How Dare You Vote!

If you have not mastered Frédéric Bastiat's "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen," how dare you vote! How arrogant of you to presume to set rules for everyone else! Do something constructive on election day: stay home and mind your own business.

TGIF: Midterm Blues

As midterm elections go, for champions of individual liberty this one could have been worse. I see two bright spots. The likely slim majority of Republicans in the House could -- maybe -- produce a measure of gridlock on domestic spending and regulation, and the blame for the Republicans' substandard midterm performance might fall entirely on Donald Trump, driving him from the stage. When you consider all the possible outcomes from Tuesday, that's not bad.

In most midterm years the only outcome worth hoping for is gridlock. Gridlock, however, wouldn't be the best outcome under all conceivable circumstances. Libertarians want Congress to get many things undone, especially but not limited to out-of-control military and so-called entitlement spending. The latter, which is on autopilot, finances programs that are facing insolvency. When that happens, today's spending, taxing borrowing, and money creation will look trivial.

But hardly anyone in power even talks about these and similar problems, so gridlock for the next two years is hardly likely to stop anything good from happening. In other words, gridlock was worth rooting for. It won't be worse than continued Democratic domination.

So regardless of what happens in the Senate, if the House goes Republican, even by the small margin that appears likely, we might see it block the most egregious domestic spending and regulatory measures proposed by Joe Biden and the congressional Democrats. I'd keep an eye on any more energy bills intended to interfere with the use of fossil fuels. Not that Republicans are reliable when it comes to opposing domestic spending -- far from it -- but we can hope. On the other hand, don't look for a freeze, much less a reduction in military and related spending. Republicans have not lost their commitment to the warfare state. 

As noted, the other good news from Tuesday was the poor showing for Trump, some of whose favorite candidates lost. Not all of those he endorsed bit the dust, but some key ones did, such as in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. He may yet be disappointed by still-undecided races in Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, and elsewhere.

I'm hoping that Republicans will blame Trump for their party's poor showing in the midterms. The out-party is supposed to make big gains in Congress, in governor's mansions, and in state houses, but the Republicans did not do it. This happened in a year when the voters' top concerns were inflation and crime, and with an unpopular Democrat in the White House. Who or what else could be responsible for the lackluster midterm performance if not Trump?

So if Tuesday's results play a role in convincing Trump to stay out of the 2024 presidential election, we can breathe a sign of relief. Liberty would be better off without his toxic presence. (This is not to say that Ron DeSantis, who would be the chief beneficiary, offers any hope.)

With another election behind us, it's worth remembering what a fraud electoral politics is. Campaigns are little more than performance art -- bad performance art. The skill that ignorant voters tend to reward is a candidate's mastery at delivering a particular tribe's or coalition's talking points. Much of what elected officials do is interfere with our peaceful productive endeavors, but how many voters know anything about economics? Without that knowledge, all that's left are cosmetics and rhetoric that reassures.

The candidates typically don't know anything either, but they and their handlers do know that the voters are ignorant and thus are suckers for comforting soundbites. It's just a matter of which candidate gets more of his or her tribe to the polls.

If you can see in this any resemblance to selecting office holders according to their actual knowledge, judgment, competence, and integrity, let me know.

I'm not implying that politics could be better than this. The problems are inherent because government is a top-down way of attempting to organize society that cannot help but violate individual liberty. What I'm saying is that at best politics is show-biz by other means. 

So as usual, the election gave us both good news and bad news. The good news is that the losers lost. The bad news is that the winners won. 

TGIF: Election Day 2022

Another election day is upon us. We're told that we have a duty to vote because so many Americans gave their lives for that right. But perhaps it ought to be spelled R-I-T-E, as in a religious ritual.

Is it a duty or a right? Let's make up our minds. In 21 countries voting is mandatory -- although the law is not always enforced -- but that absurd idea has never had traction here. There is something weird about an alleged right that one is compelled to exercise. It certainly would be unique.

And did Americans really fight wars for the vote? Many who were killed in wars that the government tricked them into fighting might have thought they were risking their lives for freedom, but the freedom to vote probably didn't rank high on the list. Americans certainly died in the domestic struggle for full citizenship -- civil rights-- which includes the vote, and I don't mean to disparage that struggle.

I'm saying that the freedom to govern one's own life is more important than the vote, and deep down people know it. In our private lives individual action really counts: we tend to reap the lion's share of the benefits and pay the price of our actions. When I go to the supermarket to buy eggs, I am confident that I'll bring home eggs. Virtually all the costs, both in time and money,  and the benefits are mine; thinking about them is how I decide if going to the supermarket is worthwhile in the first place.

Voting is different. Individual action is almost always indecisive -- each person has only one vote, and the costs and benefits of each person's decision are widely and thinly dispersed throughout society. That disconnect breeds irresponsibility.

