How Can Anyone Think Voting Matters?
(It does. Just not in the way you think.)
by Wilton D. Alston
by
Wilton D. Alston
DIGG THIS
"…people
who vote are quick to distance themselves from the guy to whom they
gave their support. It seems to me that if your candidate lies,
cheats, steals, or gets a whole bunch of people killed you – the
voter who supported him – might share some blame. … With the secret
ballot, everyone can claim to be disappointed with the guy they
actually helped elect!"
~ "I
Don't Mind If You Keep Voting, But…"
In the piece
above, I attempted to lay out some very basic non-voting logic,
as well as provide a handy-dandy bibliography to some of the exceptional
non-voting prose from giants like Butler Shafer, Wendy McElroy,
and others. From the very positive feedback I received, it would
appear that I got my message across. Still, I know people continue
to fight with themselves on this matter. I have close friends who
face internal and external debates about why voting is so
necessary, and why anyone who really "understands the struggle"
would have to take part, and similar hooey.
The simple
fact of the matter is this: Voting – and I’m talking here about
national-level elections for public office, but similar logic is
available, if less applicable, at other levels – is a waste of time.
Shaffer’s suggestion that one is better served doing
a thorough examination of his navel lint was overly kind. This
essay represents my (hopefully) final volley in this debate. Thereafter,
my navel lint will get all my attention on Election Day. When that’s
done, I’ll find something else to do that won’t involve entering
a booth to select the liar I like best.
Why Is Voting
for President a Waste of Time?
Voting for
President of the U.S. is a waste because the issues that should
garner the most interest and cause decisive post-election changes
will remain unchanged no matter who is elected. This is absolute,
undisputed, unmitigated, hard, cold, polished-to-a-high-gloss, quick-fried-to-a-crackly-crunch,
naturally-seasoned, artificially-flavored fact.
How do I know?
Well, for one thing, it’s been true since the first election for
president ever held in the U.S. Yes, it was true immediately
after those initial rich white guys – affectionately known as the
Founding Fathers – put their let’s-have-a-country-of-our-own scam
to pen and paper. The truths have only gotten more obvious, while
developing wider scope, since those early days in the late 1700’s.
Jim Davies,
a columnist over on Strike-the-Root,
put together an interesting list
of the items about which one typically complains regarding the government.
His list included many of the oldies but goodies: fair elections,
taxation, bankers running America, needless foreign wars, politicians
ignoring the Constitution, etc. He then offered solutions to each,
culminating with an analysis of how the completion of this list
would result in a "better" government, or not. His conclusion
is the same as mine: One can’t get that which he should most desire
– freedom and liberty – from the government.
Let’s create
another list, shall we? (My list won’t be as long as Davies’ but
that’s okay.)
War
Governments
exist to make war. They always have. This is because war
is a racket. Standing armies, which are remarkably
misnamed, are the realization of the fact that without professional
soldiers, wars are often quick and indecisive or long and ridiculous.
(That is, states can still fight, but it’s not really that, well,
satisfying and the wars can fizzle out due to simple logistics
like running out of ammo or food, or having to tend the crops.)
With professional soldiers employed by a highly-developed state,
the cost of supplying them, feeding them, and housing them can be
off-loaded to others. This makes it possible to invade and conquer
distant lands and make "efficient" war, i.e., kill a lot
of people very quickly. Best of all, the profits can still
be absorbed by the war-racketeers.
Without a standing
army, just defending the plot of land you occupy could be a challenge,
although frankly, defending it often, or ever, will likely be unnecessary.
The emergence
of the State, dating back to Sumer and ancient Mesopotamia led
to the rise of the state-military complex. These early warfare states
arose out of the supposed need for state-financed facilitation of
the public good via public works. Make no mistake however. The real
reasons for the existence
of the military-industrial complex had (and has) little to do
with freedom and everything to do with power, control, and corruption.
