Don't Vote - It Only Encourages Them

If you are a plantation slave, you must do as the master says.

This is wrong.

But...what if you could choose who your master would be? What if every four years, the master, and his wife, would put up posters saying, "I will be the kindest master" and "I will protect you from bandits" and "I will keep the roofs of your cabin fixed"?

And you could then choose the man master or woman master?

Would you feel happier, and would you then be free?

No. For you'd not be choosing whether or not to have a master, you'd only be choosing which master you'd slave for.

One might say there'd be a benefit to it, that it would encourage a more gentle master, since they'd want to keep their "job". The history of masters doesn't seem to support this though.

One might say that if you don't vote for who your master is, you can't complain about being whipped in the fields...but I disagree.

Let us examine that assertion:

You cannot complain if you....

1. Voted for the master who won, for you picked him.
2. Voted for the master who lost, for you participated, and shouldn't be a sore loser.
3. Did not vote at all, for you had your chance to make a difference and did not.

Hmmm....

Uh, in what world are you allowed to complain? Apparently none, to those who accept the "voting ritual" as good and proper.

Back to that plantation, if you saw the male and female contenders busy telling you how important voting was, would you not be suspicious?

Would you not then realize, "Hey, they just want me to vote so as to validate the system. Because if I'm voting, then no matter who I vote for to master me....I'm first and foremost agreeing that I should have a master!!!!"

Such a slave who realized that would be correct. And then, no matter how many of his fellow slaves said things like, "Hey, the woman says we'll get new quilts!", or "Hey, you have to at least vote against the one that's worse!", or "The bandits are everywhere, we must set aside differences and vote to make things as good as we can.", or "well, don't complain if the guy wins then, and you have extra work"...

He'd still sullenly sit there, maybe not sure of everything, but sure of one thing......

That while he has no choice but to toil in the fields, and to obey the Plantation rules or die...the masters yet give him a choice on whether he will validate them or not. And so with only that small protest available...he will at least do that.

And that's why I don't vote.

It really does only encourage them.

And what is this "vote" any way, but a most cowardly initiation of force? You would recoil from the thought of stealing from your neighbors to pay for your family camping trip - yet you see no problem with voting for Congressman Pork who promises to "Increase funding for our National Parks" which is but the same theft, simply once removed.

Apparently, theft from your neighbors is just fine, so long as you have someone else do it, and so long as you let your neighbor have an equal chance to rob you! What a fascinating game of Spin the Loaded Gun, where one never knows which group of us the gun will be pointed at, but if it stops pointed at us, we must then dig deep for the other man's pet projects.

Sometimes the gun points at us and we are robbed for road maintenance in Montana. Other times it points at others who are robbed for our Hydroelectric Plant. So many votes, so many spinning guns, so many robberies. We always get to point the voting gun at so many people for so much of what we want - and we always wonder why so many voting guns are pointed at us for so much of what others want!

We forget that while we want to soak the rich for that which benefits us, that the poor want to soak us for that which benefits them, and we all want to soak all - for after all, we're getting soaked here, and want some back!

It is as Frederic Bastiat said, "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else."

Let us each make a more moral decision, and just as we'd not pick up a gun to violate our neighbor's rights, let us not pick up a ballot to that same end. It is unfair to vote for a person, knowing that if that person gets in, that he will harm another as surely as he breathes, that his job as administrator of "legalized force" allows him to do nothing but.

Dean West