Thousands have died so that Iraqis might partake of democracy's sacrament. In the following essay, which I’ve been tweaking for ten years, I explain why I long ago apostatized from one of modernity's cults, after which I append links to complementary essays.

* * *
I don’t vote, but not because I am apathetic. Pulling levers in a booth is not so inconvenient that I would not endure it for the sake of a compensating good to which I am entitled.

The alleged compensating good, however, escapes me, whereas the evil attaching to it is obvious and substantial.

When shareholders vote on corporate policies they exercise their own property rights. They violate no one else’s. Neither do club members when they elect officers. Citizens of a democracy, however, are neither shareholders nor club members. They are rather seekers of ends whose achievement requires the control of resources they do not own without regard for the wishes of those who do own them. Voters therefore are accomplices to a system of brigandage.

The control or confiscation of property through taxation, regulation, or restriction of trade, however, comprises virtually all of the "issues" of political elections. If individuals lack rights in scarce resources, they can hardly acquire such rights simply by voting them into existence by fiat. Leave to elections only those decisions that honor that moral reality and nothing is left. Even voting to repeal bad legal code legitimizes the process by which more will be enacted.

Mindless slogans like, "Bad people are sent to Washington by good people who don’t vote," apparently intended to induce guilt, suggest that non-agents are agents, that those who refrain from acting are responsible for acting. But nonvoters do not send anyone anywhere. If nobody voted, nobody, good or evil, would be sent to Washington.

That is, if they gave an election and nobody came, no one could claim to tax and draft "by the power vested in them by the people.” Free people on free markets would determine who receive which goods and services, including the socially necessary services like police now monopolized by the State, and including charitable services for those unable to earn for themselves.

Increasingly, eligible voters prefer to be left alone. Of those who register to vote, however, most seem to prefer to attain monopoly (non-market-derived) privilege for themselves, or to influence the conduct of monopolies, than to abolish them. The tragic, unintended result, however, is that they (and/or their loved ones) are lied to, robbed, enslaved, and sometimes even killed, either in a war on foreign soil or on the streets the State’s police cannot or will not protect. This is the price they pay for being so uncreative as to rely on voting to "make a difference."

I withdrew my “consent to be governed” long ago. Why don’t you withdraw yours?

April 24, 1996
(revised October 28, 2006)


Anti-Democracy 101

Butler Shaffer, Don't Vote [2006]

David Gordon, What's the Argument for Democracy? [2005]

Butler Shaffer, The Rational Choice for Election Day [2004]

Hans Hoppe, Why Bad Men Rule [2004]

Hans Hoppe, Down with Democracy [2000] See Hoppe's site for more articles and information about his Democracy: The God That Failed

Murray N. Rothbard, On Democracy [1962]

In “We’re Living in the Dream World of George W. Bush” on today’s LewRockwell, Gene Callahan exploits the irony that neocons, presumptive heirs to a political movement that once took seriously Eric Voegelin’s diagnosis of modernity as gnostic, are now that spiritual malady’s poster children. As a White House adviser lectured New York Times’ writer Ron Suskind two years ago (Callahan provides the link):

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

As Callahan suggests, they’re also history’s patients.

While we’re on the Voegelinian topic of existence in untruth, let’s hear a few words from the master:

In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists . . . . And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence—with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. . . . [B]ehind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.

. . . The speculations of classic and scholastic metaphysics are edifices of reason erected on the experiential basis of existence in truth; they are useless in a meeting with edifices of reason erected on a different experiential basis. Nevertheless, we cannot withdraw into these edifices and let the world go by, for in that case we would be remiss in our duty of “debate.” The “debate” has, therefore, to assume the forms of (1) a careful analysis of the noetic structure of existence and (2) an analysis of Second Realities with regard to both their constructs and the motivating structure of existence in untruth. “Debate” in this form is hardly a matter of reasoning (though it remains one of the Intellect), but rather of the analysis of existence preceding rational constructions; it is medical in character in that it has to diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence and by their noetic structure to initiate, if possible, a healing process.

“On Debate and Existence”
Intercollegiate Review, 1967; Collected Works, Vol. 12