Re: Voting

(Note: I haven't been on this blog in years, apparently the last post i made was on the same topic, so many of the ideas here are the same. Still, here are a couple thoughts on the topic of voting in government elections.) A Few Quick Reasons Why I’m Not Voting. 1. I don’t recognize the U.S. government as legitimate, so I don’t see the point in participating in the elections that make it even pseudo-legitimate. 2. If you vote in an election, you can not complain about the outcome of that election. That’s the cornerstone of democracy: majority rule. It also goes back to #1: by participating you implicitly agree that the election (and the rulers it puts in power) has a ‘legitimate’ claim to you. 3. The game is rigged from the start. Elections are bought and sold long before the votes are ‘counted’. Politically connected special interests finance the political officials and mandates that will bring them the most favor from the state. 4. Government can be essentially summed up as a ‘monopoly on violence’, that is, the power to unilaterally and coercively enforce a specific set of laws that are created by legislatures and the legal system. Since this legal system and legislature can be definitively shown to be corrupt and responsible for crimes against innocent person and property, it seems to then be implicitly unethical to participate in that very same system. 5. By definition, a monopoly has no competitors. This means that the economic laws of nature and the marketplace, especially the law of supply and demand, are not present. There is no way to hold a government accountable for its actions as there is, say, for a business. A monopoly also has the quality of having the most power and brute force available in the areas it monopolizes, so once the monopoly comes into existence it is hard to get rid of it. This is one reason why the government of America has gotten bigger and bigger since the ratification of the Constitution. 6. There is no philosophical or moral basis for the violent rule of one human being over another, or by the same token a group of human beings over another. Do I have the right to ‘tax’ my next-door neighbor? That is, demand a sum of money from him and either take it or him by force if he doesn’t pay? That is called ‘extortion’. If we as individuals (or ‘citizens’ to use the political language) do not have the right to take money from others, then why should it be O.K. if it’s done by ‘hiring’ the government to do it for us?