Voting = Status Quo

by Joe Blow

Popular sentiment tells you that voting is a good thing. It supposedly punches your duty ticket as a citizen, makes you a decision maker, and gives you some sort of claim on your future—to be decided later by elected (or appointed) officials whom you trust implicitly with your property, liberty, and life—based on patriotic concepts of an omniscient and benevolent government. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Voting only results in more of the status quo: more empty promises, more taxes, more government, more spending, more entitlements, more hegemony, more global policemen, more wars, more expensive “solutions” to nonexistent and/or induced problems that only Leviathan can devise and impose on its citizens forever. 

Ideas become projects that become programs that never end. Unlike the real world, the State lives in a perpetual state of self-delusion in which wealth grows on trees and taxpayers willingly and happily bear any burden and at any price. 

Still, voters exist who claim that somehow in this election, things will be different. Somehow, magically, their vote will suddenly make a difference. Even a brief review of the headlines quickly shoots down this sentiment as mere wishful thinking. 

MSNBC.com headlines: “Parties seem headed for status quo” and “Will it be a status quo election?”

Unlike such past years as 1982 and 1994, when midterm elections produced sizable shifts in the party balance, polling and reporting failed to discern any broad national trend that would let the country break out of the nearly perfect 50-50 split demonstrated in the 2000 election results.

In other words, the status quo will prevail again. The end result will be the same: more government. The State exists for only two reasons: to grow and bury all competition. Anyone who believes that the State places the welfare of its citizens above that of itself has been seriously gorging on magic mushrooms.

To any thinking individual, none of this is news. Since the status quo is a product of the political system of the State it is ludicrous and illogical to conclude that more of it will somehow change things for the better. If that was true, government would grow smaller with each election, but it doesn’t. If that was true, taxes would decrease over time, but they don’t. It that was true, entitlements wouldn’t even exist, but they do.

Entitlements exist for two reasons: Politicians use them as vote bait and voters demand them from the socialist State. In each case, prostitution prevails. Politicians are pimps for voters who function as hookers for the State. As long as the pimps and hookers get paid, the State is happy, and the taxpayers pick up the tab. How big is the latest tab?

According to a Heritage Foundation estimate, the federal government will spend nearly $800 billion more in 2000-2003 than it did in the previous four-year period, or some $5,000 more per household, now totaling some $73,000.  Just 21 percent of the boost is allocated to national defense and one-fourth thereof to the war on terrorism…

The fiscal year closed on September 30 with a deficit of some $160 billion which, at 1.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), is rather moderate, yet also alarming because of the speed at which the surpluses gave way to deficits…

Congress recently raised the legal debt limit by $450 billion, which hopefully will keep the government solvent for a year or two.

Just in time for the next election when the hookers will get yet another opportunity to perpetuate the misery of the State at the expense of the taxpayers.

If voting could actually change the status quo, the State would outlaw it. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.