This week the Republican Party will be carrying out their well-scripted coronation of Mitt Romney as the party’s presidential nominee. Sadly, those in control of the party are either moles for the Obama campaign or are criminally inept. They have done everything in their power to suppress any possibility of Ron Paul’s name going into the nomination ring at the convention (in case you’re not aware, he never officially dropped out of the race and technically can be nominated were it not for recent RNC shenanigans).

What is the result? The nomination of a candidate who is more like Obama than unlike him. Yes, their rhetoric may be different, but both are in stark agreement on many issues: the war on drugs, the war on terror, bailouts for big banks (TARP), increasing government spending, and government managed socialized healthcare (Obamacare v Romneycare) to name just a few. So while the American people watch the cleverly orchestrated marionette show between Mitt and Barry, little do they realize there is only one manipulator controlling the strings: the elite party bosses of the centralized state (D’s and R’s are two sides of the same coin). In that respect I suppose it should not be surprising that Ron Paul was ignored and shut out of the process at every turn. He represented an opportunity for a meaningful choice between the two major parties. Why would the party push a candidate who is nearly identical to the opposition rather than a candidate that can offer a real alternative in the market place of ideas? If I’m trying to sell a product I don’t do it by copying my competition and then claiming the product is different because mine comes in a red box and theirs comes in a blue box.

Libertarians don’t want to pilot the ship, they want to dock it so people are free to come and go as they please.

Of course one could make the same argument against the Democrats. Their candidate claimed to stand in stark contrast to the policies of Bush yet he furthers Bush-era policies: bank bailouts, DEA raids of state-legal marijuana dispensaries, Guantanamo, and strong support of the PATRIOT Act and the NDAA. The Democrats are becoming war hawks and pawns of the military industrial complex (NDAA support) while the Republicans are becoming socialists (Romneycare, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind). Both parties are merging into the single Bureaucratic State Party. This “BS” Party is a monopoly that suppresses all outside dissent and rigs the rules to prevent you, the voter, from even hearing about other options. For example, the Commission on Presidential Debates (a non-profit organization literally controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties) has a “15% rule” that prevents Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gov. Gary Johnson from being on the debate stage with Romney and Obama this fall. The media, rather than acting in its regulatory role as part of the Fourth Estate, is willingly involved in the suppression of dissenting opinions by not even placing Gov. Johnson (or any other party’s candidates) in any polls used as the metric for the magical 15% threshold.

So again I ask, why would both parties be so aligned across so many issues while feigning the appearance of difference in order to give the populace the illusion of choice? Because the goal of both parties is power. Their policy alignments all have one thing in common: expansion or maintenance of government power. The bureaucrats write rules that validate the existence of more bureaucrats. The parties may fight over who is steering the ship, but what they both agree on is that the people must never ever leave the ship. If the people find out they can live on land and take care of themselves, then there won’t be much need for a ship and her crew, will there? Libertarians don’t want to pilot the ship, they want to dock it so people are free to come and go as they please. It’s all about choice. You may not agree with Gov. Gary Johnson, but fairness in the political process is a very basic American principal. There is no legitimate reason to establish rules that suppress ideas that fall outside of the 3×5 card of approved political opinion. Let the voters hear all sides and make up their own minds.