I'm Anti-"Anti-Political Dynasty"

Many will read the title of this and think I'm all for political dynasties. I am not. I am simply against legislature that aims to dictate who can and cannot run for certain positions in government. Put simply, many of these kinds of legislation aim to block certain people from running - regardless of their ability to lead the country.

I'll add to this law, the law on restricting term limits. It's one of those laws that dictate who can or can't run based on how many times a person has won the office of mayor regardless of how good a job he's done.

Why am I against these two laws? It's quite simple. The only people who should be able to decide who can or can't run should be the people. I.e., if the people want to vote for the son of the current mayor to replace him, so be it. Or if the people want to vote for the same mayor after 10 prosperous 3 year terms, why not allow them?

The Anti-Political Dynasty Law comes from a good place. It aims to allow a more level playing field especially in places where the political dynasties are only serving their own interests. To which, I say, if the people allow themselves to be conned by the same family over and over and over again, I say let them be conned and let them learn their lesson the hard way - I'm looking at you, Lapu-Lapu City!

I worry that if we use the Anti-Political Dynasty law to restrict the people running, we're actually depriving ourselves of legitimately good lawmakers and politicians just because we want other people to have a chance at running. Why fix something that may not be broken?

And what do we make of families that run against each other? Or families that support people other than their own families? These two cases aren't rare and have appeared in the news in just the past week. Clearly, it's not the case that all families are as close knit as your typical non-political family.

It may be a bitter pill to swallow as I once did support some form of Anti-Political Dynasty Law but such a law would be counter-intuitive and might actually make things worse in the long run. This is why I'm considering this point to be one of the deciding factors when I vote next week.