Every presidential election season, our would-be rulers line up before clamoring mobs and television cameras to tell us why they believe we should mark their name on a piece of paper. On the big day, millions of Americans find their way to a special room and put a little mark beside the name of the candidate they remember associating with something vaguely positive. The following morning, we find that the mysterious moral compass of majority opinion has decided our fate for the next four years by a margin of less than 5 percent. They call it “democracy.”

The politicians make a big show of trying to convince likely voters of how “different” they are from their opponents. We can choose between a Democrat, who probably wants to spend trillions of dollars making everyone dependent on government handouts, and a Republican, who probably wants to spend trillions of dollars killing people in other countries.

We have all these “choices” — do we want the politicians forcing us to pay for someone else’s medical procedure, or would we rather they make us to pay for wars around the world that could (if John McCain has his way) last 100 years? Unfortunately we don’t get to choose to keep our money and have the politicians mind their own business. It is always assumed that the government should have power, and that it is up to the voters merely to express their desires on how that power is exercised.

Democrats and Republicans do a pretty good job of making us think they are different. Here I am making it sound like the Democrats have one plan and the Republicans have another, opposing plan. Ironically, neither side has taken a strong stand against the other; Republicans generally want some kind of “compromise” in which the government incompletely controls healthcare (like the current system), while the Democrats don’t quite seem capable of promising an end to the Iraqi occupation even by the 2013 — after the upcoming presidential term is already over.

Voting merely gives us a choice of personalities and superficialities. The question of whether it is moral for the government to seize our property for its own well-being is never discussed, let alone set to a referendum. Our choice is confined to who we prefer to run the system; we never get to vote on whether we think the system itself is right or wrong.

So tens of millions of Americans don’t vote. In recent elections, voter turnout has ranged between 40 percent and 60 percent, depending on whether the presidency was up for grabs. Only half of eligible voters bothered to involve themselves in the selection of our political masters. The other hundred million cast their vote against the current system by refusing to support any of the candidates.

The majority of Americans are dissatisfied, not just with the current administration, but with our entire system of government. We don’t care to argue about political personalities or which bottomless pit to sink money into. We just want to be left alone and to live our lives in peace.

Proclaim your indifference to Nash at [email protected]