WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Stop agonizing. If you don’t like the idea of either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton as president, don’t vote.

This is one of the most politically incorrect statements in our politically correct society and you can almost hear the gasps of horror in the establishment parties and the mainstream media. Voting is not just a right, it is a civic duty, they choke out through clenched teeth.

The cast of “Hamilton” has joined with President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush in a video urging everyone – and especially you young people! – to vote!

“ If you vote for either of the mainstream candidates, nothing will change and the next election will be just as corrupt and unsatisfactory. ”

“Lots of people lived and died so that you could do that,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, the actor and composer behind the Tony-Award-winning hip-hop musical, says encouragingly.

Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. Certainly many thousands of people throughout our nation’s history have died to preserve our freedoms and our way of life, including the chance to vote.

But they did not die so we could face the highly unsatisfactory options that a corrupt and broken electoral process is offering us this time.

And one thing is sure — if you vote for either of the mainstream candidates, nothing will change and the next election will be just as corrupt and unsatisfactory.

Millions of voters registered their dissatisfaction with the mainstream parties by voting for an unknown 74-year-old independent who promised a political revolution and had the gall to challenge the anointed Democratic nominee, and by hijacking the Republican Party and propelling a controversial political neophyte to the nomination.

Donald Trump's Russia Dilemma

People want change and they might yet elect Donald Trump, not because they don’t have reservations about him or don’t see his flaws, but because they can simply no longer abide holding their noses and voting for the lesser of two evils.

So exercise your freedom by not voting. This is what Hillary Clinton — who has cowed the Democratic Party and the mainstream media into accepting her election as inevitable — fears the most, because, as Michelle Obama and others repeatedly claim, not voting is a vote for Trump.

Not really. Not voting is not voting. The implication of these admonitions is not only that you have to vote, but that you have to vote for Hillary Clinton. That doesn’t sound much like freedom, does it?

Memo to the mainstream parties: If you want me to vote, give me better choices.

The New York Times — which both in its news reporting and editorials has been pathetically in the tank for Clinton — moaned in a “news” story last week that she was having trouble winning over younger voters.

“They tend not to be motivated by any single, unifying issue, making the job of messaging harder,” the Times reporters tell us, no doubt taking their cues from the Clinton campaign for this sweeping generalization.

This is not really true. Bernie Sanders found two or three big unifying issues that enthused young voters — first and foremost among them that we have a corrupt campaign finance system.

But Clinton can hardly rally voters around this theme after spending all of August playing that corrupt system to the hilt in a series of fundraisers with the rich and famous, can she?

The other alternative — almost as politically incorrect as not voting — is to vote for a third-party candidate. The guardians of our democracy gasp again — this is just throwing away your vote, or dangerously abetting the election of the greater of two evils

“The vast majority of millennials were not old enough to vote in 2000,” that same biased Times story reported, “when Ralph Nader ran as the Green Party nominee and, with the strong backing of young voters, helped cost Vice President Al Gore the presidency.”

Oh boo-hoo. The person who cost Al Gore the presidency was Al Gore — if he had been a stronger candidate the race would not have been close enough that a few hanging chads or minuscule number of third-party votes or an adverse Supreme Court decision could cost him the election. If he had won his home state of Tennessee or Bill Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, he would have become president.

Moreover, it is something of a myth that Nader cost Gore any Electoral College votes, even in Florida. Add up the votes anyway you want, there’s no way of knowing whether Bush or Gore would have prevailed in Florida if Nader was not on the ballot.

So if a Libertarian ticket of Gary Johnson and William Weld holds more appeal for you, or the refreshingly radical Green Party ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka, by all means vote for them — whether you are in a battleground state or not!

After all, any Democrat in a solidly red state or any Republican in a solidly blue state is throwing away his or her vote in exactly the same way, voting for a second-party candidate that has no chance of winning that state.

Or go to the polls to vote for candidates in the down ballot — Congress, state and local officials — and skip voting for president. When an electoral process is as dysfunctional as ours, not voting can be a principled exercise of freedom.

Establishment choice Hillary Clinton is likely to win no matter how many people stay home, but the tally of abstentions and votes against her will show that she scarcely has any legitimacy as a democratically elected leader.

Perhaps then someone else younger and more charismatic than Sanders or less flawed than Trump can pick up the message of change that has created the only enthusiasm in this nutty election — and we will vote for him or her because we want to and not because we have to.