Minor Thoughts from me to you

Fred Thompson gave a great speech this morning, exhorting Republicans to get out the vote. It's just unfortunate that his candidate is John McCain. While John McCain might be better than Barack Obama on economic issues, I'm not really convinced that he would be. McCain is a deficit hawk who would be comfortable raising taxes in order to pay for the recent bailouts and his proposed increases in defense spending. McCain is an economic populist who hates profits and "greedy" businessmen. McCain is an economic populist who believes the government needs to buy mortgages to bailout homeowners.

No thanks.

But this speech is great motivational material for anyone thinking of voting for Bob Barr. An excerpt:

All of this is important, because how we respond to our economic challenge is more important than the crisis itself. For the last 25 years the United States, and indeed the world, has enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. You wouldn't know it from listening to Obama, but worldwide over 1 billion people have been able to lift themselves out of poverty. This is due to America's influence, from our defense of freedom in World War II to the Cold War, to the ascendency of our free-market capitalism, the adoption of open trade policies, and globalization. Yet some say our current financial difficulties are evidence that we should turn our back on our founding, free market principles ... that it's time for big changes.

But in a world that is increasingly inter-connected by jobs, trade and global finance, how our economy is viewed by the rest of the world is extremely important to America's economic well being. The worst thing in the world we could do is appear to be unfriendly to investment and trade with an economy constrained and made uncompetitive by layers upon layers of new regulations, and bogged down in the divisiveness of class warfare. Yet if you are to take them at their word this is precisely the direction that an Obama administration and a Democratic Congress would take us, turning a short term recession into a long term economic decline for the United States.

And while our regulatory regime needs to be examined and improved, we should be clear: capitalism is not the cause of our nation's economic challenges. The subprime mortgage crisis was not rooted in lack of regulation, but in bad policies made by Democrats in Congress that forced banks to give mortgages to people who could not afford the houses they were buying. These are the same politicians who protected the excesses and fraudulent conduct of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are the same ones who now want to control the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars to solve the problem they helped create, and who tried to slip $200 billion into the first bailout bill for their political cronies in ACORN, the organization that is now systemically perpetrating voter registration fraud around the country. This record, Obama and the Democrats say, entitles them to total control of all of the levers of power in Washington.

Under an Obama-Reed-Pelosi scenario nothing will restrain them from making the secret ballot in union elections be a thing of the past. The so called "fairness doctrine" will likely be passed, restricting free speech on talk radio, possibly even the Internet.