Einstein’s Vote for Gary Johnson

Jeff Opdyke (October 30, 2012)

Next Tuesday, I will step into the polling booth at the fire station near my house and I will cast my presidential vote for the only man in the race who can change the path America is on. He won’t win; this I know. My vote, some will certainly complain, will have been cast in vain … because I am voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate. You can blame Einstein.

You might recall that Einstein once famously quipped that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Well, that’s precisely the problem in American politics today – precisely the problem I’m addressing with my vote for Mr. Johnson. If only I could convince 10 of my friends … and 10 of their friends … and on and on – to vote with me in numbers so large that the American body politic must take notice of our collective, epic disillusionment with the status quo. But that, too, I know, is the stuff of Tooth Fairies and Easter Bunnies.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that we voters continue the same insanity every four years, ignorantly expecting a different result. We continue to choose between a Republican and a Democrat, incapable of grasping the obvious fact that we are effectively choosing between vanilla and French vanilla. They are essentially the same at their core. Each party prattles on about different social agendas – but abortion, school prayer, gay marriage, labor matters, gun rights, etc. will not alter the fundamental direction America is now moving. They are sideshow issues each party exploits to galvanize the base of voters most likely to sway one direction or another over matters that are ultimately trivial in comparison to the real crises we face.

Listen to what Romney and Obama say – what they really say. They’re not debating how to save the country from an impending currency collapse. They’re not talking about scaling back the size of government in order to live within our means. They’re not honestly addressing the slow death of the middle-class life we once proudly claimed. They’re debating how to spend even more money we don’t have. Do you spend it on tax cuts for the amorphously named “high-earners,” or do you spend it on redistributing national wealth through ever-more obese handouts to the entitlement class?

It doesn’t matter which of those causes you support because both ultimately add to the country’s strangling debt.

For the entire post-war period, Republicans and Democrats have been building an ever-larger bureaucracy. At the end of the Second World War, government spending was about 20% of the country’s GDP. Today, it’s about 40%. Think about that: two of every five dollars spent in America comes from the government, not private industry. As that grows larger – and it will, regardless of the party in charge – America’s tax regime will increasingly become untenable for average households, and businesses will relocate to friendlier locales.

We read a lot about America’s public debts now exceeding $16 trillion … but that’s a Kmart blue-light special when you consider that our real debts – all the unfunded liabilities we’re on the hook for because of all our bloated, social-welfare entitlement programs – actually exceeds $121 trillion. And that sum is growing far faster than we can manage.

Those are big numbers with no context. So, here’s some context to consider: That sum exceeds $1 million per taxpayer, about half what the average college graduate will earn over an entire lifetime of work, and more than the average high-school graduate will ever earn … and remember: we’ve become a service-sector economy where education lags, so our future population of service-sector workers is screwed.

Americans owe a sum of money we can never – ever – repay. We are effectively bankrupt as a nation, no different than corrupt Argentina, circa 2001, or corrupt Greece today. We just have the benefit of a currency the world accepts as the key preserve of value and a military the world relies on – and the currency’s reputation is sinking fast.

America needs neither Romney nor Obama. We’ve spent too many decades with Republicans and Democrats switching seats yet changing nothing. It’s like a brunette who dyes her hair blonde – what’s underneath remains the same.

We need a fundamental rethink in this country, a new political direction to follow, a new philosophy to take control of the White House.

That’s Gary Johnson.

I bet most Americans have no idea about Mr. Johnson’s beliefs— though that’s more of a flaw with the media than with the people. Still, I encourage you to spend time learning about him. You’ll realize he’s rational and reflects a set of values shared by the plurality of America. He’s not a fringe thinker like so many want to believe of Libertarians. Hell, Mitt Romney’s the lunatic who thinks we should actually build a wildly unrealistic, multi-billion dollar, high-tech fence along the Mexican border. That’s fringe thinking.

Unlike the men who will run one and two in this election, Mr. Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, recognizes the dire need to balance the federal budget immediately and to reduce federal spending by more than $1 trillion – otherwise the economy will never grow to its potential, the dollar will continue its decades-long decline and the erosion of middle-class wealth will only accelerate.

He knows America’s dysfunctional, hyper-bloated tax scheme must be dismantled and rebuilt in a simpler, fairer fashion. He understands that Social Security and Medicare must be reformed – with no impact on today’s retirees – because both systems pay benefits far too generous for the income source those benefits draw from … and there’s no way to increase taxes to the degree necessary to cover those benefits without draining capital from the economy and sharply reducing the middle class standard-of-living. (Obama and Romney lie when they claim they will protect the middle class; there aren’t enough taxes to raise from the wealthy and businesses to deal with what we face. The middle class will most definitely pay. Period.)

Mr. Johnson knows America must lose the belligerent-cop act and stop picking fights around the world. That America must rethink an archaic, barbaric drug war that fills prisons with expensive-to-incarcerate “criminals” who commit victimless crimes, yet which causes no end to the pain and bloodshed in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America. That we must roll back the never-ending, always-expanding litany of regulations and bureaucracy that unnecessarily weigh down every industry from banking to dairy farming.

Do that, Mr. Johnson knows, and American prosperity – the prosperity we longingly recall from our glory days gone by – will rekindle.

If Americans – if you and all your friends and all their friends – understood the man behind the Libertarian banner, then he might just become the next president of the United States of America. I know, though, that he won’t. Too many Americans don’t understand him, though well more than half of Americans fundamentally believe as he does … and that’s the sad headline you won’t read on Nov. 7th.

Ultimately, I’m pulling the lever for Gary Johnson for a single reason: It’s the right thing to do for America.

Until next time, stay Sovereign …

Jeff D. Opdyke

P.S. No matter who wins next week, America’s fiscal house will remain in disarray. I’ve been watching an approaching economic catastrophe that’s ready to strike regardless of who occupies the White House. It’s a 99-year-old Ponzi scheme that’s about to unwind, and it could take the entire middle class with it. To learn more about this coming crisis, click here for my urgent video.

Einstein’s Vote for Gary Johnson

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