Election Reflection

 Just finished voting... small slate of candidates, no initiatives.  Nothing exciting, and very, very few voters at the polling station.
 
 When a candidate says the following, this is what they really mean:

 "I care about you/the little guy/the taxpayer."  - even if they do care, all that "caring" really means is allocating forcibly redistributed money.  There's really no personal sacrifice on their part.

 "I want to get things done." - even if they do want to be productive while in office, "getting things done" means, for the most part, passing new laws or harshening existing ones.

 "I want to see justice done." - even if they care about punishing the guilty, this really means passing feel-good laws, harshening existing sentencing guidelines, and stepping up enforcement of petty offenses.  "Law and order" candidates typically boost their record by lowering the bar of what's considered criminality and snagging these increasingly low-hanging fruit.

 What would a truly effective candidate do, once reaching the office they're seeking?

 Show caring not by implementing new programs, but by tossing out programs that don't work, and making existing ones deliver the same results with less money spent.
  "Getting things done" should mean a focus on personally intervening on behalf of taxpayers caught up in bureaucracy.  Is a merchant's customers the seeming target of aggressive parking tickets?  Is a merchant in their district trying to expand their facility but can't seem to hurdle the red tape?  Is a taxpayer in arrears trying to make an honest effort at catching up, but the collectors keep calling and also tacking on new penalties?  These are all things most officeholders have the power to help with, and should.
  "Seeing justice done" should mean *eliminating* outdated laws, and seeing to it that civil fines and criminal penalties actually match the offense.  It also means not targeting decent people who accidentally violate some law, like forgetting to remove their CCW gun before entering a school zone, but instead making police work harder at catching violent offenders.  It also means not waiting until a pardon request makes its way to their desk, but actively looking for cases in which people were royally screwed by the "justice" system and doing their best to make it right.

  Just some humble suggestions, but hey, who am I, right???