How do I stop a button event from posting in ASP.NET MVC?

I have a standard view and some standard input tags without runat=server:

<button id="submit">submit</button>
<button id="clear">clear</button>

Pressing either causes the page to submit. Instead, I want them to do nothing since I'm handling the click event with JQuery. How do I do this?

EDIT

Here is my jquery code

$('#submit').bind('click', submit_click);

function submit_click() {
    alert('clicked submit');
}