From this, it follows that if you are making campaign contributions or donating to front groups who spend your money on behalf of candidates, you’re wasting your money, or worse, diverting your resources away from political action that actually could make a difference. There’s more to political life than elections although you wouldn’t know it from Karl Rove’s brave new world of perpetual campaigns.

Take it from someone who worked as a Republican apparatchik for many years inside the Washington machine, the American political system is an exercise in mass deception and mass delusion. Elections stupefy the people and give political cover to what Will Rogers called “America’s only native criminal class” (viz., Members of Congress) to commit all manner of felonies in the name of the public interest.

Voting legitimizes the criminal enterprise called government, and it makes voters a party to the crime. And to top it off, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the major party candidates. If you believe otherwise, watch this video.

American elections are a game played between the forty-yard lines, kept carefully within narrow bounds where the two establishment political parties can trade offices back and forth without changing a thing and without endangering their political duopoly.

The establishment parties wail about how difficult it is to cut spending and balance the budget but neither of them puts forth serious proposals to reduce the size of government by, say, bringing the troops home and dismantling the military-industrial-security-state complex; by eliminating all public sector pensions, including their own, and cutting bureaucrats’ salaries and eliminating cabinet departments.

They insist on continuously raising the national debt and giving reckless and corrupt bankers guarantees and bailouts rather than making them eat their losses and take the haircuts they deserve. The permanent political duopoly never gives serious consideration to measures that would restore Americans’ freedoms and personal privacy, such as eliminating all forms of sovereign immunity and holding elected officials, judges and bureaucrats to the same standards as ordinary citizens and requiring all public officials to abide by the same laws as everyone else. It never enters polite Washington conversation to consider subjecting federal laws and regulations to a ballot initiative in which the people have the opportunity to repeal them. Super majority voting requirements to check passionate majorities are fiercely resisted. And it is beyond the pale of social propriety in Washington for candidates of either establishment party to propose repealing the income tax and making the dollar as good as gold by ending the Fed and outlawing fiat money creation by the government or a central bank.

Instead, the parties play the Washington Monument game, conspiring with each other to eviscerate earned Social Security and Medicare benefits from retirees rather than keeping the terms of the deal the government cut with today’s seniors back in the day when they were still working and producing and paying taxes to support the programs. It’s the oldest bait-and-switch gambit in the world.

Class warfare too is a favorite Washington game as the permanent establishment parties stoke envy and jealousy among the people, turning Americans against one another so the hoi polloi don’t turn against them. They deceive people into believing the tax increases coming down the pike will only land on the rich. It’s such a tawdry lie but no politician ever lost money betting on the gullibility of the American voter. It has all played out innumerable times before. They tell the country they just want the rich to pay a little bit more but everyone ends up paying a whole lot more.

The promise of elections is that they establish an efficient negative feedback loop through which the clashing of competitive electoral forces reveals previous errors, elucidates the truth and validates the will of the people by selecting for public office candidates who are capable of and committed to solving pressing public problems.

But it turns out, most of the problems are self-inflicted by the very politicians who demand that voters empower them to fix the mess they created. Quite the opposite of their promise, elections set up a nasty positive feedback loop that legitimizes the destructive acts of the political class. Winning an election is a license to make a new mess under the guise of cleaning up an old mess that career politicians made before the last election. They are perpetual mess machines.

That’s because elections are the very opposite of adversarial legal proceedings and competitive markets. Election campaigns ignore what’s important and obsess over trivia and minutiae. They are theatrical sword fights, not true competition of the marketplace. Election campaigns create their own reality rather than revealing objective reality. They formulate public opinion and distort public perception rather than discovering peoples’ preferences through the clash of competition. They manipulate people’s preferences rather than satisfying them. American politics is a political matrix, a virtual reality World of Political WarCraft. But, the consequences are only too real.

The entire American political system is based on a false syllogism that runs something like this:

• If you make campaign contributions and work your butt off for political candidates, then
•  You can elect the “right” people to office, and then
• The candidates you elected to office will be committed to the policies and values you hold and, therefore
• The candidates you elected to office will promote the “right” laws and regulations and appoint the “right” bureaucrats and judges and, then
• The “right” laws and regulations you donated money and sweated to see adopted will be enacted into law, and the law will be interpreted and implemented the “right” way by the “right” judges and bureaucrats, and therefore
• You should make large campaign contributions to and work long hours on behalf of and vote for candidates who promise to change the world the way you want to see it changed.   QED—or rather, LOL

To anyone who still buys this crock of malarkey, I say, “Remember John Roberts.” Elections don’t change a thing, and if they did, as Emma Goldman once said, they would soon be illegal.

Anti-abortion advocates take note. You are illustrative of the electoral scam being run in America today. You will never elect the “right” candidates to appoint the “right” judges to overturn Roe v. Wade; you will only succeed in rewarding the same lying politicians and enriching the same PACs and political operators behind them who’ve been running this scam for the last 40 years. Elections don’t work, and you better find a new strategy if you hope to stem the tide of abortions.

Mr. and Ms. American voter: You’ve been had.

Source: Forbes.com - Author: Lawrence Hunter, Contributor ("I write about the intersection of economics and politics.")