Why I don't vote

I don't vote because I don't believe in the offices that we are voting to fill.  I don't believe we should even have those offices.  I don't believe anybody should have the powers of those offices.  I view emptying or eliminating these offices as a worthy goal, and I view voting as a detriment to that goal, because it legitimizes those offices.  I view not voting, and telling people that I am not voting and why, as the best option for proceeding toward my goal.

As a Christian I am glad for the opportunity to get involved in the process, and I do so by not voting so that I can advance what I think is the best goal for the land: eliminating the existing political offices.  I would welcome the ability to have more input in the process, such as a chance to vote to leave offices empty, or a chance to secede.  Failing that, I'm grateful for what I can get: the opportunity to make a difference by declaring how important it is to eliminate the existing monopoly government.

One world government

Secession is equivalent to freedom, and is the right of all sentient beings. People without the right of secession are not free, regardless of whether or not they get to participate in popularity contests to determine the king(s) for the next olympiad.

One world government is fine as long as there is UNANIMOUS agreement.

If you force somebody to be subject to your government (not just use your government to enforce your rights to life, liberty, and property, but REQUIRE people through coercion or threats or actual violence to be citizens of or subject to your government against their will), then you are a manstealer; you have committed a crime against their liberty. You have enslaved them. Do you believe in slavery, or do you believe that people should be free and have the right to self-government?

Every person of age and reason possesses, at all times, rights to life, liberty, and property, including the right to defend those rights and the right to contract with an institution to help defend them on their behalf. This right is expressed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." If you don't believe these things, then you should not celebrate July 4th.

People have the right to skip out on the system if it doesn't secure their rights, and especially if it is violating their rights. They have the right to decide, for themselves, if they want to participate in your rights-securing plan or not, because they have the right to create and participate in a system which "to them [not to you] shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Speaking for my family, the only one world government which we would endorse would be the direct reign of Jesus Christ, administered by Jesus Christ and not by the compulsion of man. Since all other proposals conflict with this, we do not approve of them, and therefore while we are living and holding this opinion, one world government cannot be achieved without violating our rights.

How to fix government

I recently saw the suggestion that we can fix the problems of the U.S. federal government by "kicking them all out": firing every single incumbent congressman and banning corporate lobbying. Making corporate lobbying illegal strikes me as somewhat naive and definitely restrictive of rights.

As Walter Williams often says, the government shouldn't have the legal power to do bad things ... then the problem of lobbyists influencing it to do such things will go away.

I don't think term limits of one term will fix the problem, either, whether it happens from statute or the vote.

I think the only way to limit the power of government to encroach upon its citizens' rights to life, liberty, and property is for that government to be checked by alternate, competing institutions "instituted among men to secure these rights ... and whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." (For those who might not recognize it, this is a near quote from the United States Declaration of Independence. You should really read it sometime. If you don't believe in this stuff, you really shouldn't be celebrating on July 4th.)

If you don't think the U.S. federal government is adequately securing your rights, then you do morally have and should legally have the right to use your own resources to establish your own rights-securing institution, including the right to delegate enforcement of your rights to others who work on your behalf, the right to subscribe to such services from a company, the right to collaborate with and work with other people to build your institution as you see fit. The government does not morally have and should not legally have the right to force people to pay for its services and prevent them from receiving such services from other providers.

The problems are:

• government is a monopoly
  
• security for the rights of life, liberty, and property is a socialized service, instead of being provided by a free market
  
• government grants to itself the legal right to take actions which are not morally right (i.e., violation of the rights of people to life, liberty, and property)

Personally, I think the biggest committer of crimes against me and my neighbors, is the U.S. federal government. I would like to see everyone kicked out of it and to leave the offices empty, not repopulate them and play Russian roulette and hope (against all evidence) that somehow it will come out better this time, and that if it doesn't we can still somehow improve it in the future through the democratic process and constant monitoring and tweaking of statutes and regulations. At the very least, give the rest of us the right to opt out, even if you want to keep it.

