Isn’t that what elections have become all about? Well, except electing folks who are the tip of the iceberg on government needing more of your money.          

I could have added to the headline, “Like it always does after another failed social experiment,” but I prefer to digress in the body, not the punchline, errrr, headline.

And no, this isn’t a column telling you how to vote. It’s a column telling you how I voted.

Which brings us to the easy part of this year’s ballot. Just vote no on the two statewide initiatives to give government more money for programs that, once again, never achieve desired results and never have enough funding. Which, since I’ve been voting, is literally every government program or initiative ever put on a ballot.

Let’s face it. Every government program is a fiscal and moral failure. Want proof? A favorite saying on the left is: “You can’t legislate morality.” Yet all the left does is introduce legislative morality. That alone should garner a no vote. Not enough evidence? Then how about 250 years of waste, fraud and abuse of literally every government program that never achieved the desired result?

So a no vote on Props ll and mm (and nn and oo and pp or whatever letter the progressives in Colorado are up to) was a no-brainer. That last comment is some raw meat for you leftists to write to me about.

Which brings us to the other part of the ballot, Mesa County. Our school board elections. The good people of Mesa County have the opportunity to vote for some individuals who literally are keeping a government program within its budget. And they are doing it even with the state underfunding them and our citizens approving an outrageous amount to build Taj Mahal High, formerly known as Grand Junction High School.

Quick note: This doesn’t mean I didn’t realize we needed to replace the high school. That was obvious since I moved here in 2000. But what our “community leaders” proffered in that single-issue ballot measure (for the record, I was the first pundit to say we needed a single-issue ballot measure, not a Christmas-tree one) was outrageous. Thank goodness we had Will Jones, Angela Lema and Andrea Haitz elected before the shovels hit the dirt to keep things under control.

And that’s not all they’ve gotten under control. Spending is down (a necessity given enrollment is down), fiscal responsibility is up, grades and test scores are improving, and staff salaries are up to be more in line to keep good employees across the board. And yet, it’s not enough for the local and state teachers’ unions.

Then again, nothing ever is.

Yet here, in Mesa County, we have three incumbent school board members doing citizen service. And they’ve done it in transparency to boot. And the people who have benefited the most from them want them gone.

When it comes to elections, there’re always three reasons for that: Power, money and control. No wonder the unions (a control mechanism that needs to be outlawed) want them gone. They are in the way of the union’s power, money and control over our most valuable possessions: our kids. To paraphrase every control-freak progressive throughout history, “Get ’em while they’re young.” And for that, nothing works better than taking away parental rights in education.

This makes voting for Will, Angela and Andrea even more obvious than voting against giving the government more power to confiscate your money. Which ironically is what most of our education-based ballot measures end up being about. Oh, it’s also nice we finally have a savings account to put some money toward the district’s next monument. Although my hope is with these three re-elected, they’ll just build a functional building for educating our kids. And we all know how the union hates that.

As my dad’s campaign slogan said in his successful campaign for school board back in Monroe, Michigan: Make your vote count.

And in this election, my hope is that vote is in Freedom and Truth.

Craig Hall is owner and publisher of The Business Times. Reach him at (970) 424-5133 or publisher@thebusinesstimes.com.