Choosing your dictator may be democracy, but it isn’t freedom

America is stressed out. The election is a high stakes game and people on both sides are biting their nails. After all, who will get the reigns of the awesome power of the Federal Leviathan is a pretty big deal. That person will wield tremendous power over the massive centralized bureaucracy.

That person will decide who are winners and who are losers. The president plays a huge role in defining which rent seekers are successful and those that are not. The person elected will have the power to choose the fates of millions of families. Perhaps people who have lived in America all of their lives will be exiled to strange lands. Maybe new wars will be fought. Businesses may be crushed with taxation and regulation. Churches may be put under pressure to yield to the will of the state. Successful import businesses may be destroyed.

All of this and much more hangs in the balance. The problem, however, isn’t who gets to pull the levers of the all powerful leviathan. The problem is that a leviathan government exists at all.

All across the nation people have been induced to believe that the leviathan can be tamed if only their candidate is at the helm. They have forgotten, it seems, that power corrupts. Choosing your dictator still results in a life living under a dictatorship.

It is really sad, when you think about it, that so many tens of millions of people have come to believe that the leviathan can be tamed by lending is power to a person who has demonstrated a lust for the seduction of power. Come on… We all know that neither of these candidates is going to suddenly become less physically aroused by power after finally achieving more power than any other human being on Earth.

The question shouldn’t be to whom will we give access to ultimate power. The question should be how to make sure than no one ever has access to that much power.

The Founders were keenly aware of this and built a constitutional system that provided a balance of power ensuring that no one man ever wield the full force of a leviathan government. Those checks and balances have weathered and eroded to near uselessness.

So how will the checks and balances be restored? The short answer is that they will not be restored behaving as we have been. Not as long as the the American people are fine with a single person wielding ultimate power as long as it is their chosen person.

As long as people divide into camps and enthusiastically support a power-mad candidate for no other reason than to oppose the alternative power-mad candidate, the result will always be a power-mad person at the helm of an ultimately powerful leviathan state. They cook the rule book and we enthusiastically embrace it.

The problem, therefore, isn’t to choose the right candidate. The problem is to create a limited government system in which the wrong candidate in office has limited ability for mischief. In that system, politics would be more cerebral, more policy oriented and less hateful.

As long as Americans allow an ultimately powerful, unchecked, unfettered leviathan government to exist, our public life will continue to exist as a zero sum game where my loss is your victory and everything is at stake all the time. As long as this situation exists, people will continued to be brainwashed into enthusiastically supporting their candidate for dictator.

For this reason, I hope that voter turnout plummets. I hope that people check out. That they stop being manipulated into picking their poison. I hope that change starts tomorrow.

It is a vain hope and an impossible dream, but that is my prayer.