Choice is a dubious notion to begin with. Most Americans feel their choices are becoming slimmer.

Do we really have a choice anymore to refuse the disproportionally crippling and life-denying debt needed to advance our life goals? No. Do we and our families have or have ever had a choice to pay taxes? No – but wealthy tax cheats and large corporations do. And more importantly, do our votes really count in the way of affecting every level of representative government?

A major study from Princeton and Northwestern indicates no – “average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence (on U.S. government policy)” and “when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.” Our best academies now paint a picture of oligarchy – of special interest, crony capitalism. So the question is really not Hillary versus Trump. The question is if this system has the capacity anymore to produce choice at all.

And we know it doesn’t. It is a show run by shills. It is a growing leviathan state of Mammon and false justice.

No, Mr. Trump isn’t going to be the benevolently disruptive bull in the china shop. His ability to do anything at all in one term would be neutralized by his already toxic, Nixonian political presence, his inborn incapability of inspiring institutional trust, and any number of ballooning wall-related eminent domain lawsuits, international slights and unconstitutional blights on the republic.

No, Mrs. Clinton isn’t going to be able to legally get anything substantial done either. Republicans just didn’t get the chance to hate Obama as long as they’ve hated the Clintons. And even if Congress did run completely blue this election, the already spineless Democratic Party would fester into levels of majoritarian hubris and executive corruption so great it might actually lose Corey Booker the presidency in 2024.

I am undecided because big government and big business are colluding to eradicate true choice in both the market and the capitol, and these charlatans are the best examples of both. And if our political system doesn’t have the capacity to produce a legitimate choice by legitimate means – and it currently doesn’t – than something much more than a choice is at stake here.

Things will not get better in the next eight years, and that should terrify us all at this point. But what is even more concerning is that we’ll keep coming to the table, expecting salvation, forgetting that we don’t have a seat, over and over again, until the negotiations are finished and the results announced, without end and without us.

Michael Lang is a Seattle resident.