When it comes to voting (your civic duty and most patriot act), one must keep in mind that it is not a horse race.  You should not be trying to pick who the winner is going to be.  I know it gives everyone a good feeling inside when the person you voted for wins, but that is not the point behind voting.  The reason for voting is to pick the person that best represents your ideals and beliefs, the person that you think will do the best possible job out of all the people running.

            It is an election, a chance to voice your opinion of who is most deserving of the position.  For some people, it will be the only significant voice they will have in the way government is run.  A good voter is one who does his or her research and examines every candidate running, then it is his/her duty to pick the candidate that fits their respective belief system best.  This does not mean that you should pick who your parent(s) tells you to, or to pick someone based on how many television commercials you saw them on, or to pick someone since they have the best chance of keeping one of the other candidates out of office.

            If a thief steals and gets away with it, more than likely they will steal again, and again, until they get caught.  In my opinion, the two major parties have been expanding the powers of government too much and have been getting away with way too much.  Why is that?  Because there has been a tug of war going on for 100 years between only two political parties, which is preventing us from moving forward and keeping up with the other countries.  We have not had the needed checks and balances, where one party is ousted and another new party takes its place.  Now you might be thinking…”well, isn’t that the job of the people to not vote someone or some group back into power that has done a horrible job?”  The answer is yes, but the American people do not understand that they have choices outside of the two major parties.  The two major parties, which are constantly being pulled at by special interests, have control of the media, too much power and too much money into the system.  

            Although there are some minor differences between the democrats and the republicans, they are constantly working together to keep any other competition out of their perfect oligarchy.  A perfect example, they created a commission to decide the rules of who gets in the debates and who doesn’t; there are two chairmen on this board—one, a career democrat; the other, a career republican.  That commission on debates has set the standards extremely high for entry into the debates and set rules where each candidate no longer has to talk about important issues.  What this leads to is a lack of idea sharing.  When was the last time there was a discussion over what the real powers of the Federal Reserve are supposed to be, or why Congress—instead of the American people—votes for elected officials pay raises?  Or maybe even, why does the government interfere so much with the natural ups and downs of the economy.  By trying to fix a down turning economy, you are just going to make things worse in the long-run—Economics 101.

            How could two people expect to have all the answers to the most difficult questions in the world?  They don’t and worse yet, sometimes they don’t have any answers at all.  The two major parties don’t want people to think about the issues, they want the American people to like how they talk and like how they look when they are on television, to vote no longer on ideals, morals, beliefs and what one knows to be best for the future of America, but they vote based on who think has the best chance to beat the person they hate.  If we keep doing that, then the quality of the person we elct will continue to get worse and worse.

            If you let the thief keep stealing, or you let the government keep raising taxes, spending more money, taking away your personal liberties and creating bigger and bigger bureaucracies…then that is what they will continue to do.  

The equation is simple, if the government has more of your money and the government gets bigger and more costly; then you have less of your own money to spend and you have less freedoms, because the government is now making your decisions for you.