How much does it cost to rig elections so that the candidates don’t have to? How much does it cost to permanently lock third parties out of the political process? How much does it cost to ensure that only the truly corrupt get into public office? How much does it cost to lose what little remains of your freedom?

Just six dollars.

That’s how much of your money you will be forced to pay every year for federal elections, if a plan being pushed by partisan activists comes to fruition. (I’ll let you guess which side of the fence they’re on, and it isn’t the right side.) The plan goes like this:

First, force every American citizen to give up $6 of their hard-earned money and put it in the U.S. treasury.

Second, allow any candidate for Congress or the President to get their hands on that money by filling out some paperwork and agreeing to some minor restrictions on their campaigns.

Third, watch in awe as the U.S. political system magically cleans itself up, all the corrupt people go home, and true statesmen come forward to serve.

And I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona for sale. Cheap.

It turns out that this group has already introduced a bill in Congress this session to implement what it calls “voluntary public funding” of federal elections. Now what they mean by voluntary isn’t that you get to choose who you give your money to. You are forced — at the point of a government gun — to give up your money anyway, and to give it to whoever wants it, even if it’s someone you can’t stand.

That’s right, this so-called “voluntary public funding” of federal elections is really enforced campaign contributions to candidates you don’t like and would never support.

And while that bill, the horribly misnamed Let The People Decide Clean Campaign Act of 2006, doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere, it’s vitally important that it doesn’t. Otherwise, this is what will really happen:

The two largest political parties will be well provided for under the legislation, being able to get hold of all the money they want from their private donors and getting matching enforced contributions from we, the people. And since there’s little true difference between them anyway, it can’t really be said that one or the other is an opposition party. That’s just some theater they put on to make themselves look good, and this bill won’t change that.

Everybody else will get screwed. In order for a third party to get anywhere near your stolen $6, they would have to collect signatures amounting to 20% of all the votes cast in the previous election. But then the bill hamstrings the third parties by prohibiting them from paying anyone to collect the signatures. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any possible way any one person can collect 21 million signatures — by himself — just to get in to the election.

“When it becomes technically illegal for oppositional political parties to run candidates for Congress, there can no longer be any claim of legitimate representation,” said political consultant Stephen Gordon.

The ultimate end of a plan like this is to create a political system in which only those approved by the established order can run for office and have a chance of winning. When a country did this openly, we called it a one-party system. When a country does this back-handedly, maintaining the illusion of choice while actually restricting voters’ choices, we may as well call it a one-party system, for it amounts to the same thing.

We need fewer restrictions on third parties, not more of them, if the one-party system masquerading as a two-party system is ever to be broken. Or, as Gordon puts it: “When sizeable groups of people are no longer allowed to be represented on ballots, they will begin to represent themselves with bullets.”