WasteYourVote 

I'm asking you (and every other voting-age U.S. citizen) to waste your vote in the 2004 presidential election.

    What does that mean?  It means I want you to vote for your favorite third-party candidate, because voting for numbskull & bonehead won't really change anything in any substantial way.  Take this poll and see why.

    The major parties have been arguing about which rights to take away, and which powers to assume for decades, to everyone's detriment.  The primary losers have always been us, the individual citizens, because demo-publicans care much more about the power of their party, than the just role of government, or the rights of the individual person.

    click here if you plan to vote for a third candidate, and find out how many others are also ready to trade in the two major parties.

Most people hear about third party options and think 

                      "But I'd be wasting my vote!"

Typical poll-numbers support the belief that if you don't vote for one of the two major parties, your vote won't actually have an effect on the outcome. More sophisticated voters consider the 'negative' impact of 'costing' votes...as if your vote 'belonged' to anyone but you. Negative voting also ignores the fact that a vote for anyone is a vote against everyone else, including any candidates you like.

* - margin of error typically hides the lead in close races.

    If you consider actual returns, you'll understand why 'both' parties get so desperate near the end of the race over that extra 12%;  The 'moderate' or 'centrist' voters are the wild card, the random element that keeps the candidates up at night...and the party affiliated are the clear minority.

POWER - The Hidden Agenda

Electrical power as dollars

Electricity, however, meets all the requirements of good money, including some which gold does not meet.

It is easily divisible, measurable and transportable.

It is inherently useful, and fairly easy to recognize and judge for quality.

The total amount can be increased without limit, though it certainly is not free.

It doesn't decay into something else (though it does suffer losses in transport)

Currently, if we set a KWh standard, it would approximate 5 cents per Kilowatt-hour. That is roughly the 2004 wholesale price of a kilowatt hour.

(1000 watts - a kilowatt - is the amount of power required to light ten 100-watt bulbs. If they run for an hour, they will use 1 Kilowatt-hour of energy.)

Life runs on energy, as does civilization, and money is a symbol used to account for those various human-to-human transactions. We could do worse than using a unit of energy as a method to account for energy-intensive transactions.

There is plenty of room for a motivated electorate to make a real change, and plenty of evidence that people would prefer it:

Is voting Libertarian a wasted vote?

The only wasted vote is the vote not cast -- and the worst thing to do is to vote against your conscience. You don't have to be a registered Libertarian to vote Libertarian

     The party wonks determine who gets to run, who gets on the ballot, and both parties as well as major (that is, connected) media support the common belief that only one of the two can win.  The word 'centrist' assumes it.

    They urge everyone to vote, hoping by sheer luck, volume, or repetition to get more of that 50% than 'the other guy.'  More important, low turnouts threaten the two party's legitimacy, their ability to claim a mandate for their plans.  'Landslides' don't erase the doubt, which is why both parties blame that 50% on 'apathetic citizens,' as a way to dismiss the possibility that most voters are desperately wishing for some kind of real option.

    "I'm with stupid" just isn't working very well, as more and more people know.

    I attribute this to 'lack of real choice among the regular suspects' and think I know how we can, if we desire, and if we communicate that desire, take a real option.

  The voters have no checks on their concerted political decisions. 

    We can eliminate both bozos from the running, because we can eliminate them from our consideration.

Getting 20% of eligible citizens has long been a win, 

The lack of representation proven by that fact is atrocious, and worse, dangerous.

Getting 25% of eligible voting-age people was a historic landslide.

  Rather than offering real choices to the voters as a way to increase the turnout, both factions harangue us as 'apathetic' if we don't vote for them, or simply undercut the alternatives by absorbing the most popular ideas into the rhetoric, which attracts many 'marginal' voters back into 'the ranks.'

    Of course they don't actually implement any of the borrowed platform ideas.  Republicans are still in favor of 'Socialism for the Rich' and Democrats still won't acknowledge the always-damaging side effects of laws specifically intended to cut individuals out of the loop.

    Neither party has done anything to repair the most damaging policies currently threatening our Republic.  Many (if not most) laws have been put in place to favor particular groups at the disadvantage of other groups, or everyone else, or merely to allow the sitting President and Congress to 'manage' the economy in someone's favor (and it's usually their own).

    I'm making this appeal to the people who recognize the dynamic as well as the fact that laws built around favoritism are the real problem that needs to be addressed.  If you vote for either of the parties that have crafted our 'favors-for-campaign support' system, it means voting for favoritism.

  If you want to change that, it's time to vote 'else.'

I'm not suggesting you vote for any particular third party or independent.  

And I'm only suggesting it for the Presidential Race.

(But of course you can apply the idea to other elections, too)

    I'm asking you to commit to voting for any one other than Bush or Kerry, then tell your friends, tell your grocer, tell your customers, tell your boss, tell your mom.  And tell your local pollster, so anyone can hear about it from them.  

    Tell anyone you think might care.  Tell them why.  

    Send them an email about WasteYourVote.com, a non-profit dedicated to ending the two-party personality clash we're all so tired of hearing.

  They argue over each other's personal crap because they long ago agreed upon the bad policies that should be repealed .

    Imagine the substantial debate over real issues we'd get in the popular media if poll numbers looked more like this;

    If you want to see it happen, click here and find out how many others are ready to trade in the two major parties in exchange for a real debate over policies.

Otherwise, it's just more of the same self-sustaining bickering.

    Kerry said he supports renewable energy - then voted against building windmills on Martha's Vineyard.  Democrats have a long history of hypocritical rhetoric and illogical theory, followed by legislation to favor all the 'good people', with the Democratic National Committee (one of the largest corporations on the planet) topping of the list.

