Do we truly control our government?

Contemplate this quote, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” It was spoken by Thomas Jefferson. Do you think that, today, the people fear the government or the government fears the people?

I, personally, came to the conclusion that the government certainly isn’t afraid of the people, or it wouldn’t be doing all of the horrible rubbish that it is now (such as torture and wiretapping). Rather, the people are afraid of the government, or at least have good reason to be afraid of their government. The government is getting rid of our civil liberties daily (this includes Congress too, because they facilitate it); our privacy has all but disappeared, we are all at risk of being whisked away by the government and detained for an uncertain period of time, and there seems to be nothing we, the people, can do to stop this erosion of our civil liberties.

But this converges with my next point. Voting is supposedly our power, correct? It’s how we control and change our government and representatives? That’s what we’re taught in our schools and families. Well, here’s the question I asked myself the other day: If we control our government, if we can actually change our government, if we actually have power over our government, by way of voting, then why on earth are we afraid of it?

My conclusion is that we don’t truly control our government. My conclusion is that, when we go to the polls to vote, we are simply giving our power away to elected officials that manipulate the electoral process to be elected. Once you elect a politician (usually from one of the two designated political parties) to office, they very often do not fulfill their campaign promises, and you can beg, plead, write letters, start a petition, etcetera, but you have no real power. The main power of government is not voting: it is lawmaking. So, if the people are ever truly going to gain control of their government, they must acquire the power to make laws.

This is where the National Initiative for Democracy comes in. The National Initiative for Democracy is a federal ballot initiative that would allow citizens to directly vote on and establish laws about the issues that affect their lives, in partnership with their elected officials; the laws created by the ballot initiative process would be subject to the scrutiny of the Congress and the Courts (the laws passed by the people would have to be constitutional). With the National Initiative for Democracy, the people who make the policy could finally be the ones to suffer the policy, and, with the National Initiative for Democracy, average Americans could finally have some control over their government.

The ability of the people to make laws would solve a lot of problems in this country. For example, campaign finance reform is a necessary remedy to campaign finance corruption. But how can you expect a politician, who got elected because there was no campaign finance reform, to pass campaign finance reform? Wouldn’t that be directly in conflict with their own self-interest? Perhaps that is why we have seen little to no campaign finance reform passed in Congress in recent years. Or what if a proposed law directly hurt one of their big campaign donors? Wouldn’t voting for that be against their self-interest? The people are not influenced by the corruption of money in politics, and the people can not be bought out by the forces that currently control our government.

Now, if you would like to learn more about National Initiative for Democracy, please visit nationalinitiative.us, and, if you would like to learn more about the man who is the founder of the NI4D, please visit Gravel2008.us.