest, one's
interest might include pain, misery and suffering of others.
First, let's agree that Herman Cain
should, in a perfect world, not be president. He has no foreign
policy experience, no political experience, and in the dominant issue
of our time, the economy, he seems completely clueless. His key
economic proposal is the "9-9-9" plan.1 The
9-9-9 plan as Cain describes it essentially calls for a 9% corporate
tax, 9% income tax, and 9% sales tax. This is not a good plan. This
massively lowers taxes on high brackets and raises it on the poorer
47% of Americans who actually don't pay income tax under the current
code. Revenue short falls under this code would be tremendous. 2; Cain has also gone on record as saying that the problems with the housing market could be fixed if
the government got out of the banks way and let the banks help all
those people stay in their houses. This is possibly the most
ridiculous statement made by any person ever. As one who works daily
with people trying to keep their homes, let me tell you that
statement is silly. You have a better chance of being struck by
lightning that receiving a principal write-down from Bank of America.
I have seen hostage negotiators give up in frustration in dealing
with banks over a loan modification. That's right, it is less frustrating to deal with Al
Queda than a major bank. According to Herman Cain, these banks who
have essentially spent the last four years giving the finger to
anyone who had the audacity to ask for their help, are the exact
people we should trust to help keep people in their homes now. This
is the rough equivalent to entrusting airport security to the
Taliban.
On top of the lack of experience and
glaring stupidity of his economic policy, Cain also has numerous
allegations of sexual harassment surrounding him. I'm not
saying I believe any of these allegations; they seem as credible as a
paternity suit against Justin Beiber. However, the fact that he put
himself in a postion where not one, but several potential
gold-diggers, could even bring these accusations calls into question
his judgment and moral character. Rick Perry is far more sleezy than
Cain and yet he seems to have kept his bimbo eruptions under control.
How can a man with this kind of moral haze around him, who does not
have the excuse of being married to Hillary Clinton, aspire to be the
leader of the free world? I submit to you, Herman Cain is a terrible
candidate and his policies would lead to economic chaos and
devastation and hurt the country. That is why, Herman Cain is the
man I am voting for.
Why would I want someone as clearly bad as Herman Cain? Like most good lawyers, I make my
living off of other people's misfortunes. In my case, I practice
Bankrutpcy Law. Bankruptcy has been in a boom the last few years.
First as people filed to save their houses. Now, As the economy
further deteriorates, people who would never have dreamed of filing
bankruptcy are now finding it is their only option. Lately I see
people lose their jobs, try their hardest to keep current on their
obligations but eventually burn through their savings. When they ask
for understanding and help from financial institutions to whom they
have been good and loyal clients they are rewarded with contempt and
abuse. They find that the Banks and Lenders they paid faithfully for
years have buried clauses into their contracts that allow them to
dramatically raise interest rates and pile on fees. People find that
when they are already desperate and sinking, their creditors stand
ready to lead them out into deeper waters and watch them drown. It's
a terrible tragedy, but without it I couldn't put food on my table.
I won't lie, the housing crisis is the
greatest thing that has ever happened to me. It caused Bankruptcy
filings to increase exponentially. The Obama administration has
proved stunningly incompetent in dealing with the crisis, and I thank
them for that. Without the many Obama programs dedicated to giving
the illusion of help, without actually giving meaningful relief, I
could never have bought my 55" flat screen TV. If the HAMP
program were actually designed to work, or if the president actually
got tough and imposed consequences on banks for treating people like
dirt, I would not be able to watch football in HD. I owe a lot to
the Obama Administration. Their demonstrated ineptness has been very
good to me. Still, I think Herman Cain might be even better to me.
I realize that many people may
consider me a horrible person for saying this, but I don't want an
economic recovery. I want the housing market to stay soft and real
unemployment to remain in double digits. I have student loans and
the more bankruptcies I file, the faster they get paid off. The fact
is, my self interest demands that the economy stay in ruins, so the
person I want to be president is the person who is most likely to
keep the economy circling the drain. I believe that person to be Herman Cain. Granted, none of the other
republican candidates is really all that promising and the problems
with the economy are so severe that no one may be able to fix them,
but why take a chance? While I'm content that Obama is bad at
getting the economy on track, there is a very good chance that Herman
Cain will actively make things worse.
For those of you who think that voting
my self-interest makes me a bad person, I have to disagree. If any
of you are Republican, you can't think negatively of my position
without being a gross hypocrite. Self interest, we are told, is the
cornerstone of democracy. Ayn Rand wrote lengthy diatribes about how
the noblest virtue is the pursuit of one's own self-interest. Atlas
Shrugged is a billion page love note to pursuing self interest, and
it is the basis of the entire republican party. Self-Interest is the
entire foundation of Capitalism. If you in any way have a problem
with me intentionally tanking the system to get ahead then you are a
fraud and a liar.
The fact that it is in my self
interest to have the worst person possible elected president
highlights one of the basic flaws in modern republican thinking.
Modern republican ideology dictates that man should pursue self
interest, government should be limited and get out of the way of
pursuing my self interest unless I am treading on the rights of
another person or fetus. The problem with this is that for a large
number of people, it is in our self interest to screw everyone else
over.
Want to know why 4 years later there
is no meaningful progress on the housing crisis? Or why credit
default swaps remain unregulated? Because a lot of rich, and
powerful people have a vested interest. That's why. There's lots of
money riding on keeping the status firmly as quo and the fact that it
hurts millions of people is sad, but ultimately not as important as making money.
When you set up a system in which you encourage self interest, and do
not temper it or tame it with a sense of community, of
interdependence, or basic decency, then you get a system in which
people mislead consumers about the credit rating of mortgage backed
securities. You get a system where you sell homes to people who
can't afford them, and then foreclose on the house and leave it empty
rather than sell it back to the prior owner at a reasonable price.
In short, when you set up a system where its every man for himself,
you may wind up alone and unhappy, and broke because it was in
someone else's interest. You may get the kind of system where Herman
Cain is someone's idea of the perfect president.
1 This plan is most familiar as the default tax rate in the computer game "Simcity". Players of the game refer to it as "the tax scheme you need to immediately change if you don't want your town to fail."↩ 2 And please, spare us the argument that when we reduce the taxes on the rich from 33% to 9% that they are going to go invest all of that income and grow the economy. Corporate America is already currently sitting on trillions of dollars capital because of an unstable market, and pretty much have been since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. There's no reason to think they aren't just going to sit on more of it for years to come.↩
