Anarcho-Lobbyist: You Have No Right To Vote

Posted by Zenphamy 9 years, 3 months ago to Government
35 comments | Share | Flag

So is voting a Right that every citizen should have. This comment has an interesting look at the question and offers some good reasons.
From the article:

"Voting is not a right. I understand the desire, and even the perceived necessity to treat it that way, since all of us are affected by government, but it’s still a not a “right”. I don’t much like the concept of rights to begin with, but that’s a story for another post. Whether or not rights exist, the idea that anyone is morally or even pragmatically correct in choosing those who will violently rule over others is insane. If you have no proper authority to violently rule over others, it is impossible for you to delegate that authority to someone else.

Government is an unjust imposition on all of our lives, and voting is a privilege granted by that institution. This is self evident, in that it requires registration to be invoked, and that it can be revoked at any time. Not only that, but it is perhaps the most abused privilege since taxation, and I don’t personally feel like making it more readily available to people is going to help improve the world any. There’s a reason liberals always accuse conservatives of voter suppression, and that’s because fewer voters is generally a good thing for keeping government small.

Most people are not exceedingly intelligent or well educated, particularly when it comes to history and economics. Thus, when politicians tell them to choose between a candidate who says “We’ll keep you safe and healthy and give you free stuff” vs. a candidate who says “You are responsible for your own life” most of them will unfortunately support the former. Free stuff and safety are universally appealing options, and so anyone who makes those promises, however false they may be, will be favored over someone who gives the hard truth of “life sucks, get a fuckin helmet”."

and

"It is exceedingly rare that I stand for the State to be more restrictive on anything, but voting and getting free stuff is where I draw the line. I support drug testing for welfare recipients, and I support restrictions on voting for the same reason.

Making voting more widely available is the same thing as making welfare more widely available. You give people better access to the machinery of the State, and we should not act surprised when it gets used more frequently. Voting is serious business, a person who deems themselves fit to choose who will violently rule over a society had better have some skin in the game, and know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, the people pushing hardest for freer elections are often those who have the least education, intelligence, and skin in the game."

Do any Gulchers think there's a chance in Hell that we can aver get back to a Republic after being democratized?


All Comments

  • Posted by $ Commander 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Thanks. I can't remember a time when I was not solution oriented. Having a strong INTJ personality....I usually step on a lot of toes...to the point of breaking hips!
    Snoogoo and I are kicking around the idea of a new money system that may be enjoined with this. A novel, fact or fiction, is still to be determined.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Because we don't need them and all we need is a self-sustaining community, I would think 50-100 people might be sufficient, if the talent base were diverse enough. Certainly 500-1000 would be.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Jeff Immelt is the living example of Wesley Mouch. At least Bill Gates created something.
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  • Posted by $ Commander 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Legality has become the bane of the "just".
    As I understand original voting privilege, it was only property owners.
    I'm just offering up a starting point to leverage out the uninterested, under-informed and over-powered big businesses. The resistance to this?! Deep sigh....
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  • Posted by frodo_b 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I’m unfortunate in that the country I was born in no longer exists, but either way I’d still have to renounce my US citizenship and you’re right. It is expensive to do that.

    Which is completely and utterly insane. I don’t know where to begin. The whole idea of being charged to renounce your citizenship… They’re on crack, right? Please tell me they’re on crack. And the sad part is that you can’t just tell them to get stuffed. If the country you move to has an extradition treaty with the US then goons will show up to put you in a cage.
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  • Posted by frodo_b 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    That’s an interesting proposal. I don’t know if it would work, but it would be a fun conversation to have :)

    Personally, I think that only property owners should be allowed to vote and there should only be one vote per household.

    But the root cause of the problem is the corruption of law and as long as that isn’t addressed it doesn’t matter what remedy we propose.
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  • Posted by Robbie53024 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    You think Bill Gates would have struck? How about Jeff Immelt, just to name two. There are tens of thousands more who are cronyist sell-outs, but have sufficient capability to keep any system functioning.
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  • Posted by Rocky_Road 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

    Thomas Jefferson

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  • Posted by Rocky_Road 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    There was a time when only property owners had a vote...you had to have 'skin in the game' to change the system.

    In retrospect, not a bad approach.
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  • Posted by $ Commander 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    A simple solution, though grievously difficult to institute, would be the idea of "Stakeholding" as applied to voting privilege. Mind you, this is an idea with a few complications, yet...
    1. Everyone gets a vote
    2. Property owners a second.
    3. Business owners employing a "minimum" number of emoloyees, a third.
    4. Business ownership of it's "domicile", a fourth.
    Once again, this is a simplicity beyond the complexity of the problem at hand, and the resistance to any such proposal. It is a path toward Representative Republic.
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  • Posted by Rocky_Road 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "Striking is not a viable mechanism."

    So true.
    You would become a member of a 'huge mob' of around three...kind of like the Occupying Wall Street bozos.
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  • Posted by $ Commander 9 years, 3 months ago
    I take "care" of and for my own "house". I live in disdain of those who do not "take care", to make decisions, that rob me of my Liberty
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  • Posted by Robbie53024 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Actually, in many ways it's much worse. In AS, there were only so many people of true capability and very few who were people of capability but corrupted (the Stadlers). Thus a strike was a possible mechanism to bring about change. In our actual society there are far more Stadlers of all sorts. They are the cronyists who use the force of gov't to gain an advantage where they couldn't otherwise. Striking is not a viable mechanism.
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  • Posted by Robbie53024 9 years, 3 months ago
    It has been said many times over the centuries. First summed up in the phrase "bread and circuses," attributed to Juvenal in about 100 AD. It has been reiterated numerous times that any voting populace, once it figures out that it can vote itself money, will do so. It cannot be stopped. And it always leads to tyranny.
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  • Posted by khalling 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I might agree if you also had the choice to be a citizen. But you don 't really. Sometimes I wish that I had been born overseas and could choose that citizenship if I wanted. It 's now expensive to renounce US citizenship.
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  • Posted by Technocracy 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    When the US was created their were barriers to vote.

    Primarily economic, with the implication that if you aren't economically invested in the country you should not be voting on how to run it. I have no problem with tests or barriers of this type.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 9 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I know. I just think the world is run by little tribes who follow people who get things done. I wish I knew how to build a startup Gulch that proves the concept. My theory is that if there were an enclave, which doesn't have to be in an exotic location, where you got a bunch of producers together, they'd create extraordinary value and be a model for other people. It would have to be large to prove the concept though b/c even in a large group of producers Googles and Facebooks are rare. Maybe a smaller enclave would produce a lot of privately-held businesses doing mundane things, producing real value with none of high-tech IPO sex appeal.

    My gut feeling is something like it will happen. I'm not sure if it will even be geographic. One dream is that someone like you inherits a little bit of wealth and invests it into a high-tech incubator in an area near a private university that generates research that could be commercialized. If the founder actually understands some of the research, he could invest small seed capital into it, which might help them get attention of other angels or VCs. If that works, maybe he buys a hotel that's already operating in some Caribbean island that already has a favorable business environment, and try to make it a retreat for objectivist-minded people to vacation or to have workshops. If somehow this leads to the org buying commercial RE there, well, it's starting to look Gulch-like. Business never unfolds according to plan; it will all happen completely different. The general idea, though, doesn't feel like a stretch to me.
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