Welcome to election season. You are probably, if you have any intention of voting, wondering how you know who to vote for. It is not actually unusual for people to already have their minds made up. Some people vote along party lines. People who vote religiously already have strong convictions that drive their votes, even when those convictions would be laughed out of an asylum. This advice is meant for everybody else.

Truth is that you never do know who to vote for. What you know is who to vote against. Sure, you will always end up voting for the lesser of two evils. There is no force in politics that causes candidates to agree with the constituents that they are supposed to represent. We have come to accept that our representatives are better than we are and they know this. In fact, we try to lean toward moderates, which means the candidates who cannot make up their minds or will not admit to their real positions in public places.

Out of a spirit of conservation, candidates should use the same advertisements that they had printed up for the last election cycle. They have accomplished nothing that they promised, so all the promises are still there. Most of what candidates promise cannot actually be done by government. Furthermore, if government actually did the things that it can do, even allowing government to do the things that government cannot do, then we would cease to be dependant on our politicians. A cure loses value when the disease goes away.

Once a man learns to fish for himself, he begins to have power over his own life. Such a man can feed himself and his family. He then has time to consider less essential properties in his representatives. While he may vote for a tyrant who can fill his empty belly, but he can afford to consider freedom and justice when his belly is filled with the work of his own hand. Have you noticed the effort that tyrannies put into gaining control over the essential resources of the populations they govern?

To gain the dependence of a population, it doesn’t hurt if you can produce a large special interest that cannot think for itself. Any time that a group votes in a block, putting the will of that block ahead of the will of the block’s members, it is a special interest. There are no fixed properties required to define a special interest beyond the fact that it operates as a block. A special interest group defines itself by its actions.

No amount of money can be spent on a bad curriculum and produce a good result. As a child, I remember being surprised when I realized that gross sales are not the same as profit. No school that I attended, in a capitalist country, taught me that. Today, in capitalist countries, there are people who can look at the total sales of a company facing bankruptcy and believe that it is making too much money.

In how many other subjects are Americans undereducated just to produce a political belief? If the education in a society does not allow you to understand and survive in that society, then that education has failed. Grades are not worth the ink that they are printed with. Ask schoolchildren in the seventh grade to explain why things in their part of the word are as they are. If they cannot defend the reasoning on why things in their part of the world resulted from good ideas, then they are not getting an education. I do not expect these students to have no doubts or even legitimate problems with the way that their communities, states and nations are. All that I expect is an honest understanding and the ability to reason on their own.

If Americans were as well educated as students are in the Amish schools, or the original schools founded by the benedictine monks, then politicians would fear us. Elections would not be campaigns designed to manipulate our feelings. We would easily know who to vote for because we would know where candidates stood and how they reasoned. Then, we would be more than pets to our leaders. We would be their masters.

Until then, we will never know who to vote for. You look over the public records of what the candidates have done both for and to you. Never vote the party; vote the issues. Elect the candidates who, intellectually, have the most in common with you. How can they represent you if they do not share your values?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 2:58 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.