It amazing how 0.05 percent of the population votes and the nominating elections are practically decided. I think Edwards was right when he said that he would stay in the race because so many people have yet to have their voices heard (although I disagree heavily with the rhetorical ambiguity of "being heard"). Nonetheless, we already see candidates being eliminated from the discourse by media conglomerates. Kucinich & Gravel have already been taken out of the debates, even though only one state has held an official vote. How is this the democratic process? If you want to consider the Iowa caucuses, you have to accept that 1/3 of shift workers at a 24-hour plant/workplace could not make it to caucus unless they took off from work, and I doubt shift workers can afford to take off of work for anything other than an emergency. Swing shifts usually do not end until 9 or 10 PM. If it is not a 24 hour operation, and the workplace has only two shifts, then 1/2 of the workers would not be able to vote.
This is one of the reasons why having such a large central government is problematic. At a local level, everyone knows everyone else, at least moreso than at a national level. That is, I know many of the candidates I might elect in my local government. If not, it would be easy to get to know them or perhaps I know people who know them. It is clear why it is my city council representatives make the decisions they do. There is no heavy lobbying, party power-plays, and in most cases, they are not professional politicians. Thus, people are elected because they are trusted by the majority of people, and it is unlikely that local citizens would be systematically excluded from the process, because it is the local people who control the process.
Also, if we accept a large and powerful central government, we have to accept that it can be used for massive social change for either things we agree with or disagree with - and we have no direct say in the matter! The people of this large bureaucracy are far removed from the people they represent, Washington DC does have its own culture, and it does corrupt even the most noble.
This is not to say there should be no laws or order, but it is to say that there should not be professional politicians, who know no other life than being a politician, who do not work side-by-side the same people for whom they make decisions and whom they represent. I do believe that we need public education, I believe that retirees need to be taken care of, and I believe tat we need universal health care ought to be instated; but I do not believe that this can be done by an almighty federal government. I do not believe a change of heart can be had by a change in legislation. It is much easier for me to point to my neighbors and say "Can we really let Fred go without health care coverage?" than it is for me to say "we should all pool together to make sure everyone in the world has health coverage."
Surely, the federal government has done good - ending segregation, social security, etc., but this does not mean that the federal government was necessary for those changes nor does it mean that the federal government does more good than harm on a day-to-day basis by treating citizens as numbers and not neighbors. There is nothing to stop people from helping their neighbors, and when neighboring towns/cities need help, others will come to help. We see this with every disaster in America. It doesn't require legislation, it IS human nature. Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods - people flock to help. People do not wait for the federal government to tell them to help.
But what about problems like the the homeless, you ask? The problem is that we expect the government to do something about it, we have forgotten that we *are* the government. And if you knew the person who was homeless, you would probably et him into your home. When a colleague of mine suffered a fire in his apartment, I let him stay with me until he got things sorted out. Does that sound odd? It shouldn't. When we become dependent on Big Brother to do our work for us, we fail to accept any responsibility other than paying taxes, and half of every dollar you send to Washington is used for the military, anyway.
I am not a right-wing Christian. I do not believe in original sin. I do not believe that people starve because they sinned or because they are lazy. I believe that humans are naturally good and generous, and that they work when it is meaningful. Hobbies are work we that we call something else only because we have come to define work as "that which I hate to do." So if we enjoy doing it, and we don't get paid for it - it is a hobby.
What we have is a state that will forever uphold the status quo of corporatism. Sure, they might talk about curtailing it or increasing taxes for them, but they will never accept eliminating for-profit industry altogether. People have a right to exploit others' labor. You make me a widget that cost me $1 and I sell it for $2, I keep the extra $. Why? Because it's my right to. Whereas, prior to the industrial revolution the craftsman used to control his labor, now she must work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (and we are slowly losing our weekends), and she must ask permission from his owner to leave early or take a day off.
It used to be that craftsmen (and they were men centuries ago) owned their own tools. Perhaps there was a guild that pooled resources together. If you hired a craftsman, you hired them and their tools, and they kept all of the payment for their labor and its fruits. Merchants purchased the craftsman's fruits of labor to sell elsewhere. Essentially, there were:

Aristocrats
Merchants
Artisans/Craftsmen
Slaves

With the aggregation of wealth during the industrial revolution came the ability for people to own the machinery that used to be owned by the craftsman. No individual craftsman could afford a automobile plant. So, Henry Ford buys the tools, and says to the craftsmen "I'll let you work with my tools, but I get to take a cut of everything you do…and not just until the tools are paid for…I get a cut forever." The craftsman became a wage-slave; without his own means of producing goods, he was forced to rent himself out to others for just enough for shelter, food and clothing - just like a well-treated indentured servant. The only difference between wage-slavery and chattel slavery is that the wage-slave can choose which hovel he lives in, gets to choose whether she wants to use her $4 in daily food stamps for either coffee or peanut butter, and gets to choose her master. But she nonetheless has no control of his own labor or the price of her goods, and her living conditions give little more than basic physiological needs, if that. Now we have:

- Capitalists (active [venture capitalists] or passive [those who merely live off of investment interest)
- Professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, bankers, engineers, programmers, architects, and other salaried workers)
- Wage-slaves (hourly workers, skilled or unskilled)

Slowly, many of the professionals are slipping into wage-slave living conditions, and the gap between rich and poor widens. If the trend continues, we will end at a to a two-class system in which there are those who do not need to work to eat and those who cannot find enough to eat no matter how much they work.
What's that? You say that if people were allowed work at they pleasure without bosses that they just wouldn't work at all? Not if they don't get paid! And paid by whom? *Directly* by those whom reap the fruits of their labor, not by an intermediary owner of the laborers' tools. The only people your charge applies to are the filthy rich who need not work, who merely collect interest on money loaned out to people who needed capital to purchase means of producing so that they could hire wage-slaves so that they could skim off the labor of their slaves so that they could pay off the person who loaned them the money so that that person can not have to ever work for his daily bread. The truly lazy in this society are not the poor, but the independently wealthy. They will never have to clean someone else's toilet or empty someone else's trash, or do another's bidding for fear of not earning enough to eat. Nor do they ever have to worry about working to pay their bills. They go to Washington to become a politician or to lobby politicians to keep the status quo so that they can continue to live of the labor of others. Do you hear any Democrat or Republican challenging the wage-slave system? Do you hear any of them questioning the integrity of the very idea of corporatism? They are all invested in the giant machine that stamps each child with a number upon their birth, trains them to be a docile wage-slave, and helps to maintain their position in Washington, its culture, and the corporate capitalism they all subscribe to (except maybe Bernie Sanders, Denis Kucinich, and maybe Ron Paul).
Where are the libertarian socialists? Where are those leftists who broke from mainstream Marxism for fear of the Red Bureaucracy would become just as evil as capitalism -- another form of oppression? Where are those who hate the categorization and collectivism of identity politics, claiming it to be the flipside of racism on the oppression coin when it becomes institutionalized &legislated and yet also believe in a cooperative commonwealth that meets the basic human needs of its participants and that believes in eliminating all forms of oppression and arbitrary authority? I guess some are in the left wing of the Socialist Party USA, some are members of the IWW, and others either join other decentralized organizations or stick to themselves, carrying out their beliefs one-on-one and day-to-day, participating in community organizing and liberating local governance from State bureaucracy. I am surprised and alarmed that the only voice in America that gets serious attention is that of the Big State. Big State for the progressives, Big State for the conservatives. The libertarian capitalists are laughed at the the libertarian socialists are not even known. And we think we have a choice of candidates and inclusive political discussion?