You Get What You Vote For

From The Ohio Republic:

You get what you vote forfrom The Ohio Republic by Harold Thomas


Ken Matesz, Libertarian candidate for Ohio governor, echoes on his Facebook page something that I wrote for the current issue of the Liberty Voice:





As a “third-party candidate,” I get to hear this one phrase so many times I practically hear it in my sleep: “A vote for a third party is a vote for the

__________(insert party name).”



Funny thing about this is that my third party had no hand in the current economic mess. Libertarian policies did not produce the Federal Reserve Bank that slashed interest rates making the housing bubble possible. Libertarian philosophy or policies did not encourage banks to lend to those who can’t really pay back their mortgages. Libertarian philosophy would NEVER have bailed out Wall Street or car companies the way Republicans and Democrats did. Libertarian philosophy and policies do not allow spending to exceed revenues. Libertarian policies are always 100% anti-tax to the highest degree possible. Libertarian policies did not drive the deficit to nearly $2 Trillion and the national debt to nearly $14 trillion. Libertarian policies would not allow a congress to regularly increase the debt ceiling as both Republicans and Democrats have done for decades.



So while both parties have made a royal mess of our economy for decade upon decade, it’s the third party candidates, like me, who get blamed for getting poor officials into office. This is like saying a death-row inmate was killed by an electric shock because he desperately wanted to live! Think about it. Such an inmate might have three choices: to die by lethal injection, to die by the electric chair, or to find a way to be free and stay alive. His chances of freeing himself may be slim, but who would blame him for trying? Would you say that it was because he chose freedom that he was killed in the electric chair? Or would you say he was killed by lethal injection because he wanted to escape to freedom? People who vote for alternative candidates want to be free. They understand that it’s the two hard-to-distinguish-from-each-other parties that have slowly killed the economy with their lethal injections or electric shocks. One party shocks the economy with excess taxes; the other injects it with spending that exceeds revenues. I want to be free and live without that pain and unconstitutional meddling. I would ALWAYS choose to find a way to free myself from that merry-go-round.



Don’t you want to be free? Don’t you want to be able to look in your children’s eyes and say, “I’m sorry things are such a mess, I did everything I could to make us free.” Or will you turn to your young one and say, “Well, it didn’t look like we would have much chance of survival, so I chose to feed us all poison.”



Those who “won’t vote for a third party because it means the Democrats will win” are saying, “I don’t want to kill the economy with taxes, I want to destroy it with excess spending.” Same difference. Either way, you get a mess. Most people, of either party, will agree that the political environment is a mess. Yet they insist that the only way to fix it is to keep voting for the same two parties that have been messing things up for 75 years or more. Strange how it all works, isn’t it. You vote for the lesser of two evils and, amazingly, you end up with evil. What an insight: You get what you elect.

Makes sense to me. I wonder why it makes sense to so few others? Maybe they've been brainwashed into thinking that no one except the Demopublicans can win an election?