A Vote for Liberty
Glenn, MI
The US is a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
– Julius Nyerere, First President of Tanzania
Last night, we saw the clowns. This morning, we consider the circus.
Opinions make markets. If you can’t comprehend an opposing perspective, you don’t understand your own. Yesterday, we made the case for voting. Today, after the calamity in Cleveland, we take the other side of the trade.
We’re purchasing a put on democracy…a system H.L. Mencken called the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. It’s the political equivalent of an investment-grade mortgage-backed security, packed to the rafters with subprime junk. Yet people line up around the block to buy the bamboozle.
Like the Nazi archaeologists at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, they may regret opening the box.
November, as one writer recently put it, is suiting up like a suicide bomber. As always, voters can pull one of two pins from the grenade. But either way, it’s bound to blow up.
Elections are for show. What happens on stage is entertaining, riles the crowd, and keeps them at a fever pitch. Campaigns reinforce emotional investment in the State and those who preside over it. The audience thinks they control the players, like request night at the local Improv. But the real action is backstage, and only a favored few have passes.
As Mencken said, every election is an advance auction on the sale of stolen goods. Recent looting in American cities is a travesty, but in some sense a sideshow. The real pillaging happens in Washington, where we send elected thieves to grow the pie by stealing from the cooks. After eating their fill, they let the original chefs fight over the crumbs.
Democracy is the mischievous mechanism that convinces us we are doing this to ourselves. In some sense, we are. But in general, like deciding to swim in a rainstorm, we’ll get soaked whether we choose to or not.
Voting is merely an administrative function in a system of institutionalized coercion, not a holy sacrament in a salvific religion. Yet, confusing the means with the end, its advocates give democracy the same mystical reverence the Greeks gave Gaia and that Lincoln bestowed on the “Union”.
Everyone kneels before its altar and waves incense at its shrine. But before they know it, the high priests have embezzled the basket, the choir starts singing hostile hymns, and the congregation is broke.
Democracy is, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe called it, the God that failed.
Aside from potential psychic satisfaction, there is no reason to vote. Yet, in solemnly self-righteous fashion, we are constantly implored to do so.
Why? Cui bono? To help answer that question we offer a heuristic: if anything receives unambiguous bi-partisan encouragement, we may not know the true beneficiary…but we can be sure it ain’t us.
Voting is a platitude. All respectable people agree it should be done, and haughtily admonish those who don’t. Like separating trash from “recyclables” or denouncing fossil fuels to prevent “climate change”, casting a ballot makes people think they’re aiding society and helps them feel good about themselves. Yet they usually are just wasting their time, and probably doing more harm than good.
The real beneficiary of the ballot is the government. That is why its agents implore us to participate in what is euphemistically called “the democratic process”. But what if they held an election, and nobody came? What would that do to the foundation of the whole enterprise?
All candidates and both major parties urge maximum voter turnout, even among those who would vote for the other side.
Again, why?
Because both sides are in essence indistinguishable, what Murray Rothbard called two wings on the same bird of prey. They are fighting over power, not ideas. But they all need legitimacy, and a large voter turn-out lends them that.
But while voting strengthens the State, it corrupts the voters. They become mentally complicit and morally culpable. They begin to think of the government as an extension of themselves, a delusion the State encourages. They unconsciously use the first-person plural to implicitly associate themselves with criminal actions of others. “We” invaded Iraq. “We” raised taxes. “We” implemented the New Deal. “We” bombed the Serbs. “We” are trillions in debt. “We” owe it to “ourselves”.
“We”, as Hillary Clinton put it, “are the government”.
In any other circumstance, the normal reaction would be that of Tonto to the Lone Ranger: “What you mean ‘we’, Kemosabe?” But by conflating the government with “us”, voting implicates the particular people of a place in the egregious actions of its State.
But what about voting as a sign of good citizenship? We’re incessantly told by those who are monomaniacally focused on politics that voting, like jury service, is a “civic duty”.
Of course, neither of them are.
Our only duties are to support our families, be charitable to others, and aggress against no one. The Constitution considers voting a right, not an obligation. Why do we not treat other (arguably more important) rights the same way? Should we harangue people for not owning guns or taking communion?
Still, voting proponents clamor for the high ground, from which only they should be heard. Ignoring logic and inverting common sense, they assert that those who don’t vote have no right to complain.
Yet, if anything, the opposite is true. Voting produced the people and policies we complain about. Were non-voters responsible for that? Voters had their say. They did this. Maybe it’s time we listened to someone else.
In reality, it’s not that we simply shouldn’t vote. We must actively avoid it. Not out of indolence or indifference, but intent. We should aggressively not vote, as a principled denial of consent to institutionalized coercion. Abstaining also helps maintain objectivity, by keeping us from becoming part of the thing we are trying to observe.
But there are reasons to avoid voting that are pragmatic as well as philosophical.
The rational reason for not voting rests on the basic statistical proposition that a single vote simply does not matter. And opportunity costs do.
The time any reasonably intelligent individual wastes attempting to cast a ballot could be more productively spent in almost any other endeavor. They would also avoid an additional interaction with bureaucratic busy-bodies, and keep their names off another government list.
Because arguments for voting are filled with second rate, third grade clichés, and that among them is the notion that “every vote counts”, this argument may seem spurious. But the numbers bear it out.
In a presidential election in Georgia, the odds of casting a ballot that causes or breaks a tie is just under a fifth the chance of being killed on the way to the polling place, a third that of being canonized, and a quarter the odds of actually being elected president myself. In short, an individual vote is more like a grain of sand in the Sahara than an empowering force by which individuals can hope to preserve their natural rights.
And it can be buried or blown away just as easily.
Even were an election to come close to turning on a single vote, the 2000 presidential election in Florida (which was not determined by a single vote) showed that either the trailing contestant or the government would dispute the results. They would refer the issue to the courts (i.e., the State itself) for “resolution”, thereby invalidating the ostensibly “decisive” vote anyway. Does anyone really think that wouldn’t happen this year? As Stalin said, who votes doesn’t count. What counts is who counts the votes.
But what about the obligation to our ancestors? Propaganda informs us that since Valley Forge Americans have died for the right to vote. I’m not sure where this canard started, but it is obviously preposterous. Men have fought to be free (regardless the real rationale, that is the one they were given), not to vote.
Wilson did sanctimoniously steer the United States into World War One under a pretense of “making the world safe for democracy”, but only after peddling propagandistic nonsense about Germans bayoneting Belgian babies and steering U-boats into Boston Harbor.
No World War II soldier thought he was fighting for the right to vote. That was, after all, the means by which Hitler came to power.
Even the Suffragettes, who by definition fought to vote, and civil rights activists, who included ballot-exclusion among their grievances, were really fighting for something more.
They wanted full citizenship. They perceived voting as a means among many, not an end in itself. They risked what they did for all their rights, not just the franchise. Why are we all not constantly harassed to exercise the other prerogatives for which they fought?
Since the Progressive Era, democracy has been casually and incongruously conflated with liberty. Prior to that period, most serious thinkers, like Alexis de Tocqueville, more often thought of them as opposites. They correctly saw democracy as subterfuge enabling some groups to legally pick the fruit from other people’s orchards.
After a century expanding the franchise, the trees are withering, and the branches are becoming bare. Voting, as Lysander Spooner said of the Constitution, either created these circumstances, or was unable to prevent them.
Either way, it is an activity best avoided.
JD
