I went home for the holidays this season to find that some of my mail was still arriving at my
parents’ house. I don’t know about you, but when I get mail I automatically rifle through it, tossing the bills aside,  looking for the good stuff. Well, there was no good stuff to find, but what I found interesting was a letter from the political party that I registered with when I turned 18.

This letter did not include voting records of the people affiliated with it, nor did it give a summary of the good things they had done over the course of the year, but what it did do was ask for my financial support to further the goals of the party, which were also not defined.

I began thinking about why I would or would not want to support this effort after I had trashed the solicitation. I thought about the support of MCOOL, CAFTA, Captive Supply, the Packer Ban, and various other issues that we had received over the past year. In doing so I realized that there was not one party that defined those goals as a whole. The support for those issues came, not from a party, but from individuals. Usually these issues had both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition. I thought to myself, it is certain men and women that I support, not one party or the other.

What I am getting at is this: partisan politics is destroying policy that benefits the citizens of this wonderful country. With the recent attention to the Jack Abramoff scandal, we are able to see
this a little more clearly. He has been convicted of defrauding clients of over $25 million to bribe and sway politicians of basically one party in order to secure votes on policy. This, however, is not the only time that an action like this has gone on, and I doubt that it will be the last.

It is a problem that is not exclusive to one party. Political favors and cronyism are ruining the democracy that our forefathers set out to attain. I've learned one thing under President Bush's administration. When one party controls both chambers of Congress and the White House, too much power is placed in the hands of a single group. The consequences of this have been brutal for Rural America during the past few years. 

As I look at the politicians and people in Washington, there are many good ones, but they are sometimes in opposition of their party or on the other side of a backroom agreement. These are the ones that we need to support. We can do this with campaign contributions, but the best and most effective way to do it is with votes. We don’t need anymore "yes men", crooks or cowards in the capital. What we need are people that stand up against the current institutions and vote the way the people that elected them would, without regret or remorse.

It should be clear to all of us that if we want to restore ethics, morality and a democratic process to our political structure, the first step towards doing so is on election day.

"Existing economics is a theoretical [meaning mathematical] system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world" – Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize winner, Economics