The Problem With Voting

Chris | InformationLiberation
Nov. 04, 2010

A poster in my previous article asked " What do you suppose we do other than vote?" He said "Not voting is a extremely good way to ensure that only statists and socialists get elected, because they rally their troops to vote, union members are required to vote and are told whom to vote for for instance." I don't necessarily entirely disagree. None-the-less, I wrote out a large general response to several poster's objections, reposted below.

If you want to vote, I am not going to stop you. I strongly believe the system is going to collapse in on itself soviet-style, socialism always fails because they eventually run out of other people's money. When the Fed is openly buying it's own debt, you know the system is coming to an end very soon.

The problem with voting is government as an institution is immoral, it postulates you have the right to force your neighbor to live a certain way simply because you want them to. Their rights are irrelevant because you claim the right to violate them simply by voting for it. That's not an ethical, moral, nor realistic system for any sort of free society.

All we do is take principles to their logical conclusions. Stealing is wrong when your neighbor does it, it's wrong when the government does it. Killing people is wrong when your neighbor does it, it's wrong when the government does it. The obvious conclusion is government does not have some super human authority nor super human aura of legitimacy in all the criminal actions it takes, it doesn't matter how many people voted for them to do it, it doesn't matter how seemingly legitimate nor how long the scam has gone on, it's inherently criminal and inherently immoral.

So, how do you have a society without one gang of thugs (a government) ruling everything?

That's where anarcho-capitalism/private-law/voluntarism comes into the picture. They simply point out how our entire society is organized by free market voluntary exchanges and an innate recognition of property rights. The same way we get bread through voluntary trade, we could get law and order through voluntary trade with private courts, private insurance in case of bad things happening, voluntary associations and voluntary exclusions of bad people who we don't want to associate with or who don't play by the rules of a civil society, etc. This system is systemically ethical and moral because it forces no one to do anything and violates no one's rights. All services would be provided voluntarily and competitively on the free market based off incentive, not force and violence like we have now.

Most people act in their best interests, they choose to buy what food they want, they choose where they want to live, they choose what job they want, what type of car they want, they choose every purchase they make based off their own wants and desires, they can choose what type of insurance they want and what type of court system they want to be under as well.

I think, in a free society, it's very likely everyone would basically have to buy insurance in order to have a job, take part in business deals, and engage in general civility with general protections for all based off their voluntary acquisition of insurance. The insurance companies could run the courts competitively and whoever the people decided they liked the best would get the majority of their money (voluntarily) the other insurance companies could compete to provide a better service and we'd see law and order improving consistently, the same way we see computers, electronics, technology, etc. improving constantly through open competition on the free markets.

This should not even be a foreign idea, imagine where we'd be with computers if the industry was nationalized and a committee of bureaucrats had to vote on everything, then some government workers went to work on carrying out their plans, obviously we'd be nowhere and computers would horrible and insanely expensive. Well, that's what we have in all the industries government has nationalized, namely courts, police, national defense, "social security," education, health insurance, it's too much to even list. Just think of everywhere which is horrible, it's all due to government.

We need private law and order and private competition, imagine if the government nationalized the shoe making industry 200 years ago, "thou shalt provide for the general shoefare," was written in the constitution. Obviously, they'd all be horrible, they'd all be one color and only the "most efficient" as judged by a team of bureaucrats would be produced.

Imagine if someone proposed privatizing the industry, people would be screaming "but how will people decide what color to make them!? How will they decide what material to use!? How will they make shoes for everyone if they don't have trillions in government subsidies?! How could the free market provide good shoes, their only motive is profit!! If we have a completely unregulated free shoe-market, how will we prevent one company from taking over the whole industry and gouging everyone?!"

Well, of course we see the same rhetoric today. It will change though, it has to, the whole world is not going to go under this communist system simply because it's too wasteful and any territory which takes a stand against it will have all the world's capital flow into it, capital eventually flows where it's best allocated. The dam will break and we'll get freedom again, it's just a matter of time, it's our responsibility to hurry the process along through inciting an ideological shift in people's minds, not through simply voting!