Question: Will
the incredibly
large worldwide U.S. military presence, including over 750 bases,
be curtailed dependent upon who wins any election for president?
Answer: No.
Follow-up question:
Regardless of who is elected, will the gargantuan
domestic military-industrial complex be popped like a zit on
Baron Harkonnen’s
festering kiester?
Answer: Nope.
The subject won’t even be seriously debated.
Given the pending
"financial crisis" one might argue that the gravy train
of govern-mint cash for weapons and those who make them will
dry up on its own. Don’t count on it.
Money
Websites such
as LewRockwell.com, Strike-the-Root.com,
the Foundation for Economic Education
(FEE), the Mises Institute,
the Library of Economics
and Liberty, the Future of Freedom
Foundation (FFF), and many others have provided and continue
to provide a cornucopia of information on economics, the Federal
Reserve (the Fed) and all that inhabits the space in-between. Inspired
writers, from Murray
Rothbard to Lew
Rockwell to Mark Thornton
have provided ample education on historically relevant events and
currently-held mythical beliefs.
(Occasionally, even
a poser like me chimes in.)
The methodology
employed by the Fed – the
printing of money with no underlying market-generated value
– causes inflation. Inflation – the perceived rise in consumer prices
– results in a massive transfer of wealth from those at the bottom
of the economic food chain to those at the top. Frankly, that’s
why the Fed was created! (The debasement
of currency for the benefit of the State dates back at least
to Roman times.)
Question: Will
the Federal Reserve be abolished dependent upon who wins any election
for president?
Answer: No.
Follow-up question:
Regardless of who is elected, will the wealth transfer that has
corresponded with the loss
of over 80% of the value of the dollar since 1970 be stopped
like one of those Toyota
Tundra trucks?
Answer: Not
hardly. Best case, it gets mentioned in passing.
Despite the
fact that the abolition of the Federal Reserve would not, I repeat,
not result in the end of the State, it would still be a nice
step. Instead, when the current fiat currency scheme goes belly-up
– and it will, because they
always do – one can be sure that agents of the State
will come up with a new one to take its place. The same financiers
(or people just like them) who absorbed that transferred wealth
the first go-round will return again to the teat, fat and happy
as ever.
Any bailout,
such as the one
currently under discussion, simply provides an opportunity to
really gouge from the taxpayer for a specific instance, but the
systematic transfer of wealth, caused by the inflation/debt
sandwich, both predicated on the printing of money, continues either
way. There is a plethora of great insight out there about why economic
crises are the rule versus the exception and why the current "crisis"
is just another scam, including but certainly not limited to:
Taxation
Everywhere
one goes, he is taxed, often heavily. When you buy a grande-sized
cup of over-priced coffee, you pay taxes. When you fill-up the tank
of that long-term-financed SUV, you pay about 40% of the cost of
each gallon of gas in taxes. A typical American works about four
(4) months to pay "his fair share" of income taxes. (How
did it come to be true that anyone has a "fair share"
of something he didn’t volunteer to give?) Others have already proven
that there is no
such thing as a just tax; but of course, the purpose of taxation
has never been justice.
Worse yet,
when you die, if you’ve somehow managed to sequester any of the
money you made along the way, generally in the form of earthy possessions
(while simultaneously managing to keep eating regularly and sleeping
inside) your heirs will pay additional taxes on the value
of those possessions, referred to as your estate. This after you,
the deceased, paid taxes on all of that stuff as it was acquired!
The Internal
Revenue Service (IRS), just a collection vehicle for income taxes,
operates like a police organization, with armed thugs, raids on
homes, all that. The best part: The amount of "hidden taxation"
from the printing of money by the Fed more than accounts for the
income generated by the IRS. I’d assert that they don’t even "need"
the money, despite the
amount of government income supposedly due to individual income
taxes. (Maybe that’s better left for another essay.)
Question: Will
the IRS be abolished dependent upon who wins any election for president
of the United States?
Answer: No.
