From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 07:58:22 +0800
To: Eric Murray <ravage@einstein.ssz.com
Subject: Re: VANGUARD:  An Election About Nothing? (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <199811031321.HAA04373@einstein.ssz.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19981103151311.00984100@idiom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 09:00 AM 11/3/98 -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
>The Natural Law people are so wierd that it's very tempting to vote for them,

One reason their rhetoric looks so weird is because it's avoiding
coming straight out and saying "Our plan for fixing society is to have 
the government fund teaching of Transcendental Meditation(r) to everybody,
and once everybody is doing TM, they'll all be healthier, better behaved,
and will do things in accordance with The Laws Of Nature As Taught By
the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, so the problems of the world will all fix themselves."
Meanwhile, of course, they describe their national health plans as using
"Proven Scientific Principles" (TM having been proven to fix everything)
and their education plans using similar obfuscatory rhetoric.
(On the other hand, I haven't heard them saying that the TM-Siddhi program
will let them replace the Air Force with levitation yet;
they tend to take the view that calmness and niceness will scientifically
reduce the need to shoot people, which I can't fault them for too much...)

It's basically a wimpier version of traditional Western moral reformers 
pushing the view that if government gets rid of Sin, society will work better,
but getting rid of ignorance is usually a "kinder, gentler" process,
not that you want to tell the ignorant what you're doing,
because they may think that offering fruit and flowers to a guru's picture
and chanting the name of a fire-god while breathing quietly
is not only a strange way to fix ignorance but is an inappropriate thing 
for governments to spend their money on, especially in the name of Science.

Most of the Natural Law Party candidates I've talked to, except when
they're on direct meditation-revenue-enhancement topics, tend to be
reasonable folks, somewhere in the liberal-to-libertarian range,
thinking the government should mostly let people do what they want,
which will naturally lead to calmness and niceness as they follow 
natural law, and a lot of the TM folks, especially around
Maharishi University in Iowa, have gone into business for themselves,
so they prefer lower government interference and red tape.

On the other hand, like any small party trying to get enough candidates
to run full slates for office, some of their folks really are flakes :-)
I like to believe that Libertarians do better on that score,
but we've got our share as well, and the only real way out of it
is to grow large enough that the supply of people willing to run
includes enough competent people.

On the other hand, it's still tempting to see about putting Frank Zappa
on the ballot.  He is a bit metabolically challenged these days,
but it wouldn't bother him much, and he's still be a better candidate
than most live Democrats or Republicans.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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