I’ve voted in every single election every November since I turned 18. This will be the first time I refuse to vote.

Truth be told, I would prefer that Trump be president if I had to choose between him and Biden and there were no other considerations. Biden has almost nothing going for him, while Trump has a little bit going for him. However, my concern isn’t for the next four years. My concern is for the next 100 years. What will be best for America and my family over the next 100 years. I’m willing to sacrifice four years of bad times if, it means that my great, great grandchildren are better off in 100 years.

Here are a few of my reasons.

1. Trump doesn’t meet the biblical requirements for a leader. If that was the only reason, that would be adequate, wouldn’t it, Christian?
2. Christians should only vote for people who meet biblical requirements. We’ve fouled that up for 2016 and 2020 elections by nominating Trump, who doesn’t meet the requirements. The best thing that could happen would be for Christians to refuse to vote for Trump (and Biden). This would cause Trump to lose, and we would suffer for the next four years, but Republicans would be darn sure to find candidates that met biblical requirements for many years to come.
3. All people are created in God’s image, and have a God-given conscience. If Christians could use Scripture in future campaigns to teach people biblical principles and show why a certain candidate should be elected, who does meet the biblical requirement, and appeal to people’s conscience, I think that would go a long way to elect a godly president.
4. American government rejects Jesus Christ as Lord. It is impossible to operate in a secular manner. If you believe that murder should be illegal, you’re establishing a religion, or submitting to some religion. Since American government is based on some false religion, I choose not to legitimize it by participating. I don’t think it’s a sin to vote, and I would under certain circumstances.
5. Taxation is theft. Trump is in favor of slightly less theft via income tax than Biden, but Trump hasn’t done anything about the dozens of other types of theft. In fact, Trump increased theft in some areas by placing tariffs on steel. If Biden wants 50% of my income to be stolen by all the various forms of taxation, and Trump is just fine with 45%, and thinks he’s done something great by only stealing 45% of my income, he’s just a tyrant.
6. Trump is pro-choice no matter how much Christians insist otherwise. You can read his own words. He’s in favor of murdering certain babies, just not as many as liberals.

In reality, Biden is only slightly worse than Trump. We may have dug ourselves into such a huge hole with or moral depravity and national debt that it doesn’t matter who is president. America will be a smoking crater in four years. When will God call us to account for 60 million murdered babies and all our other sins and theft?

Stop wasting time worrying about who is president. Spend the other 364 days per year focused on doing the things we can do, and work to advance the kingdom of God where we can–locally, with our own family and neighborhood. I have many ideas for everyday steps we can take to advance God’s kingdom. But the strategy for most Christians seems to be to declare each election to be the most important ever, and for the rest of the year lament how this country is going to hell in a hand basket and do nothing about it except give up and say there’s nothing we can do but wait for Jesus to return. I reject that end-times view and believe that Christ will return when all His enemies are under his feet.

This is a conversation I’m having on Facebook. I hate to admit it, but these tea party groups are filled with people who seem especially unintelligent. I’m not saying I’m that smart, but as I deal with other groups, I face much more interesting and challenging debates and conversations in other forums.

Below is the conversation, and I’ll post the video I’m referring to below the picture of the conversation. My comment comes after the “conservative” who admits that she wants security services she can’t afford.

At 0: 56, the cop says, “You’re responsible as a citizen of the United states to dispel any services in that way.” First off, that is nonsensical, and she should be forced to take a sobriety test before driving anywhere. Secondly, it is completely false that we have to cooperate with police until we’re under arrest or being interrogated. I keep asking the question whether police actually believe the stuff they say, or whether they’re just lying. Surely, she can’t be that stupid, so she must be lying. But then again, she does seem pretty stupid, so maybe it’s not so crazy that she’s borderline retarded.

The PR for the thin blue line says they protect our rights. Now, most people you run into who worship the police really are so stupid that they actually have bought into that. But are the more professional cop apologists that stupid, or are they lying?

Either way, the PR for the police says they’re protecting our rights, which would certainly include the 4th and 5th Amendments. But that is demonstrably false, as I’ve shown on this blog many times. So, the police are so confident that what they’re doing is so great, that they’re willing to force me to pay for their services via sales tax and property tax, not counting whatever money they receive from the federal government. Yet what they are providing isn’t what they say they’re providing. They’re committing fraud on an enormous scale, and I want my money back.

I hope they sue the crap out of this police department. 

This is a very good video. But let’s say you disagree completely that the cops provide bad service. You think they provide great service. So what? The arguments still stand. Your neighbors shouldn’t be forced to use the same service you choose to.

Here’s a video where a conservative defends a big-government welfare-based government monopoly, and a liberal puts forth alternative free market solutions.

The liberal talks about Latinx and Trans people and other liberal buzz words, which rubs me the wrong way. The conservative shows such little respect for liberty and justice. No wonder we’re in such a mess.

Here’s my response to the video:

I don’t think this guy has ever thought critically about the police for a single millisecond. It is rare for police to ever stop a crime in progress. So police aren’t for protection. In fact, they aren’t even legally obligated to protect you. Ideally speaking, they are there to find criminals after they’ve committed the crime and bring them to justice. Their other purpose, which never comes up in government PR, is that police are there to collect taxes.

Even in cases like terrorist shootings that he mentions, police rarely protect anyone. At Columbine, police hid outside in fear, even after the shooters killed themselves.  The conservative never explains why hundreds of thousands of cops across the country are necessary for a couple of shootings a year. Why can’t citizens with an AR-15 respond to situations like that? They couldn’t do much worse than the cops.