Read "The Right to Ignore the State"

The Right to Ignore the State, by Herbert Spencer, is tough reading (Spencer died in 1903). It takes work to get through what it says, assembling the meaning of complex sentences from difficult words, and then following the train of logic from sentence to sentence.

But I found that Spencer said, eloquently and intelligently, exactly what I believe to be true.

Practical anarcho-capitalism

What would anarcho-capitalism look like, if we had it? How would it work? How would we solve all the problems that government now solves for us? It is easy to see how the need met by such things as government postal delivery might be met. It is not so easy to see how defense would be handled, or how we would be protected against tyranny.

Many people love the original Constitutional United States government system because they believe it to be the best system mankind has discovered for protecting liberty. Often you'll see such good patriots attempting to educate today's public about the fact that the U.S. system is not a democracy; it is instead the superior system of a Republic. Of course, in practice our system has been attempting to devolve from republic to democracy, and from there to socialism (did you ever know a Communist nation that didn't like to refer to itself as "The People's Democratic Socialist Republic of [Region]?"). And personally I think the similarities between republic and democracy are greater than their differences. But I do agree that Republican government was a great protection for liberty, and a great check against tyranny.

History has produced a long list of such checks against tyranny:

• the rule of law


• Constitutional government


• law applying to the ruler as well as the ruled


• democracy


• republicanism (not the political party, the form of government)


• separation of powers


• bills of rights


• checks and balances

In the end, though, none of these is sufficient to guarantee liberty is never violated. And in fact some of them don't work nearly as well as advertised. And unfortunately many of them get equated with "liberty." Right now we say we want to spread "democracy," and we act as if that means spreading "liberty." The very definition of democracy is actually incompatible with liberty.

Anarcho-capitalism surpasses them all. And what's more, anarcho-capitalism actually is liberty.

I think a Republic was a great advance and a great protection for liberty, but in the end I think it always devolves again into tyranny. I do not believe one government can check itself, even if you have separation of powers. I believe governments can only be checked by the people, or by other governments.

Being checked by the people has always been a part of government's existence, even under tyranny, even since the first raiders rode into a peaceful town and proclaimed themselves kings. The government takes a lot from its people, in the form of liberty and resources. It loudly gives a large portion back in the form of services. They give enough back to keep the people from revolting, and this keeps their power and income sources secure. It's a little more civilized under a Republic, thankfully.

This necessity that government be checked by the people is always the reason for the need for the rights granted by the US second amendment to be secure and absolute. I know a lot of people think the 2nd amendment is about hunting (I used to), or personal defense against local criminals (I used to think that, too), but the reason the founders talked about was the need to protect from the main criminals of history: government.

The second way of checking government is why a Republic is not the greatest hope for human government, and anarcho-capitalism is. Under such a system, every person would have the right to secede from their government, as well as the right to form new governments within the same territory. Noone would have the right to compel anyone to be a citizen of their government; government would be by true contract. If a government became tyrannical to its citizens, they could form a new one (or several) to protect themselves from its depradations. If a government acted tyrannical to those who were not its citizens, they could protect themselves by forming their own government. And this is pretty much exactly what the Declaration of Independence says, that government is an institution with the special purpose of securing rights, and that all people have the right to form such an institution as seems best to them (though I doubt Jefferson envisioned multiple such institutions in the same geographic region).

Noone has the right to do that which is wrong, not even governing officials, and in all history the biggest threat to man's rights has been the government; therefore the most pressing reason to form a government is to protect its citizens from another government. Under our present system government does much which is wrong. As it exists, taxation is simply legalized theft (indeed, the government is simply a group that has a monopoly on breaking laws such as this with impunity), and much of the rest of what governments do is simply legalized slavery. Under a system of anarcho-capitalism this could not be the case. A government's only citizens would be people who had explicitly agreed to its terms, which would include whatever fees the previous citizens or founders had deemed necessary. Governments could actually compete for citizens by trying to offer the best protection for the best price.

