Why I support Herman Cain

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.

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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.^↩