Imagine if we shopped for groceries the way we pick rulers. On Shopping Day you would walk into the supermarket and see before you two (maybe three or four) sealed pre-filled shopping carts. Each cart has a different selection of products. Your task is to vote for a cart from among the candidates. That may not be easy. Undoubtedly, you would like some of each cart's contents and dislike others. You would have to decide which one has more of what you want and less of what you don't want. And no, you would not be to able exchange items with other people.

So you would mark your ballot and then return home to watch the election returns. The cart that you get to bring home is the one that wins 50 percent plus 1 of the votes or perhaps a plurality. Of course, it may not be the one you voted for. Oh well. (To make this even more like politics, the cart you bring home isn't exactly like the one you saw in the supermarket. Campaign promises are notoriously ephemeral.)

I submit that that would be a stupid way to shop for groceries. But that's the system we use to pick the people who are empowered to meddle in our lives, embroil us in war, and do other foolish things that no one has any business doing. I acknowledge that voting is preferable to violence for selecting rulers, but when Churchill said democracy beat any alternative, he overlooked a contender: consistent liberalism (libertarianism), which does not allow majorities to negate individual rights.

Mathematically, one vote is rarely decisive and that's only in the smallest jurisdictions. As the late public-choice economist Gordon Tullock pointed out (watch the video "Voting Schmoting"): "It’s more likely that you’ll get killed driving to the polling booth than it is that your vote will change the outcome of the election."

No election in my adult lifetime would have turned out differently had I done something other than I did on election day. Not one. While the smaller the vote pool, the greater the chance of a tie, greater is not the same as great. In most places that chance is insignificant. People still talk about how close the 2000 Bush-Gore vote for president was in Florida. But the margin there was 537 out of nearly six million votes. As far as I've been able to determine, no individual Floridian cast or declined to cast 537 votes that day.

So when the good-government types tell you to get to the polls because "every vote counts," you know not true. It is certainly true that the winner by definition must have more votes than the loser. (Presidential elections are more complicated, of course.) But each person has only one vote, and it will make no difference. The only action you can control will not decide the outcome.

Someone might object that although your chance of casting the decisive vote is typically only the tiniest bit above zero, you won't know for certain how things will turn out until the votes are counted -- so you'd better vote. But if that were the right way to look at it, playing the lottery would be a good financial strategy because your chance of winning, no matter how small, is greater than zero. But it's not a good strategy. Except in truly desperate circumstances, we don't usually undertake a course of action unless we see a reasonable chance of success. That's how we avoid wasting scarce time, energy, and resources. Instead of voting, perhaps your time would be better spent doing something that has a reasonable chance of making a difference in some way that matters to you. Every action -- including voting -- has opportunity costs.

Tullock wasn't telling people to stay home on election day. He pointed out that many people vote because they like to vote, and he meant no criticism of them. Voters can have many reasons for liking that activity, such as feeling part of a like-minded group of people. Tullock simply thought that aiming to determine the outcome of an election is a bad reason to vote.

People can also have good reasons to dislike voting. They may not want to participate in a civic religious-style rite, which apologists for the government power will invoke in order to blame the voters and excuse the politicians and bureaucrats for bureaucratic incompetence and misconduct. If "we are the government," as we are often told, then the fault must lie in ourselves. But are we the government? Or is popular sovereignty the secular equivalent of the divine right of kings -- a fiction to rationalize an elite's power over us? (See the section titled "The Fiction of Representative Government" in my article "The Misrepresentation of Health Care Reform.")

One last thing: we are also told that if we don't vote we have no grounds to complain. That fallacy was put to rest in 1851 when the classical liberal Herbert Spencer pointed out that, apparently, voters have no grounds to complain either because those who voted for the winner got what they wanted and those who voted for the loser accepted the rules of the game. So everyone must shut up and obey. How convenient.

TGIF: Is "Free Election" an Oxymoron?

American leaders and their loyal media pundits love to sit in judgment of other countries' election, declaring them fair or rigged according to their seemingly meticulous standards. In fact, the real standard is that the regimes "we" like hold free and fair (enough) elections, while the regimes "we" dislike don't. What about regimes "we" like that hold no national elections at all, like Saudi Arabia? They are forgotten whenever the loveliness of democracy is the topic of discussion.

Maybe a broader approach would shed light on the matter. We could ask: does any country have really free and fair elections? In other words, could an election be described that way even if the authorities did not engage in blatant voter or candidate suppression or outright vote fraud?

I'm not trying to be clever here. I am not one of those people who might say that since free will is an illusion, the idea of a free election must also be an illusion. Free will is real. To borrow a trope from philosopher Etienne Gilson (1884-1978), free always buries its undertakers. (Gilson said this about philosophy, though many people think he said it about metaphysics or natural law. What he said applies to these.)

