It will be months before the public knows for certain what
the results of the Nov. 2 elections will mean to U.S. policy and legislation.
Likely, it will mean more of the same that we’ve seen for generations, but with
a continued decline of a once great nation.

Things will remain the same in the sense that no new ideas
will come to the forefront, that Democratic and Republican party office holders
and party officials will continue their finger pointing and rhetoric.

Both parties, and most of the American public, are stuck in
the same mental rut. They can only think left and right. Such thinking is
tantamount to creating a political flat earth philosophy.

Just as the illiterate and uneducated of ancient history
thought the earth was flat, so, too, do most people today in thinking there’s
no other way than left/right or liberal/conservative.

Left and right exist, to be sure, but there’s more to a
compass than east and west. There’s also a north and south. And it is truly the
battle between north and south on the political compass on which people should
focus.

Left and right is the battle between those who believe in
the welfare state, and want to continue the practice, and those who continue
the warfare state. Sometimes these lines blur, too. There are warfare statists
on the right who believe in corporate welfare and there are welfare statists
who love to talk about stopping wars, but continue to appropriate funds for
their prosecution.

The north/south, or vertical thought process is different.
Those on the bottom are authoritarian and want to see the welfare/warfare state
continue. On the top of that vertical axis are the libertarians who want to put
an end to the welfare/warfare state. They place individual liberty and personal responsibility at a higher priority
than the power of the government.

Yet, when people read most newspapers and all but two
television shows, all they’re presented with is the left/right spectrum,
liberal versus conservative, Democrats versus Republican.

The trite truism that says insanity is doing the same thing
over and over again but expecting different result, has been bandied about
often. It’s been used by the left to denigrate the right, and vice versa. It
should also be applied to the American voting public. For more than 100 years.
Voters have bounced back and forth between Republicans and Democrats. Why would
voters think that continuing the same thing will bring anything other than more
debt, more instances of the U.S. acting as the policeman or bully of the world?

The right will continue the warfare state while disregarding
civil rights. It will continue to create its own form of authoritarianism with
the failed, unconstitutional and self-devastating war on drugs and refusal to
accept the rights of gays as being equal to the rights of straights.

The left will continue its own authoritarian practice of
forcing people to pay for a failed welfare state while dictating how businesses
are to be run, what foods people should eat. They will also continue to destroy
the right to keep and bear arms.

No change. That’s insanity.

There will be no change until people acknowledge that the
policies of both the left and right are authoritarian and destructive to the
concept of liberty where people can do as they see fit so long as they don’t
interfere with the rights of others. There will be no change until people start
thinking vertically.

The philosophical battle is not left versus right, but
authoritarianism versus liberty.