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.

Don't vote

Democracy is not freedom. It is the exact opposite. It is the power to rule your neighbor. If your neighbor is subject to your vote (or to the people you vote in), then he is not free.

Isn't this obvious?

I call for an immediate abolition of the government, to be accomplished by giving every person the right to secede and form their own institutions for the protection of their liberties, as called for in the Declaration of Independence.

And what I am doing is immeasurably better for you than voting. When you vote, you are attacking the welfare of me and my family. Meanwhile, I am lovingly calling for you to be granted freedom and prosperity.

This system is wrong. I will not legitimize it in any way.

Three reasons not to be a part of democracy

I was going to title this post "Three reasons not to vote." But actually, I do vote, just in a very unorthodox way that I have found to register my disapproval of the system. So here are three reasons not to vote. Much. Or at least, not in a normal way.

• It's ineffective: Change is never going to come by this route. I voted Republican in 2000 and 2004 because I believed in smaller government. It didn't work. Even when your candidate wins you don't get what you want. (Even if you wanted bigger government you wouldn't get what you want, because the costs of reality and the impossibility of centralized economic calculation always prevent big government planners from fulfilling all of their promises.) And the candidates always believe in expanding some portions of the government's power. (George W. Bush, for example, believed in socializing healthcare, which distressed me greatly because "we" Republicans had stood against this staunchly when Hilary Clinton wanted to try it. I compromised. May God forgive me for supporting a man who would steal from other people.) And of course all politicians believe in taxation. The history of elections in the United States has been the history of the expanse of federal power and the decline of liberty and the intent of the founders of the country. Even politicians who believe in a limit to government power seem to weaken their principles with only a short time in office; some believe this is because power is simply so intoxicating.

  
  
  

  Meanwhile I have two avenues to effective change. As a Christian, I may have confidence that if I practice the things God requires of me, which include prayer and the preaching of the Gospel, change will occur in my life and in the lives of those who come in contact with me. If Christians really believed this we would see a dramatic decrease in the amount of time they spend discussing politics and a dramatic increase in the amount of time they spend discussing the word of God. Secondly, I may spend my time peacefully persuading people that anarcho-capitalism is best for them and best for everybody; throughout history governments of all types, tyrannical and democratic, have survived by throwing out enough "benefits" that the populace never gets mad enough about the violation of their rights and continues to support the government. Eventually as enough people cease to support the government, there is a tipping point where its power will begin to rapidly decay. Some optimists think this tipping point is very small, at somewhere near 10% or 25% of the population. All I know is I'd rather reach that than obtain a temporary majority for some flawed candidate in an election.





• It legitimizes the system: When I vote for a politician, I'm saying that I pick him to represent me, to act on my behalf. As the declaration of independence says, the government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. I can delegate my right to self-defense to an agency to defend my rights. I can delegate my right to decide what to do with a portion of my land to a group that is going to pool land and use it for a particular purpose. But since I don't have a right to dictate to other people (other than requiring them to respect my rights), I therefore can't delegate to the government all of the powers it is exercising. Selecting a representative means picking a person to act as my agent. If I get together with someone and ask him to steal for me, he is acting as my agent and we are both guilty. This is government as currently practiced. This is "we the people."

  
  
  

  Furthermore, when I've picked someone to hold the king powers for a term, I'm stuck with him, and if he doesn't do what I need or want, or what is right, it's my fault for picking him. As I said above, no person can or will use the king powers in the "right" way (there is no right way, other than using those powers to destroy themselves). But under our system, you have three options, and no matter what it's your fault:

  
  
  
  • You can vote for your man and win. If things don't go well, it's your fault for picking the wrong man. And all the men are wrong, and things will never go well for everybody for any length of time.
  
  
  • You can refrain from voting. In this case when they come to take your money your haughty voting neighbors justify their theft by saying you didn't vote and therefore you granted your consent to everything they wanted to do. I wish it were more obvious that this couldn't be more wrong, but we were all taught this in government school and almost everybody believes it. Funny, that.
  
  
  • You can vote for your man and lose. In this case you have to suffer all kinds of things being done to you that you did not consent to, but you agreed to participate in this democracy and you are told you have no room to complain and should work for change within the system. What a joke.
  
  
  

  Funny how the government keeps taking money that doesn't belong to it, keeps keeping people from using what belongs to them, keeps abusing people ... and then tells people that it is their fault, not its. When this happens between a man and a woman we call it domestic abuse. Interestingly enough in many domestic abuses the abuser tells his wife that all the bad things he does are her fault, and she often believes him. (This without loss of generality; I don't mean to imply that all abusers are men.)