He then talks about a lady being murdered and trying to call 911, and being told there are no police. Again, it’s rare for police to show up to prevent a crime in progress, so the whole thing is just a fantasy. Wouldn’t a better solution be to have an app on your phone that you can alert your neighbors that you need help. And wouldn’t it be nice for the men in the neighborhood to be men and show up to help to show that they love someone enough to potentially lay down their lives for someone else? We don’t have to do that, because we pay the government to do it.

The conservative then raises the question of how we could deal with situations like shoplifting. Maybe the same way the founding fathers dealt with crime before police, when we were still a free people. The police take the information from the store, and then try to locate the suspect. That doesn’t have to be done by police. That can be done privately by investigators, bounty hunters and the courts, which is how early America did it. Read this excellent article on that history.

Then, the liberal says that the job of cops is to manufacture criminals. I think that isn’t the day-to-day mindset of the cop on the street, but I think that is true. With the tough-on-crime mentality of the latter half of the 1900s, politicians made a lot of things illegal that weren’t illegal, and increased prison sentences dramatically. I’ve also heard that there are district attorneys offices whose budgets are wildly too big with a lot of extra staff. What does a prosecuting attorney with nothing to do start looking for? What will happen when we start putting cops in every junior high and high school? You’re going to get more criminals. There have been cases where private prisons bribe judges to send them inmates. This is not far fetched, and the conservative is just not well informed. It’s not exactly surprising that cops aren’t told this, or that this isn’t in the government PR message.

Then the conservative mocks the idea of policing for profit, and says that cops only make $30,000 per year. I suppose there are some places where cops aren’t well paid, but there are also cops who are making great money, and even have pensions worth a couple million. Check out this Forbes story on that.

And the conservative makes fun of the idea that poorly-paid cops are going around trying to put money in other people’s pocket. Well feast your eyes on the video below. Oftentimes they’re trying to put money in their own pocket, as has been verified in local newspapers over the last week or so.

He then goes on to say that cops need to be one step ahead of criminals as far as militarization goes. Criminals have an AR-15 so why go against them with a pistol? The whole point of the 2nd Amendment is that the people are to be as well-armed as the government.

The people are paying the police to protect the citizens, but the police seem much more concerned about their own safety than those they’re paid to protect.

The liberal makes a great point that to end police, their budgets need to be cut. The conservative says that budgets are too small as it is, and for more training, they need more money. That is crazy as far as I’m concerned. When you see 6 or 10 or 15 cops show up to a simple call, it seems like the best thing to do is lay off about 90% of cops. When I’ve had the cops called on me for doing perfectly legal evangelism on a public street, 8 cops showed up. They must have been bored stiff that night.

Starting around 5:15 to 5:53, he then makes a point that I think is important. He says that all shootings are different and have different policies, training, etc. This is something that I’ve been harping on for a long time. Arizona defines murder in a different way than Indiana, which is different from Mississippi. Is it the government’s job to define murder. I have a Christian friend who said officers were justified in one particular incident, and he appealed to state law. Ok, Christian, if you allow the state to define murder, abortion is perfectly legitimate, because the state says so. God defines murder, and every cop who kills someone will stand before God and be judged by His clear and precise law. God will not judge anyone based on Colorado law.

He then mocks the liberal idea of rapid response justice teams saying that cops are that system. But that presupposes that cops bring justice, and the government isn’t stealing to fund their very existence. But he’s clearly someone who hasn’t thought about this stuff very much and seems to worship government power. Here is where he most blatantly shows that he’s a big-government conservative, and cares not a wit about free-market solutions, but in forcing his chosen solution on everyone based on force.

And he thinks the state-sanctioned rapid response justice team is automatically better than the free market rapid response justice team. It’s like he thinks the government people are magical, and this service is only possible through the power of the state. I think a lot of the same people would be involved in the free market security service, except that they could much more easily be held accountable.

So that is it. I’ve debated many people on this, and I never get rational arguments. All they have to offer is emotions.

Sometimes I wonder what it will take to convince people that the police are an occupying army roving our streets. Surely if they killed an innocent man from the turret of one of their armored SWAT vehicles that would convince people.

THEY DID.

Here’s an interesting video where Carrier (HVAC company) announces to their workers in Indianapolis that they’re moving the factory to Mexico.

I don’t know why they’d announce such a thing with more than a year’s warning. Those workers are now angry and likely to not put forth full effort. There could be a lot of factors I don’t know about, of course, but I would tell them at 5:00 the day they’re laid off.

Why is a Mexican workforce so much cheaper than an American workforce? Because the U.S. government puts all kinds of barriers in place for employers and employees. When, for example, government makes a law giving employees a new right, it just makes employees that much more expensive. Government has stepped into the relationship between employer and employee and dictated to both that the employer has to do X, and the employee must receive X. Neither has any choice in the matter.

The employee can’t opt to reject that benefit in order to be more competitive, or even to receive the benefit as a pay raise. That new benefit sounds good, but in reality, the employee is paying for it, or he’s pricing himself out of the market, and in the case of Carrier, the employee’s competitor is a Mexican.

Minimum wage is a more concrete example. In Seattle, the city has dictated that minimum wage is $15. The entry-level worker earning minimum wage may not be producing $15 worth of value for his employer. In that case, the entry-level guy will be laid off, and replaced with someone who can produce $15 or more worth of value. Or some company’s may be able to move out of Seattle, or some jobs can be replaced with computers, such as cashier jobs, where one cashier will monitor several self-checkout systems.

Raising the minimum wage sounds good, but it only hurts those who most need help. Furthermore, if raising it to $15/hour were a good idea, why not $20 or $50?

There are thousands of ways that government interferes in an evil way to price American workers out of the market. The only way for Americans to be competitive and get manufacturing jobs back is to get government out of the picture, and get them to stop meddling. B