My comment, at a local forum:
What you’re saying is exactly the same as claiming that a mere bystander at a game of roulette must pay for the losses of some gambler who deliberately chose to put his money on the table.
…
Would you have the audacity to come to my house and do to me what government does to me on your behalf?
Have many times does it have to be said?
The only people who get to complain are people who don’t roll the dice.
My comment, at Radley’s place, a few days ago:
?A vote is nothing more and always an attempt to push someone else around by electing a proxy to do the pushing.?
Yup. Voting voting is delegated coercion.
It?s also a despicably cowardly act. No one I?ve ever met has the audacity to personally do to their neighbors what a vote-fueled government does.
Would you approach your neighbor’s employer and demand a portion of his pay? Would you prevent someone from attempting to save his own life with an experimental drug? Would you have the balls to go to your neighbor’s house and use force to stop him from eating duck liver? Of course you wouldn’t. But voting lets you do those very things, without getting your hands dirty or risking your own hide.
SaltyPig recently points out that he wrote about this very thing five years ago:
When confronted directly with first-person moral decisions, most people are quick to answer in favor of liberty. So what happens somewhere between lemonade-stand-land and the modern state to make people such hooligans by proxy?
Voting is all about abdication of responsibility and delegation of coercion to impose mere preferences upon others.
Market Watch had the text of Obama’s acceptance speech online even before he started spewing. In part:
That’s the promise of America - the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.
He left out a couple words there. What he meant was this:
That’s the promise of America - the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper, or else.
Obama would be your keeper, and compel you to be your neighbor’s keeper, even if it fucking kills you.
I’ve been chipping away at the essays in Martin Luther King’s “Why We Can’t Wait” for a little while now. In “The Summer of Our Discontent”, King writes:
Very, very few voters I’ve met realize they’re selling themselves into slavery when they presume to make decisions about other people’s lives. They cast their vote, as if they believe it were some sacrament to impose their mere preferences on their neighbors.
I see no reason to hope that any of these votistas will ever recognize that they’re propping up a structure that is devouring them.
The old order will never end, so long as voters refuse to question what they’re doing to themselves and their neighbors.
A recent email discussion got me searching a bit for info on Mark Scott, a talk show host? here in Detroit on AM 1270 WXYT before it became an all-sports station. I listened to Mark for years and he’s the one who really got me thinking about philosophical concepts.
Turns out Mark’s on YouTube, in a recording of a speech he gave at Freedom Hill in Sterling Heights, MI in 1995. I was there. Much of his speech is about gun legislation and the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City but he touches on some important concepts, beginning at about 7:30 into part 3.
I’ve never heard anyone so consistently discuss fundamental underlying concepts before or since on any mainstream radio or TV station.
John McCain
Barack Obama
Other
Some folks at the local newspaper’s forums can’t wait until November to get their spot by the side of the cannibal pot.
As I write this the forum results are 42%, 43%, and 15%.
As usual, 0% grasp the reality that they’re vicariously holding a gun to their neighbors’ heads.