  
  
  

  Democracy is a domestic abuse situation. The people are battered. It's time to realize that we need to abandon this partner once and for all. We're not really married to him, anyway. Worst shack-up we ever made. Let's get on with our real lives.





• It sacrifices real change: There were a variety of views on slavery in the 1800s. Some believed in immediate, total abolition: free all the slaves immediately, no compromises. Some believed in gradual abolition or various compromises: slowly free the slaves, slowly truncate slavery's territory, have the government buy some of them, send them back to Africa, etc. The fiery insightful abolitionists recognized the truth: if you argue for gradual change, real change may never happen. The change to anarcho-capitalism should happen now because it is right, because the current system is wrong, because it is better, because the current system is far, far worse, and because any gradual transition period would really just be another formation of the current system, which is tyrannical and wrong as well as damaging; an instant transition to doing what is right might be destabilizing, but it would actually be healthier than a tyrannically managed transition, as well as being the moral thing to do. The truth is that if you argue for complete change, what you will really get is gradual change as more and more people accept the truth. If you argue for gradual change, nothing meaningful will ever happen, and thousands of years from now we will still have all-powerful government.

  
  
  

  Voting for "the guy who is going to shrink the government the most" or "the guy who is going to grow the government the least" may seem like the libertarian or even Christian thing to do. But the reality is that you give your approval to someone who is not going to shrink the government, someone who is going to do wrong things in your name, and you perpetuate the situation rather than sounding the message that reform must come swiftly.

Three ways to fund government

There are several ways to fund a government. Almost all of them are prohibited to Christians, though we are definitely commanded to submit no matter what they do to us. We just aren't permitted to engage in such actions ourselves. How can you fund a government? You can:

1) Tax. Take money that doesn't belong to you. We're not allowed to do that, even if the money is for good purposes (Acts 5:4).

2) Borrow. Interestingly enough, many Christians believe that verses such as Romans 13:8 prohibit Christians from going into debt (although others disagree and believe this passage is teaching something else. I'm not going to address the theological issues here.). Either way, the Bible definitely proclaims debt to not be a good idea: borrowers become slaves: "The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower becomes the lender's slave." (Proverbs 22:7) And decent finance experts such as Dave Ramsey will tell you what a bad idea debt is. If debt is a bad idea for a person, how much more of a bad idea is it for a whole group of people to go into debt? And if it's bad for a person to be in debt, isn't it wrong to put other people in debt, through the means of the state? And if debtors are slaves, isn't the state enslaving itself and its citizens when it funds itself through debt? How could any Christian support giving an institution (the state) the power to put other people in debt without their consent?

But it gets worse: debts incurred by the government are never paid off by the people who made it. Government loans are paid off a generation or two later. In other words, when you authorize your government to borrow (all those bond issues we vote "YES" on), you are stealing from other people's children, and your own. "Children are not responsible to save up for their parents, but parents for their children." (II Corinthians 12:14) Should we be borrowing from our children's future, or saving up for them?

3) Inflation! This one is my favorite. Inflation is government caused, although you will hear a million and one other alleged causes of inflation. (The government likes for you to think it is not caused by them. They'd rather have you blaming greedy oil companies or something, and coveting what they own and continuing to support government theft.) Inflation is a direct violation of Leviticus 19:35-36. In ancient times, rulers accomplished inflation by melting down all the coins they took in, mixing in more and more base metal, and reminting the coins, so that they could make more coins that were actually worth less, hoping to trick people into accepting them at the same rate for a while. In modern times, we accomplish inflation by producing more and more dollars; the U.S. money supply is constantly growing, when instead it should be constant. Every time we bring a new dollar into existence, every other dollar in the world shrinks slightly in purchasing power in order to "create" the new purchasing power of the new dollar. In other words: creating a new dollar is theft: it steals a small amount of value from every owner of dollars in the world. Repeat it a billion times and you've stolen quite a bit of value. God's ordained free market picked an inflation-proof money; you can read more about this and how government forcibly (and with direct theft) interfered with this decision in order to make inflation easier in Whatever Happened to Penny Candy, by Richard Maybury, or What Has Government Done to our Money? by Murray Rothbard. The Rothbard book is available for free online at the previous link, or you can buy it. The Maybury book is easier to understand (it's written for children) and is actually for sale at most homeschool bookfairs I've been to. Both of them have insights and information that the other does not.