People who wanted to keep the existing institution, the United States federal government, could do so. They could support it with their taxes, pledge their allegiance to it and salute its flag, think of it as the greatest country on earth, and everything they want to do now. They just couldn't compel other people to do so, and they'd have to allow their children to make the decision for themselves when they grew up, and they certainly couldn't force everyone who lived in their land after they died to be bound to the same institution for hundreds of years or forever. They'd have to grant everyone else the right to be free.

I'm going to say something you might not have realized anarcho-capitalists believed: we do need government. At least, we need to have our rights protected, and we need to create institutions to do that for the common good. What we don't need is to take away the rights of other people in order to protect that for ourselves. Government as it exists today rests on the premise that you and I cannot protect ourselves unless we force other people to furnish the means and manpower to do it, and to surrender complete allegiance to our system and any decisions it makes as well. This is not true! It might provide some form of protection, but it is inferior to what could be developed in a world of true freedom, it weakens the foundations of society by making us interact together in forced ways rather than those we would naturally choose, and it damages our economy because of the damage to our freedom, resulting in decreased wealth and therefore decreased capacity for the very defense we were trying to achieve, as well as decreased capacity to enjoy the fruit of our labors.

Optimus Prime and the rights of all sentient beings

Admittedly I liked the Transformers as a boy (I think every boy who was my age did). And admittedly I'm excited about the upcoming movie, which will be released tomorrow. And I'm particularly excited that Peter Cullen, the voice of the original Optimus Prime, will be reprising his role.

Optimus Prime was presented as the ultimate hero. He was completely noble, with perfectly pure motives. In multiple versions of the Transformers story (the cartoon and the comic books carried completely different stories, and the movie is starting yet another new version) that purity and nobility led him to give his life to save others. Sometimes multiple times -- it's science fiction, and that kind of thing happens.

Now as an adult I can ask serious questions like "Is it really good for kids to invest so much hero-worship in a fictional character, and an animated one at that?" And "if I'm using the word hero-worship, should I be a little worried, theologically?" And I definitely don't hold up Optimus Prime as the supreme example of morality, as I might've been more inclined to do at age seven or so. Obviously some people took Optimus Prime very seriously as a role model. And I confess I just bought a Softimus Prime for my second boy's first birthday. Probably he'll mostly just chew on it, not view it as a role model. (But it really transforms!)

But Optimus Prime got a lot of great heroic lines, and some of them taught good morality. And one of them forms the basis of my slogan for the work I do through this weblog and my writings and conversations elsewhere: "Secession is the right of all sentient beings."

Prime's original slogan was "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings." What a great 80's American slogan, huh? :) No wonder Optimus Prime is conspicuously colored in red, white and blue. But the American ideology of freedom is a good one. At least when you mean true freedom, the ideology of the founders, not the ideology of today where we pretend that "democracy" means "freedom" instead of "everybody voting on taking turns violating freedom."

In our world we don't have freedom, because we're missing a particular right. Without that right, freedom is meaningless. Ironically, tomorrow, the day the Transformers movie comes out, is the day that we have set aside for the past 231 years to celebrate men exercising that right: the right to secede. But today we have eliminated that right, and we brainwash children to create a public that actually thinks that not having that right is a foundation of freedom. The mind boggles.

The founders recognized that government was not an institution that magically deserved blind obedience from its subjects. The Declaration of Independence specifically states that government is an institution created by men in order to protect rights. It states that people are free and have the right to abolish and reform that government and create their own whenever the government isn't securing their rights. And when people do establish their government, nothing permits them to commit their descendants to give that government perpetual fealty, generation after generation. Nothing permits them to take away their descendants' rights as expressed in the Declaration of July 4, 1776.

How many things can you name that your government does that do not secure rights? Will your government recognize your right to secede? And if you want to stay with your government, will you recognize the right of other people to make a different choice?

Optimus Prime teaches children that all sentient beings, anything that can think, anything which, as the Christian might say, "has a soul" deserves freedom. He teaches it on a child's level. But adults wrote the declaration of independence, and if the message of Independence Day really is true, then Secession really is the right of all sentient beings. I acknowledge your right to secede, and may I suggest that you celebrate Independence Day by acknowledging mine, and that of others?