I was born and raised 1⁄2 hour north of the 60th district in an agricultural community. I am the youngest son of an immigrant dairy farmer. The bedrock of my political philosophy has in large part been shaped by my father’s experiences. My father was born in the Netherlands in the early stages of WWII. Some of his earliest memories were of German soldiers rummaging through their family farm seeking some small animal they could eat, demanding hot coffee from my grandmother and chasing young able-bodied Dutch boys through the pastures with the intent of putting them to work for the German war machine. His experiences show very clearly how bad government can be.

Bad government can take many forms from the criminal to the merely mundane. However, mundane does not mean unimportant or uncostly.