Some people wonder at my support for initiative and referendum. They don’t place much trust in their neighbors to run their lives. They fear what de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority.”

And hey: I don’t trust fellow voters to run my life, either. But I trust voters to let me be free to run my own life more a lot more than I trust politicians.

Voters will choose less government more often than their representatives will.

And less government, in today’s context, means better government.

This was most notably demonstrated in late September. The U.S. House of Representatives voted on the Bush administration’s proposed bailout of the mortgage industry, the biggest takeover of private property in world history.

To politicians, it made a whole heckuva a lot of sense. To Americans who wrote and phoned Congress, the bailout appeared just as it was: a quickie, panic “fix” that merely lined the pockets of a sector of the investor population.

It was a subsidy, socializing risk while letting profit remain private.

Enough Americans notified enough of their reps to convince them to take a stand, defeating the bailout. The letters came in, ten to one against the bill.

Of course, the next week Congress voted in the bailout, adding injury, in the form of a bigger price tag, to the insult of ignoring constituents.

Once again, politicians ignored the people. That’s never good government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Which major party works behind the scenes, illegally, to scuttle democratic processes? Well, consider Pennsylvania.

Ralph Nader has an $81,000 judgment against him, to pay off the legal costs of those who challenged his campaign in 2004. In early August, Nader petitioned the state Commonwealth Court to overturn that judgment, saying the whole thing was orchestrated — illegally — by Democratic legislators and aides in the State House. Conspiracy, he says.

He may have a case. In July, the state attorney general’s office filed criminal charges against a dozen people connected with the House Democratic caucus. Soon we’ll see how good the evidence for conspiracy is.

But don’t think it’s just Democrats who’d do nearly anything to keep a competitor off the ballot. This year, the chair of the Cumberland County Republican Party, an attorney, is suing the Libertarian Party for putting up former congressman Bob Barr as its presidential nominee. You see, when Pennsylvanians signed the petition, another name was on it. A paper candidate.

The plaintiff calls this fraud. Of all things.

Of course, since this minor party hadn’t held its national convention yet, the placeholder candidate was just a pro forma thing, to comply with an idiotic ballot access law that should be ruled unconstitutional anyway.

Yes, folks, the people who run both major parties look at election laws pretty much like the Borgias looked at pharmacology: Something to use to bump off the opposition.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.