Almost since the day we were born, we’ve been spoon-fed the notion that our system is rights-protective and consensual.
In a charitable mood, I might call this mythology.
Here, right now, sitting on the cold floor of a hotel bathroom (my wife is still asleep), I feel like telling it like it really is: These are collective lies that we have chosen to believe.
Our system protects rights? Partially. Then again, so did feudalism. It’s just a matter of style and degree.
Our system is consensual? How? You certainly did not agree to be governed by it. Our consent to the system is deemed “tacit” and “implied” and then ensured at the point of a gun. Then we are thrown a bone: you can vote for the people who tell you what to do. And, theoretically at least, you can try to become one of those people yourself.
That is a poor substitute for consent, but we cannot see it because our eyes are clouded by the voting mystique. Ooh, it’s the ‘consent of the governed.’ It’s “we, the people.” They serve us.
No it isn’t. No we aren’t. No they don’t.
You can vote or not vote. Stuff still gets done to you to which you did not consent.
Your guy can win or not win. He can try to do what you were hoping he was going to do, or not. He can gain support for his efforts in the legislature or not.
He is certainly under no obligation to you. The Founders believed (or, more precisely, some of them claimed to believe) that his desire to get re-elected will keep him honest. Nice try. Incumbency re-elect rates are well over 90 percent, and it ain’t because everyone loves their representatives.
He may cause stuff to be done to you to which you did not consent. Or he may be powerless to prevent his colleagues from doing so. Either way, it’s gonna happen.
A vote is not consent. A vote is a piece of confetti cast into an uncaring wind.
A vote is also a desperate and violent act: eat them before they eat you.
Lysander Spooner lays it bare:
"In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot-- which is a mere substitute for a bullet--because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.”
For the love of God, does that sound like peace to you?
Democracy—yes, even our constitutional republican kind, obviously—also allows for wide-scale redistribution. Indeed, the nature of the system encourages it and makes it inevitable eventually.
What we end up with is exactly what Bastiat described: a system in which everyone is attempting to live off of everyone else. The means by which this is accomplished is the ballot, backed by the bullet.
Does that sound like peace to you?
This system also addles people’s understanding of rights.
A person well-versed in the true nature of rights will say,
A right is anything you wish to do that does not initiate force against another. Anything that initiates force on another is not a right.
‘The people’ agree. And then, in the next breath, they talk about how people have a “right”to housing and healthcare and anything else you can think of…all of which must be provided at someone else’s expense.
You explain,
There is a right to SEEK housing. To build one’s own house. To voluntarily contract with a builder or seller of a house.
There is no right to be given a house at someone else’s expense. That right does not exist. Any attempt to execute that fake “right” is an act of violence—a violation of someone else’s real right (the right not to have one’s money taken by force).
They say, yeah, that makes sense. And then in the next breath they say, “But what if someone really needs it. Don’t you care about people?”
And then the system rewards them with public VirtuePoints™ and hides the inherent violence of this whole transaction under layers of bureaucracy and taxation and voting and mystique about “We, the people.”
There will never be peace in this world so long as we have a system that turns some people into the means to others’ ends. It does not matter whether the recipient of this forcible transfer is a sympathetic character or not. The transaction is still fundamentally a violent one. We have simply concealed the violence under layers of democracy and mythology.
There will never be peace in this world so long as people continue to believe this mythology and perpetuate this system.
There are those who live within their means; their expectations and intentions are based upon what they can earn and acquire through their efforts, the application of their minds and muscles to solving the questions of survival. Their are those who think they can survive off of someone else's efforts, by force or guile.
This "democracy" is supportive of the Iatter: the former don't need the "government " to make their way in the world.
So many great points here. The ballot is the “slave suggestion box.” Also, providing homes at other people’s expense creates a resentful “giver” and an unappreciated receiver. The “giver” did not provide care out of free will, it was forced and taken. The receiver acquired the generosity via a system in place. Therefore the receiver becomes not only used to necessities being handed to them but also never fully appreciates or is warmed by the generosity of another human being. The “generosity” is systematized.