Follow-up question:
Regardless of who is elected, will the practice of taxing the citizen
at every turn be substantially trimmed back, kinda like the hair
during one of Nick Arrojo’s cuts on What
Not to Wear?
Answer: Absolutely,
positively, not.
Exemplary of
the type of Cat-in-the-Hat lunacy available when viewing the U.S.
political system, any suggestion about changing the income
tax system almost always includes the term "revenue
neutral," as if the amount of money is okay, it’s
just how they collect it that needs modification. Discussions
of taxes by either party take on a surreal air, as if the laws of
logic, math, and reality can be suspended at will. A buddy of mine
summed it up after he watched Obama’s acceptance speech at the DNC.
"The best part was when Obama said he’d cut taxes and afterward,
buy everyone a pony and later, a saddle for that pony." The
Republicants are no better and only the mathematically-challenged
think so.
Liberty
A person would
have to have spent his entire life in a gated community way off
the grid or quietly sleeping under a large rock nourished by only
his thumb to not notice that the
prison population in the United States is large. Very.
Large.
There has been no shortage of reporting
and opinion
about the fact that the United States of America can accurately
be described as a prison nation. I’ve personally lamented the fact
that much of the prison population in the U.S. is
both non-violent and vice-generated. (When I say "vice-generated"
I mean simply that people are in jail for doing something to
themselves that other people don’t like.) The fact that we’ve
got a
war on (some) drugs, not a war on (all) drugs, is equally
obvious.
I’ve never
been one to decry
a good conspiracy theory, but I maintain no strong opinion about
the involvement of the CIA in the U.S. drug trade. For all I know,
there is a building at Langley where government workers are actually
cooking
cocaine for eventual distribution as you read this essay. I
couldn’t care less, because that’s not the point. What you ingest
is your business and will continue to be so long as people have
ownership of their bodies. (Hat tip: Stephan
Kinsella on how we come to own ourselves.) While I agree with
Kinsella, it seems that there are a lot of people who aren’t convinced,
and many of them have guns and work for the State. That is
the point!
Question: Will
marijuana (or any other supposedly "controlled" substance)
be legalized dependent upon who wins any election for president?
Answer: No.
Follow-up Question:
Will the prison-industrial
complex be smashed like a cockroach crawling out of a trailer
park dumpster dependent upon who wins any election for president?
Answer: Hell
no.
Second follow-up
question: Will the fact that, according to a
New York Times editorial, "one in nine black men, ages
20 to 34, are serving time" (often for drug-related offenses)
be substantially and directly addressed by any elected official,
including any black elected official, ever?
Answer: Never
in a million years. (Frankly, the black politician is probably just
glad it’s not him in prison.)
Providing a
bit of almost terminal irony, Paul
Armentano notes an interesting fact about one of the contenders
for this year’s I-run-the-world sweepstakes:
[D]uring
the mid-1980s, [vice presidential candidate] Biden was the chief
senate architect of the federal anti-drug laws that re-established
mandatory minimum sanctions for various drug possession crimes,
and established the racially based 100-to-1 sentencing disparity
for crimes involving the possession of crack versus powder cocaine.
Many academics have credited Biden's law as one of the primary
reasons why America now possesses the highest incarceration rate
of any country in the world, and why approximately one out of
every nine young African-American males are now in prison.
(Emphasis added.)
The chart below
shows incarcerated Americans since 1920. Note the sharp rise beginning
near 1980. And now this Biden guy wants to help lead change for
America? You cannot make this stuff up!
And that’s
Not Even the Half of It
In this essay
I have only examined four (4) areas – war, money, taxation, and
liberty. No matter what other areas one examines: the chronically-mediocre
educational system, the pharma-paid
murderers known as the FDA, the theft-fest
known as the United Nations, the security-industrial-congressional
complex, the answers will generally be the same. The real problems
will not be addressed in any substantial way as a result of a national
election for president. The problems exist as a direct and
unavoidable consequence of the existence of a coercive state.
