Ben Carson for President

As a centrist libertarian, we are supporting Ben Carson, so far, for the presidency in 2016. As a neurosurgeon, he does seem to be the steady hand on the scalpel of budget cuts as well as foreign policy, at a very crucial time. He was an independent until recently joining the Republicans for the election. He emphasizes bipartisan solutions, noting that the bald eagle is able to soar because it has both a left and a right wing. He also taught me that the meaning of “bald” here comes from the old English word piebald, meaning crowned with white. Having become discouraged in looking for candidates who had even read the Constitution, Declaration and fundamental documents of American Government, we are pleased to find one that is properly our teacher on American History, and a few other things as well. He showed me that the line of Jeremiah, saying that the prophet was known in the womb, also appears in Psalm 139. It is not quite clear, though, that he appreciates the distinction between the fetus and the born child in Exodus 21, where to kill a child is murder, but to cause a miscarriage results only in a fine. Still, it is clear that in Mosaic law, the fetus is something, while in American law the unborn have fewer rights than many animals. He has read the Proverbs extensively, though curiously he does not mention, in the book One Nation, the key passage in Chapter 3 about wisdom as a tree of life (3:16-17; 4:8-9). He also leaves out Solomon’s prayer for wisdom (1 Kings 3:9-14), which, along with his strange fate, is the crucial thing about Solomon in our reading. Nor does he seem to appreciate the meaning of the poverty of Jesus and Socrates, but is much too quick to assume the oligarchic identification of wealth with wisdom, the ability to manage a business with the ability to govern. But he is involved in education, and understands the importance of education to a self governing people. And he is able to ask:

As a society, are we free if we tolerate intimidation by government agencies like the IRS?Are we free if we allow the NSA to illegally search and seize our private documents without cause (p. 206)?

Is he then the only candidate beside Rand Paul who is not afraid to oppose the agencies he will be supposed to govern? He seems, then, most likely to support my other pet critical issues, opposing the special interests in campaign finance reform and even prescription drug abuse (though I am waiting to hear his position on that), internet integrity, property seizures, and police brutality. He seems to look to a flat tax, modeled on the Biblical tithe, for tax system reform. That itself will free up one tenth of the GNP from tax filing and accounting companies, to be set to more constructive use. Not every successful business produces a real product or real wealth, or add value. Some produce nothing more than dealing with bureaucracy that is unnecessary to begin. And does Mr. Carson see how the control of politics by the rich and corporate interests prevents the growth of a middle class? What effect does property seizure have on a poor household? Try to start a business on the internet, and everything is controlled to serve the information brokers, with our government’s blessing. Or what effect to gain an education and be denied a career because affirmative action says you are the wrong sort of person? Or what effect to be accused of crimes when violating the rights of no one? And be captured by a judicial system based on further fleecing the poor. Ah, but we know, the rich do not want to hear it, and we have only ourselves to blame for poverty: nutz! Remove the obstacles government itself, controlled by oligarchs one term and demagogues the next, has placed in our way, then come to tell us there is no such thing as good and bad fortune, but we are ourselves responsible, and the lucky shyster, who sets the pursuit of money above all else, wise. But Mr. Carson may himself be our best chance to removing these obstacles and rescuing the possibility of a middle class.

Opposition to his candidacy will come fro m those he calls the “secular progressives.” The serious objections I have heard are mostly for his extreme opposition to President Obama. We like the attempt to set individual responsibility into the health care system, and see disaster looming if the insurance companies and the drug companies decide what government health care will pay. We want the fifty percent fraud rate in food stamps to be addressed, even while expanding the program to feed the poor and cover genuine basic needs. We are not approaching a 17 trillion dollar deficit from feeding the poor, but from the fraud and corruption that result from the single minded honoring of wealth in our superficial portrait of the “American Dream.” If one is on disability or medicare, one was prevented from supplementing their income, say, with a vegetable stand. And can the unemployed poor not do a little gardening? Oh, but we had to allow Monsanto to control seeds and destroy the honeybees, so now we will have to be content with food stamps, with organized crime cashing half of them in!

The abilities required of a person by the U. S. presidency are truly staggering. It is amazing that persons of any sort rise to this position. Yet the job itself seems to make the persons greater than we would otherwise be. Ben Carson has much to say about humility, and is himself the writer of a proverb, that we might “step out of the center of the circle,” and to “take oneself out of the center of the circle (pp. 16, 20).” While this is no guarantee that he will not be corrupted by so powerful a position, the suggestion is that here we have a better chance than with one incapable of entertaining such a thought. And He may inspire us to fiscal responsibility!

So at this early phase of the presidential primary, we are prepared to envision Mr. Carson dressed in a Revolutionary war suit with a ponderous English whig. He knows what the Star Spangled Banner means!