I'm saying that other features intrinsic to political elections prevent them from being truly free and fair. First, the people who cast votes do so under duress. Not that armed agents of the state literally hold guns on to their heads as they go to the polls. It's more subtle: opting out of an election is not the same as opting out of the consequences of the election. The latter cannot be done. Nonvoters are subject to the same impositions as voters are. If the winning candidate raises taxes and interferes with peaceful conduct, everyone will be caught in the net. The only way to escape is literally to leave the jurisdiction, which implies that government owns all property. Of course, one cannot leave a jurisdiction without entering another, which will likely have similar impositions. (Political competition among jurisdictions may provide some relief at the margin.)

Because of the duress under which people vote, Lysander Spooner acknowledged that a person might vote simply in self-defense: "In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former."

I'm reminded of Herbert Spencer's sarcastic comment on the popular idea that nonvoters are not entitled to complain about the outcome of elections. But, Spencer pointed out, according to the conventional wisdom, voters--no matter whom they voted for--are not entitled to complain either. Why not? Because those who backed the winner can hardly have grounds for dissatisfaction, and those who voted for the loser knew the risks when they chose to participate in the election. So everyone must shut up and do what they are told. How convenient!

We have other grounds for questioning the fairness and freedom of any election. Even if we concede that voters freely elect the officeholders by majority rule--ignoring all the obstacles to maverick parties and candidates--can we really say that voters select the policies that the resulting regime will carry out. I don't think so. For one thing, the connection between what candidates say and what they do in office is extremely weak. Candidates are often vague about what they will do, but even when they aren't, voters have no good reason to think the candidate will do more than make symbolic moves in the direction of keeping their promises. Voters have little and mostly no recourse. They cannot take back their votes or sue the candidate for breach of promise. (Some jurisdictions have recall procedures, but they are expensive and require a majority vote.) Voting is like buying a pig in a poke.

Another problem is that most voters most of the time vote behind a veil of ignorance. They not only do not know what a candidate will do if elected; they also don't understand the issues that governments deal with. For example, if candidates differ on the minimum wage--whether to raise it or to have such a law at all--how are voters who know nothing about economics to make an intelligent choice? They will be unable to, so they will vote on the basis of feelings, a candidate's campaign skill, or sheer tribal partisanship. (See Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.) That's an unreliable way to make good decisions.

The same goes for foreign policy and any other area in which government officials act. Each of these areas require study, which requires time and resources. How many people will have the resources, not to mention the inclination, to acquire the knowledge needed to make good choices about all the things candidates promise to do?

A final problem is one that most people understand but don't like to talk about: no single vote counts. People who have abstained from voting their whole lives can rest assured that no election would have come out differently had they voted. One thing that tells us is that each individual is free to vote on any basis they like because they know the consequences of that one vote are nil. In that sense, elections are free, but that's not what the democracy advocates mean by free elections. We might call them free and irresponsible.

Critics of democracy are often accused of favoring authoritarianism because most people think that is the only alternative. Some people who dislike democracy indeed favor authoritarianism, but that certainly cannot be true of libertarians. The libertarian alternative to democracy is the removal of matters from the political sphere so that they can be addressed in the social sphere, that is, the sphere of consent, cooperation, and contract, where persuasion replaces force. That's what created human progress in the first place.

What Voting Does and Does Not Mean

I talk to Scott Horton about whether your vote really counts. Listen here.

TGIF: My Most Excellent Election Day Experience

Last Tuesday, special day that it was, I awoke early and prepared to go out. By 7 a.m., I was where I always go on this special day, eager to do my duty and exercise my sacred right to choose.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

TGIF: The Tragedy and Comedy of Russiagate

The whole election-meddling distraction is remarkable in both comic and tragic ways. The tragedy can be summed up in three words: New Cold War. At a time when the U.S. and Russian governments ought to be working toward nuclear disarmament, relations are deteriorating dangerously.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

Become a Free Association patron today!

Right and Wrong

Trump is right in thinking the system is rigged. He's wrong in thinking it's rigged against him.

TGIF: The Political Sterility of Jon Stewart

Political satire has a long and honorable history: Aristophanes, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift; W.S. Gilbert; George Orwell; Tom Lehrer, David Frost, and That Was the Week That Was; George Carlin; Spitting Image, Yes, Minister; the Smothers Brothers; the early Saturday Night Live, Dave Barry, The Onion, and so many more. Unfortunately, while it would be a slight exaggeration to say that political satire is dead in America, it’s been on the critical list for some time. That’s too bad. We need it more than ever.

Read it all here.

Election 2014: The Good News and Bad

The 2014 midterm election delivered both good news and bad. The good news is that the losers lost. The bad news is that the winners won.

Read it here.

Elections

The opiate of the people. Cast your vote, feel good, then zone out till the next one. The politicians will look out for you while you're sleeping it off.

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