The agents of the State can’t fix the problems because the existence
of the State causes them!
These issues
don’t exist only as an unfortunate result of slightly misinformed
public servants desperately trying to meet the challenges they have
nobly volunteered to address on our behalf, but failing. They exist
because lying, sack-of-cow-dung megalomaniacs created them, either
as unintended consequences of some dubious scheme or as direct means
to the acquisition of power and money. Two other points should be
noted.
One, when I
assert that voting doesn’t matter, I’m not suggesting that the "winners"
have been pre-ordained by unknown and powerful men, like some scenario
from The Matrix
come to life. I’m saying it doesn’t matter who wins since the winners
are simply proxies for the game within the game. The people who
finance elections finance both sides and will get paid back either
way. The people who are fleeced as a result of elections inhabit
both sides and will keep paying either way.
Two, when I
list the failures and evil machinations of the current government,
I am not suggesting that such behavior has culminated with the latest
set of would-be leaders. In other words, voting isn’t a waste because
the present crop of contestants is so bad. The suggestion that George
W. Bush is the worst president ever rests equally on the availability
heuristic and a misunderstanding of history.
The first
president of the United States led a military force to quell a
civilian rebellion caused by one of his cabinet member’s revenue-generation
schemes. That the new nation had just finished an armed rebellion,
fought in part against unfair taxation, is rather ironic. It has
only gotten worse since then. Again, the existence of the State
is the problem. Even a president exhibiting such obvious
mental limits as Dubya is but a symptom.
The contests
between people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the similar
contests between people like John McCain and Mitt Romney may very
well be legitimate, with the outcome of primaries and caucuses in
places like Iowa and New Hampshire fiercely-contested and unknown
to all. The same might even be said about the general election.
Pretty clearly, voting fraud is not a figment of the imagination,
so someone cares about winning.
Fans of a particular
NFL team care who wins as well. Analogous to elections, the people
who actually benefit from NFL games are a tiny subset of
the people who care. (By the way, I love the NFL, and can be found
watching almost any game telecast at any time. Now that I consider
it, I might actually benefit more from watching the NFL than
voting. Yahtzee!) Getting excited about electing a particular master
is incredibly stupid if one will still be a slave – subject
to virtually the same amount of random theft and rape-as-needed
– after the election is over. Given that over 40%
of the voting-eligible U.S. population stays home on Election Day,
I’m evidently not the only one who realizes this.
Conclusion
Now, none
of this means that all is lost and one must become cynical and negative.
Perish the thought! There is a wide range of pursuits that become
available when the smoke surrounding and generated by busy work
such as voting is cleared away. Enjoy them. (Personally, I’m looking
forward to some great laughs as people like Tina Fey lampoon Sarah
Palin.) More importantly, as Woodson taught long ago, freedom
begins in the mind. Similarly, Rockwell opined just recently,
"Real
change comes from working in the world of enterprise and ideas."
There is work to be done.
 Hoppe
has written extensively on why the consent of the stolen-from is
required for the State to keep stealing. In "On
the Impossibility of Limited Government…" we find:
…It is necessary
to recognize that the ultimate power of every government – whether
of kings or caretakers – rests solely on opinion and not on physical
force. The agents of government are never more than a small proportion
of the total population under their control. This implies that
no government can possibly enforce its will upon the entire population
unless it finds widespread support and voluntary cooperation within
the nongovernmental public. It implies likewise that every government
can be brought down by a mere change in public opinion, i.e.,
by the withdrawal of the public's consent and cooperation.
Indeed. It
is vital to realize that "the ultimate power of every
government rests solely on opinion and not on physical force."
Voting illustrates
both support and consent. Withdraw them, please.
October
1, 2008
Wilt
Alston [send him
mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three
children. When he’s not training for a marathon or furthering his
part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal
research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily
on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.
Copyright
© 2008 LewRockwell.com
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D. Alston Archives
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