Voting – a dangerous placebo?
By Ted Lang
web
posted December 23, 2002
Touted as being America's most symbolic and most effective guarantee of individual freedom, voting in elections for candidates for public office is offered as providing representation for the interests and the will of the people. But the reality of party politics and party government make voting not only a worthless exercise, but a dangerous one as well.
How can voting be dangerous? How can a placebo be dangerous? Obviously, a pill or medication administered by a health care professional to a patient or hypochondriac merely to simulate a cure, or to give the patient a false impression that the medicine being taken provides a cure for an illness, may in and of itself be harmless; that is, unless the patient has a critical need for curative medication that is available, but receives instead a worthless sugar pill -- a placebo. In such a case, rather than a real cure being provided, the failing health of a patient in need of a cure just gets worse.
And so it is with voting. At one time in this nation, only male property owners could vote. Eventually, the franchise was extended to women, but there are many feminists who will never, ever forgive the male Founders of this nation for that exclusionary mischief. But requiring voters to be property owners made sense, especially now when the party interests of both Republicans and Democrats support bringing hordes of illegal aliens into the country and the voting booth to ratify America's "party government."
And although Libertarianism favors open borders along with its basic tenet of representative constitutional government, open borders for a welfare state as big as the United States spells disaster. As more illegals are welcomed aboard and placed on the dole at the expense of hard-working voter-taxpayers, the voter registry expands while the numbers of taxpaying contributors to America's party government shrinks.
People who have a stake in America are saddled with a disproportionate voice when compared to aliens who are legitimized as voting citizens by our political parties. Democrats want more voters for their socialistic robbery of Peter to pay Paul, and Republicans want cheap labor to provide workers for low-paying menial jobs no longer desired by financially and socially elevated native Americans.
Now consider also the corrupt and immoral nature of virtually all American politicians at virtually all levels of government, as well as the party government philosophy that sustains their power and corruption, and voting for "the lesser of two evils" successfully completes the argument confirming the futility of voting. But worse than being merely futile, consider that people who vote regularly really think they are making a difference. Rather than becoming more activist in demanding that our nation, at all its levels of government, return to constitutional government, they accept as curative the placebo of voting thereby continuing the legitimacy of party government.
On average, 50 per cent of Americans eligible to vote never bother to. The media, a chief contributor to our freedom-stifling Big Brother government, insists that non-participatory voters are "apathetic." But what if they are really aware that voting is a waste of time? This is offered as "dangerous" to democracy, and well it should be! We are not a democracy, but a limited government republic with basic protection of the smallest minority conceivable: each and every, single, solitary, unique citizen. And the greatest protector of citizen rights is our Constitution's Bill of Rights.
How often does the media educate the populace as to what is really the
most symbolic and effective guarantee of individual freedom? The Bill
of Rights is a limitation on government power and it is this limitation
that differentiates the United States from that of either a run-of-the-mill
democracy or a banana republic. And of all the Amendments, the Second
Amendment is the most important to a society losing its voice in a former
constitutional nation being taken over and converted to party government.
Ted Lang is a government analyst and a political freelance writer.
He has written for numerous websites as well as New Jersey newspapers.
Lang holds a BA in political science and an MBA.
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