More classic anti-democratic gems like the one below will be coming your way in the run-up to next week's mutual pocket-picking ritual. While these media circuses "grapple with the issues,” e.g., which candidate is more of a crook or liar than his rival, who is “soft on terror,” they obscure our view of the people’s own lust for power, their desire to control scarce resources that they neither own nor trade for.

That’s the dirty little secret that everyone intellectually understands but will not face. As everyone knows, we’ve heard every electioneering slogan before, and for generations. And, as everyone knows, the State’s unearned share of the nation’s wealth continues to increase, as does its aggravation of her problems. But adults who were not yet born when I first took notice of that claptrap are now mouthing it on cue, with their suits and blow-dried hair and toothy grins, to the predictable applause of the bovine masses.

Everyone knows that government has no resources it did not first forcibly confiscate. And no one is surprised when government is “broken.” But everyone wants it fixed in time for their turn to loot the treasury. Noble-sounding slogans clothe the libido dominandi in mythical tones that sound beneath the surface of conscious attention, like the proverbial wool over one's eyes.

What is mentally subterranean, however, is very difficult to exercise control over, let alone exorcise. Therefore, most voters know not what they do. When they proudly pull the levers that serve to legitimize the system by which they pick each other's pockets, most of them do so innocently, abeit in a tragic sort of way.

But not all. Let us hear Lysander Spooner (1808-1887).

The ostensible supporters of the Constitution . . . are made up of three classes, viz.:

1. Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see in the government an instrument which they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth.

2. Dupes . . . each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a "free man," a "sovereign"; that this is "a free government"; "a government of equal rights," "the best government on earth," and such like absurdities.

3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change.

Lysander Spooner, No Treason, No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority,