Joe Van Nes is about as far from being a political insider as you can get. The 25-year-old Vineyard contractor and landscaper is happy to admit that until about six months ago he was “utterly uninvolved” in politics and did not even vote.

“I voted when I was 18, just to do it, you know?” he said this week. “Then I lost faith in a system so obviously corrupt.

“The agenda of both parties is anti-common person and pro-special interest. It’s the same general policy that applies whenever there’s a dime to be made. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Democrat or Republican.”

It was not that he did not have strong opinions on issues; he had been fervently opposed to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, for example, since he was in high school. It was just that he had given up on the possibility of affecting real change via the ballot box.

Then came the Gulf oil spill, which convinced him even more firmly about the corruption of the two big political parties, but paradoxically got him involved again, to the point of deciding to make a run for the 10th district seat.

“That was the thing that got me to stand up, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” he said.

In particular, it was the fact that the federal government allowed the oil company BP to use huge quantities of dispersant “four times as toxic as the oil itself” to hide the slick.

“They wanted to do it because they had to pay a fine that was directly related to the amount of oil that was recovered. So it was spread out under the water where it could never be collected.

“They took a problem that was horrible and made it worse,” he said.

And the fact that they were allowed to get away with it “points to the absolute corruptness [sic] of government,” he said.

“When that happened, I realized we can’t just give up. People can’t expect their representatives to stand up for them, if we’re not standing up for ourselves.”

Mr. Van Nes is listed on the ballot as the Bring Home Troops candidate, but his platform, as you may already have gathered, is way wider than that issue.

“We have to reform the whole [political] system. Not just small details of the system. The whole thing has to come down, be taken apart, remanufactured,” he said.

If he had his way, the constitution would be amended to ban any for-profit organization from endorsing candidates. The buying of media time or space would be a felony punishable by a year in prison. The media would be obliged to give fair and equal coverage to all sides. Political donations would be a maximum of $10 per person, (Violations of that one also would be punishable by prison as well as a 25-year ban from public office.) And national elections would be publicly funded via grants to everyone on the ballot of $5,000 for Congress, $15,000 for the Senate and $200,000 for the President.

But it goes beyond the electoral system, the change Joe Van Nes envisions, it goes to the U.S. and world economic system.

“A lot of our problems go back to the fact that we have an outdated economic system, that relies on exponential growth on a planet that is limited,” he said.

“A lot of people got rich off it, but we’re approaching seven billion people on the planet and it’s filling up, there’s not enough space. The system has to be changed, and if it’s not, we’re in for a pretty violent ride, I think.”

For a start on this front, he would audit the Federal Reserve Board, just to see what they are spending all that money on — and then, if possible, abolish it.

This man is no Obama-style incrementalist. The changes made to the health care system were “nice, don’t get me wrong,” but they go nowhere near far enough, in his view.

The health care system as it now exists, he believes, is more accurately described as an industry which relies on people getting sick, which relies in turn on unhealthy industries like fast food.

“A good start would be to go after the fast food industry the way we went after the cigarette industry,” he suggested. “Don’t let them target our children with happy meals and toys in the food.”

Restrict their advertising, put Surgeon-General warnings on the doors of the fast food outlets, warning of the risks of cancer, heart attack, diabetes, he said.

And, while we’re at it: “Take the soda out of schools, instead of giving the kids more Ritalin.”

Mr. Van Nes is appalled at so much our politicians do. The war on drugs which exacerbates and criminalizes the problem, the war on terror which undermines our civil rights (“We’ve lost habeas corpus, a founding principle of democracy, and we’re not even talking about it, you know?”), the Patriot Act, free trade, the bank bail-out, the privatization of the military.

“The list just goes on and on,” he said.

The current system, he says, is “a divide and conquer pyramid scheme that relies on fear-mongering to keep us voting for more of the same. The whole system is brought to you by the purple party, which is 95 per cent bought, sold, traded and paid for by special interests.”

And the solution is “mostly just about looking at the problems we have and finding better ways to solve them.”

Like the over-consumption and pollution of water, for example.

“The average person uses 60 gallons a day. We have the technology to use much less without affecting our quality of life. We could maybe even create new jobs installing new toilets, new faucets that turn on and off when you put your hands under them.

“All our problems have alternative solutions,” he said.

It seems like an awful lot for this young Vineyarder, who cites work experience including helping his dad build a boat, and work in construction and landscaping, to take on.

But he thinks inexperience is no bad thing.

“The people in Washington have all the experience in the world and they’re doing terrible things with it,” he said.

And anyway, he would not be alone in working out the answers. In office, he would have an interactive system so people could see what he was up to, and offer suggestions.

“That way I wouldn’t need think tanks and special interests because I’d have the whole public as a think tank,” said Mr. Van Nes.