In politics, cash rules everything around me....

Jane Galt has an interesting post on why libertarians often vote Republican even if they don't always agree with the social or adgendas of Republicans.

I had a coworker over lunch ask me once "How can you consider yourself Republican? They are against stem cells. And abortion." My response was "well, I pay taxes, but I'm never going to need to have an abortion." Truth be told, I tend to be marginally pro-life on abortion - I don't think it should be illegal, but I don't have a problem with limited restrictions. But arguing about abortion is pointless anyway - as long as Roe V Wade is in effect, it will be legal, and any argument is really just border skirmishes - parental notification, government funding, ect. Stem cells are also a non-issue to me - in an ideal world, the government wouldn't fund so much research, and it wouldn't matter if the federal government doesn't fund certain types of stem cell research because it would all be funded by companies anyway.

But as Jane so ellequently points out, money is a big deal in MadAnthony's life - a way bigger deal than things I wouldn't mind seeing if happen but don't really care if they don't, like drug legalization. Every two weeks, I get my paycheck (OK, my direct deposit slip) and look sadly at how much money I'm paying in taxes. Every month, I get my bill for my state-required car insurance and find myself puzzled why I pay $600 a year to insure my $215,000 townhouse and $2700 a year to insure my $20,000 Ford Ranger pickup (yes, I know - liability. But that raises other issues about our legal system, issues I won't go into in this post).

My biggest disappointment with Bush isn't the war on terror (war is messy, and decisions are made with the best information available at the time) but rather that he couldn't sell his idea of reforming social security. That's something that always puzzles me - why people my age aren't more pissed off about the fact that 15% of their income (the 7.5% in taxes plus the 7.5% "employer contribution" that would otherwise get paid to them) is in all likelyhood getting thrown away by the government instead of invested by them. For every dollar I ear, fifteen cents is getting trashed, and nobody seemed to care. Bush was one of the few people willing to point this out, to stand up and at least try to ever so slightly change this mess, and nobody seemed to care.