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.
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.
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.
This quote from George Carlin speaks for itself:?
You may have noticed that there’s one thing I don’t complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, “They suck”. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and they’re elected by American voters. This is the best we can do, folks. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.
….I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.
I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.
The folks in Pillsbury, ND had an election, and no one came.
But on June 10, no one showed up. Not even those on the ballot.
Unfortunately, the zero turn-out wasn’t because they realized that voting is delegated coercion, or even for any sliver of recognition of the force underlying voting. They were all just too busy to gather round the cannibal pot that day.