People from around the country should be happy that they are being spared having to undergo the sheer boredom of Virginia’s race for governor. Wow, what a yawner.
Oh, that’s not to say that Democrats and Republicans and the mainstream media agree with that assessment. In their minds, this is a terribly exciting race. After all, they would say, look at the 3 big issues in the race: (1) transportation; (2) a 20-year-old graduate thesis; and (3) tax increases.
Yes, those are exciting issues for statists. But what a yawner for everyone else!
Why only 2 candidates and why such boring issues?
The answer lies in Virginia’s onerous ballot-restriction law. The law places such enormous obstacles to people running for statewide office that Virginians customarily end up with only two statewide candidates, a Republican and a Democrat.
To run for statewide office, a prospective candidate must secure 10,000 signatures of registered voters. To be safe, that means that a person must normally secure about 17,000 signatures since many signatures will inevitably be disallowed.
As part of that total the prospective candidate must ensure that at least 400 valid signatures come from each congressional district around the state, which normally means getting about 800 total signatures. That means that a prospective candidate or his petition gatherers must travel around the state, expending money on travel and hotel rooms and, even more difficult, finding a place that will allow them to approach people and ask for signatures.
The entire process is difficult and expensive, which it is designed to be. Every so often the Libertarian Party or an Independent is able to pull it off, but all too often the people of Virginia are treated to two yawner candidates, both of whom share the same statist philosophy.
One of the biggest myths in American politics is that there are fundamental philosophical differences between the Democrats and Republicans. In actuality, there is one political party — call it the Statist Party — that is divided into two wings — the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, much like the NFL is one league that is divided into two conferences.
Statists, whether Democrats or Republicans, share a common commitment to the role that government plays in a society — from welfare, to transportation, to drug laws, to public schooling, to income taxation, to undeclared foreign wars of aggression, to regulation, to protectionism, to border controls, to the war on terrorism, to gun restrictions, to infringements on civil liberties. The debates and arguments are always over inane plans to reform the system.
Consider, for example, Virginia’s transportation mess. Every four years, just like clockwork, each candidate comes up with his plan to reform the mess. Regardless of who is elected, the mess goes on, followed by a new election in which the candidates come up with new plans to reform the mess.
No statist is ever going to state the obvious: socialist ownership of the means of production will always be a mess and no one, no matter how brilliant, will ever be able to come up with a plan to fix it. No one ever suggests privatization as the solution. That notion falls outside the paradigm represented by the Statist Party.
The same goes for public schooling. No statist candidate is ever going to call for a separation of school and state. Or drug laws — no statist will call for repeal and legalization. And so on.
The statists suggest that too many gubernatorial candidates would be chaotic and that Virginia voters are just too dumb to choose the best candidate from a field of too many candidates.
Yet, consider the special election for governor that was held in California in 2003, the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger was initially elected. It had 135 candidates, many of whom were running active campaigns. See the Official Ballot here.
It’s true that some people might claim that the fact that Californians elected Schwarzenegger confirms that voters are too dumb to ferret out which candidate to vote for, but others would say that it was an exciting race, one where voters were offered a range of diverse ideas and perspectives and that voters had no problems determining who to cast their vote for.
Anyone who wants to run for governor of Virginia should be free to do so, including poor, inner-city residents who lack the time, money, and ability to comply with Virginia’s inane ballot-restriction law. Why not rid the state of its monopolistic statewide elections and restore democracy to Virginia? At least it would relieve the boredom.