The Two Party Paradigm, A Recipe for Disaster

Our nation seems to assume that our "two party" system is built in and we cannot change it. Why, it must be part of the constitution!

Well it is not built in, it is not part of the constitution. In fact, if you will study the words of the Founders, they understood that parties (they called them factions) were quite dangerous. People might well be more loyal to their party than to the nation. Boy those Founders were smart folks. They learned from history and that history is repeating itself right now.

In 2004, the nation was presented with two awful candidates. It was really hard to figure out who was the lesser evil. Of course there were other candidates, but they were mostly secret or laughed at. You were told you would be wasting your vote if you voted for the freedom loving Libertarian Michael Badnarik, for example. As if your vote for one or the other of the two awful candidates wasn't wasted from the start.

The fact is that the two big parties do not care at all what happens to you. They care to maintain their power and each uses its own line of patented cow manure to get blocks of votes. They work together to keep the upstart parties out of the running.

First it was ballot access laws. Many states had draconian rules for getting on the ballot. Many times the rules were not the same for everyone. An example is that a Republican or Democratic candidate can pay a small filing fee to get on the ballot while a Libertarian or other person needs a huge number of signatures on a petition. The Libertarian party spent the first 30 years of its existence fighting those laws in court and in referenda and finally some progress has been made.

The newest attack on political competition is the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. BCRA is just like its name says. It functions to keep campaigns Bi-Partisan by making the legal reporting requirements so expensive that it is prohibitively expensive to launch a competing campaign for Federal office. Imagine that for the Libertarian Party of Kansas to field candidates for the 4 congressional seats, we would need $30,000 for legal and accounting help before we spent the first dollar on campaigning.

Now let us look at the party loyalty issue. We have a Republican president who is breaking all sorts of laws and has become a total danger and embarrassment to the nation. If any president has earned and deserved impeachment it is GWB. Do you see the Republican controlled congress doing anything about this? Of course not! Loyalty to the party is preventing them from saving the nation from a lawless administration.

When we need Congress the most, to stop the illegal spying, the torture, the wild spending, the ongoing war in Iraq and the brewing war in Iran we have a Congress that is unwilling to perform its duty of checking an out of control presidency because of blind loyalty to a party.

All you conservatives out there, the kind who care more about individual freedom than gay marriage or other social issues, I have a message for you. When you vote for Republicans like Bush, you are wasting your vote. He is just as anti-freedom as any liberal Democrat. If freedom is your desire than vote for freedom.