Government policy has gone from who can best manage our communal affairs to who will promise to transfer more from our communal wealth to those with the power to vote themselves a larger share. It is the major issue in the presidential election in the United States and it will be just as large an issue here in 2013. I have an article at Quadrant Online that looks at the contrast between the parties of the right and left both here and in the US. This is the central contrast discussed in the article:

The right has a vision of how a world can be best constructed by leaving each of us the freedom and opportunity to find our own way. It is always an adventure and nothing can be guaranteed, but there are satisfactions in being allowed to build our own lives ourselves and in our own way. But it comes with fewer forms of open-ended government support.

BY contrast, the left is filled with plans for what it will do for us: for ‘the poor’, ‘the disadvantaged’, for women, migrants, Aboriginals, or whoever can be transformed into a victim group and induced to become dependent on government programs, grants and handouts. Socialism is a drug of dependence. It is a narcotic addiction very hard to break.

They used to say about heroin that you shouldn’t try it because it is so incredibly good and then when you’re hooked it sets about ruining your life. It pulls you in and then never lets you go. Same again for socialist non-solutions to our problems. There are communal ways to deal with some of our problems and governments can sometimes help. But it is hard to think of proposals to fix things that came from the collectivist side of politics that actually left things better than they had been before. They may actually exist, I just have trouble remembering what they are.

I assumed that those BBC polls showing massive support worldwide for Obama over Mitt Romney are due to ignorance, the absence of any real dogs in the fight for most of those surveyed and the role of the media which is not quite capable of keeping the truth about Romney from breaking out in America but which has kept the world completely in the dark why Romney should be supported by at least half the American population. All those racist crackers, or something, but there can be no really sensible reason which is why we here in Australia have the Obama advantage over Romney at an astonishing 68% to 7%.

But there is another way of looking at it which is that those responding to the survey questionnaire understand perfectly well what the difference between the two is but even so prefer Obama to Romney. And if that’s the case, then things are really in a political mess just about everywhere and the only hope is that America does elect Mitt Romney who will start the process of reform, first in America and then everywhere else as he stops paying their defence bills for a start.

The European decadence as reflected in their preference for Obama has been raised in a quite interesting article by Michael Ledeen. He calls his article “Letter to My European Friends” which is really just cover for what he means, “You Europeans are a Bunch of Fools”.

The American Revolution was a great thing, and Americans were right to abandon authoritarian Europe for the possibility of creating a free country across the ocean. Anyone who truly values liberty, has to see that Obama is a threat. He wants to turn the United States into a version of Europe: big, meddlesome government, constantly higher levels of taxation and intrusive regulation of almost everything, combined with a deliberate and systematic weakening of military power and a foreign policy that shrinks from decisive action against freedom’s enemies.

That’s you, sadly. So it’s understandable that you’d favor Obama (although the numbers—reminiscent of plebiscites rather than normal elections—are ridiculous). It’s yet another sign of the decadence of Europe

Ledeen continues with a discussion of how far Europe has fallen:

The Europe I loved, and still love, is increasingly a theme park. It’s fun to visit, but it’s no longer a source of creative inspiration. Europeans seem to me to have abdicated their liberties to their governments, provided that the governments provide them with an easy life, replete with free medical care, plenty of vacations, and no international obligations. Surely you know that very few of your tax euros go towards your defense. We have been paying that bill for decades, and our soldiers and military power have been protecting you.

So don’t be surprised—but you should be very concerned—that we are increasingly looking across the Pacific. It’s no accident that the most brilliant and talented Americans are increasingly Asians, not Europeans.

We don’t want to follow your example. And your landslide support of Obama—who has done terrible damage to America—confirms my pessimism about your future.

Australia is not as far gone as Europe but we are getting there. This is going to be a pivotal election next year in Australia as well. The aim of the left is to create power for themselves by causing dependency in others. They are ruining this country by pretending to make it better by softening the edges and making things fairer. Anyone who believes that our Prime Minister cares about anyone but herself is a deluded fool, but there are plenty of those around and the more she can buy the fewer of the rest of us there will be. And not only will we not get the security and the basic living standards these socialist thieves pretend to provide we will be all the worse for it. But there are always a proportion who will take their chances that the handouts will keep coming. Our only hope is that the proportion has not yet reached 50%, but if the Labor Party has anything to do with it, we will get there as quickly as it is humanly possible.