The Anti-Manichaeist

I don’t think people appreciate Warren Buffett, multi-billionaire who became the world’s greatest philanthropist recently, as much as they should. I just read a Business Week article from seven years ago on him that was quite impressive and followed it up by reading the Wikipedia entry that had some particularly impressive descriptions of his views on taxation and the importance of estate taxes and need for land-value taxation reform in the US.

I was googling about him, because I wanted to pitch to him my idea. I couldn’t find contact info so I thought I’d just do it from here. I think that with a 100,000 dollars, I could start a Christian Pragmatic Prolife party that would be based on my Pragmatic Prolife Manifesto and a couple of other undervalued policy reform ideas cherry picked from my Christian Pragmatic Progressive Party Platform. The party would have a candidate for the US Senate in MN, I’d find someone else to be the candidate, and we would campaign nonstop until one of the other main candidates took on my position on the politics of abortion, or something reasonably similar to it. It would not be critical for them to take on the other issues on the platform, as their presence would be an extra incentive to take on my issue, to shut us up if you will.

So why would a billionaire philanthropist known for his keen business investing acumen give a blogger a 100,000 dollars to start up a third party? Well, the intrinsic value of the idea and the importance of getting it into circulation among the main parties in our gov’t. One could presumably do that more directly with the main parties, but there are serious conflicting ideological and interest groups that would complicate such a change and so the best way to make change happen is to be more entrepreneurial.

And, let’s say the third party is successful either in spoiling the election of pseudo-prolifers or getting them and prochoicers to be more pragmatic and gains some popularity/notoriety as a result. This could be parlayed into donations that could be used to pay a reasonable interest on the principle loaned, as well as future advocacy for other political reforms.

I think it’s a reasonable proposal and one that could be replicated in other states to thwart attempts to use the cultural wars issues as wedges in elections. What would matter is to have the helm of the parties who seriously believe in the issues and have no faith that the existing approaches are going to wield any fruit in effectively preventing abortions or what-not….

dlw