    Bush has dropped the conservative ball yet again, somehow surprising real conservatives who got burned once before by his dad.  Republican rhetoric speaks of economics, but their policies universally ignore the unintended consequences of externalizing costs or trying to push people around.

   I think a lot of people recognize that the major parties' hold on Washington is the primary problem to be addressed.  It's not the particular people associated with the parties, nor is it their rhetoric, which never gets implemented anyway.  Neither party acts to limit the dangerous side effects of their own misguided policies, let alone the mistakes of the other party.

    One side effect of that situation is millions of voters who don't give a shit, and no one can reasonably blame them.
 

The franchise was intended and designed to give us the power of revolution without resort to violence   Let's use it

 
    If we don't do something similar to what I've described here, then inflation, or some other side-effect of irresponsible government power will leave us with only tyranny or violence as options, anyway.

    I'm calling on everyone, now, to take up the option for a peaceful, non-violent solution, and waste your vote for a change.

    A real change; slam the two major parties this season, and we'll discuss real issues among all the alternative parties.

     If someone completely new gets elected, they will lack the power (or at least the expertise) to hack on the public for personal gain, as well.

    Both suit-wearing sock-puppets will know what they are doing, in that capacity, and they'll have the support of (some members) of Congress when they do it to us, as well.

    Click here to count yourself in favor of 'wasting' your vote

    If you spread it around, we just might win a free country.

    The power exists.  Who will use it?

- Dropped Balls -

    We've seen school choice blocked by both parties for over 10 years, despite massive and consistent evidence that it increases the success of students, and very strong support from parents, teachers and children who have actually experienced real choice.

    Both parties have always run up the debt and swept it under the rug with inflation, the hidden tax.  For at least 50 years, the 'business cycle' has been only the artificial prosperity (booms) & reckoning (recessions) caused by recurrent bouts of inflation.  Typically motivated by election politics, it is primarily created by 'setting' interest rates and running the printing presses.

    Asian interests are spending billions on Treasury-bills as we speak.   

     Inflation killed Rome

Inflation empowered Hitler

Neither candidate ever speaks about the debt-laundering scheme enacted by The Federal Reserve Act of 1913.  

It gives the President an awful lot of 'macro-management' power, by providing the primary mechanism of inflation.  Neither party wants to give it up, even though it caused the Great Depression...and might, again.

    Taxes and tariffs levied to intentionally influence markets really do favor specific groups, and probably win votes, but they always cause widespread damage, and once you add up all the side effects, it's always larger than the value of the original favor.  Vote for one of the regular schmucks, if you don't mind.

(Or learn why that dynamic always operates, at www.mises.org

 

Aristotle, Jefferson and Malcolm all agree:

Direct taxation on the citizenry sucks

    The military will continue to 'influence' international markets, as well, if you vote for numbskull and bonehead.  The only real choice they offer is which recipients of taxpayer funds receives their favor; which international corporations, which trading partners, which defense contractors, which NGOs, which security department, will get the goodies?

Paying taxes for national defense is wise. 

Soldiers dying pursuing the misbegotten goals of an interventionist is obscene, and both parties have always been in favor of it.

    At this point, it is undeniable that neither party operates responsibly, as they have repeatedly proven they are unable to respond to real facts.  As they only ever blame each other for their combined failure to do so, I suggest we believe both parties in that regard; both are failures.

    They can't respond to fast-changing conditions, they can't respond to the errors in their policy-making, they are beholden to their various factions and they haven't addressed the real ethical challenges presented by independent candidates and parties.

 

The major parties have not responded to the desires of the voters for years, as illustrated by a consistent  55% abstention rate I've been asking around.   It's not apathy.

    I say "Throw the bums out!"

    Many already agree:

"I'd like to see Bush lose, but without Kerry winning." - Jacob Sullum, syndicated columnist, author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.

"As a Canadian, I am spared the insulting process of punching a ballot to express which power glutton should prevail." - Wendy McElroy, columnist at Fox News and editor of ifemenist.net

"I might do the moral thing and not vote at all, or do the sensible thing and vote Libertarian, or I might make 100 bucks from my friend Tony, and vote for Bush." - Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller

"Rather than vote for an entitlement-expanding, tariff-imposing, deficit-increasing, big government Johnson Republican, or an entitlement-expanding, tariff-imposing, deficit-increasing, big government Nixon Democrat, I will vote for Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik" - Robert A. George, New York Post columnist

"Anyone but the Big Two....It's just two members of the same statist party fighting over whose friends will get favors" - Richard Epstein, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago

"Can you vote for all the nefarious cabals that really run the world?" - Drew Carey, comedian

"Both of the major-party candidates brazenly flaunt their contempt for the U.S. Constitution." - James Bovard, author of The Bush Betrayal (among others)

"I'm embarrassed for my country that in my entire voting life, there has never been a major-party candidate whom I felt I could vote for." - John Perry Barlow, songwriter for the Grateful Dead, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

(Quoted from Reason Magazine)

   Click here to agree and have your preference counted

    What they have done consistently is prevent 3rd party alternatives from getting much attention.  They've used legal power to keep them off ballots or out of debates, and always address only each other in the major (i.e., connected) media.  Media wonks largely support this arbitrary constraint upon participation, contrary to their most valuable function in a free Republic.  This allows the demo-publicans to avoid answering for the important and popular issues that such alternatives raise.

   Both deserve to be ousted, but if the individuals - that's you and me, our friends, our relatives and our associates - don't decide on that course of action, we'll get exactly what we deserve, instead.

Who else is talking about wasting your vote?

Copyright 2004, WasteYourVote.com, Inc.