A Qualified Defense of Voting

I realize I’m in the minority here, but I’m unconvinced that not voting is the obvious libertarian position.  Here are my two main arguments:

(1) You are not consenting to the system by voting.  I can’t remember who it was who made this analogy (which I have modified slightly), but if you were in a concentration camp and you were allowed to vote on having either steak or human flesh for dinner, you would not be consenting to the system by voting for steak.

(2) There is almost never anyone worth voting for.  But if someone (like Ron Paul) promotes nonintervention abroad and the abolition of the Fed and the IRS at home, I will vote for that person.  I would have voted for Adam Kokesh in New Mexico and B.J. Lawson in North Carolina, for example.  Not necessarily because I think one person can accomplish these goals, but because:

(a) that person will have a national platform from which to promote these important ideas; and

(b) if these ideas win more than 2% of the vote, it makes the rest of us look less weird.  Let’s face it: most people lack the courage to adopt views they think are “fringe” (by the way, the sign of a terrible writer is that he uses this word to describe his opponents).  And most people do indeed draw conclusions about political ideas on the basis of their political strength.  But if even 10% vote for them, it can detoxify them in the minds of people who might otherwise never have given them the time of day.  It can also confirm demoralized good guys in their views: you’re not alone, man.  It’s not just you and 0.01% of the population.  There are lots of us.

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7:27 pm on November 8, 2010