Why This Election Didn't Matter

After I found out the results of last night's presidential election, I made a quick visit to some social media sites to see how people were reacting to the news.  Comments ranged from rage to euphoria, but I saw very little of the apathy that I feel toward the whole thing right now.  People actually believe that there's a fundamental difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.  I don't think there is, and here's why:

Barack Obama promised a lot of things during his 2008 election campaign, the most important of which was related to socializing medicine.  At first I was appalled by the idea because of my libertarian leanings, but then I got to thinking about the tax return that I had just filed.  I looked up the ways in which my income-tax dollars were being spent, and found that about a third of them went to various health-care programs.  So I thought that if we're already paying for this shit, we might as well include everyone as beneficiaries.  If Obama wanted to rally Congress to fix our already-socialized medicine, who was I to judge? 

That's not what he did, however, as we've seen the complete opposite instead.  Mandatory inclusion in the existing private-public hybrid system is a far cry from returning our tax dollars to us in the form of government services.  We still pay about a third of our income taxes to medical welfare programs, but instead of being made eligible to receive benefits, we've been forced to contribute MORE of our money to the monstrous private health insurance industry ($2500 for an MRI anyone?).  And guess where the Obama administration got the idea from?  You guessed it: Mitt Romney.  You see, the whole Obama healthcare bill was modeled after the system that good old Mitt helped put into place in Massachusetts during his tenure in government there. 

And the parallels don't stop there.  Most people would agree that if Mitt had been voted into office, you'd see behavior that is very similar to that of the Bush administration.  Lots of military activity, restrictions on individual rights a la the Patriot Act, fiscal irresponsibility in the form of huge deficit spending, corporate cronyism and a general disregard for his constituency (and everyone else in the world for that matter) are behaviors that could all be expected as the norm in a Romney administration.

But the truth is, we've seen four more years of the same under Obama.  We got the bastard health care bill I talked about above that benefited huge corporate interests more than anyone.  We got the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives various policing agencies the ability to detain citizens indefinitely without due process simply by labeling them "enemy combatants".  We got record deficit spending.  We got record military spending.  We got an expansion of our involvement in military conflicts around the world. 

There would be no difference under Mitt Romney.  Anyone who believes otherwise is deluding themselves.  If you want real change, you need to go outside the Republican and Democratic parties.  They are the source of every messed-up thing the government has done since the civil war, and they have led us to this stage in our country's history.  The wars and financial melt-downs of the last decade or so are just a scratch in the surface of the hole they're digging us into.  Why, oh why, should we keep voting for them?