About Joe

For me, politics started at a young age.

I was born in 1981, and I have memories of Korean Airlines Flight 007. I remember it being in the news (not the shoot down itself, but the investigation that followed). I asked my parents to explain it. I will never forget my reaction. "All those people! What were they thinking? What is going on in this world?" It affected me deeply, and it left me with a desire to learn about the world.

I was born and raised in a very small city in Wisconsin. I grew up a few blocks away from one of the best parks in the county. Yet, I often found myself biking through the park to the library on the other side. People were dying try to escape East Germany, and I wanted to know why.

My search was always on the right track, but the full answer would have to wait. I had some growing up to do. Meanwhile, the world changed. The wall came down; my country went to war for the first time since Vietnam; the Cold War ended without anyone firing a shot; and after all that, I graduated from elementary school.

Middle school was a period of time when kids got mean, and Republicans got serious, taking back both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

When I entered high school, Republicans fought for and got welfare reform, a balanced budget, and tort reform – tort reform passing over a Presidential veto. I felt like an overjoyed puppy, until the Republicans kicked the puppy. They fired pro-life Newt Gingrich and replaced him with pro-choice Dennis Hastert. I wondered, "If the GOP could sell out on abortion – the murder of unborn children, what else could they sell out?" Apparently, a lot.

While in college, I saw Republicans turn the surplus into a deficit, promote government workers who let the 9-11 hijackers into the country, and pass the largest expansion of government health care at the time – Medicare Part D.

I didn't have time to worry about it, though. By now, I had graduated from college, and I was trying to find my first job in the middle of the post-9-11 recession. I started off with nearly an interview every week, but after almost a year, I threw in the towel and got a job at OfficeMax. There I was, a college graduate with a Computer Science degree, working at nearly minimum wage for about 20 hours a week. It was a very humbling experience.

All was not lost. After working for OfficeMax a year, I found a job with my local cable company. They had a call center, and they needed people for Internet tech support. I found out later that my experience at OfficeMax put me at the front of the line. They saw it as sales experience, and especially liked that I had to keep my cool without putting the customer on hold. There's no Hold button for an in-person customer.

A call center job is stressful. The computer times every second of every call, and you're supposed to say so many things from the checklist, including trying to sell something even if you didn't fix their problem. I found fixing customers one-at-a-time to be frustrating, especially in light of my programming skills. I found a job within the company that would make use of my skills to help customers on a massive scale. I applied for the same job five time in four different locations. I was turned down everywhere, except here. Thus, I moved to Clark County in 2006. I was finally out of my parent’s house at 25.

Now that I had become more settled, I had more time for politics again. Back to my questions. Why did Korean Airlines Flight 007 get shot down? Why were people getting shot trying to escape East Germany? Most important, how did these terrible people come to power in the first place?

I always had all the pieces to answer those questions, but I never had the glue to hold those pieces together in a succinct explanation, until I saw Michael Barone on Steven Colbert. Paraphrasing, he said politics is a struggle between freedom and equality; conservatives favor freedom over equality, and liberals favor equality over freedom.

You can see these battle lines in all the issues. Liberals want everyone to have health insurance – more equal. Conservatives want everyone to be able to choose what insurance fits them, including no insurance at all – more freedom. Liberals want everyone to have a higher minimum wage – more equal. Conservatives want everyone to have the flexibility to work – or hire – for a job that benefits everyone – more freedom.

Liberals promise a utopia full of unbound equality. The problem, however, is that every time someone raises the scepter of equality, what comes down is the rod of tyranny. In order to promote equality, someone must be the judge of what is equal, and then they need the power to make things equal. This power attracts tyrants, and when people refuse to accept the "equality" that is forced upon them, the bodies start piling up.

It's not freedom vs. equality. It's liberty vs. tyranny. I will not allow the siren's call of a better world to seduce me into supporting tyranny.

I will defend the freedom over equality, liberty over tyranny, with every breath I have.