 27 Nov 2006 @ 22:23
http://freeamerica.ws/why-not-ballots.html /// Article posted by Bb Astrid
NOT BALLOTS
The most common strategy employed by Americans seeking more freedom is to try to reform the government through electoral politics. I consider this to be an almost complete waste of time and effort. Here are some of my reasons:
* If you don't get over 50% of the vote in an election, you get nothing. Nada. Zip. Even if your candidate does get elected, you again have to get over 50% of the vote in the legislature / Congress, or again you get nothing.
* Even if you manage to generate a lot of support and enthusiasm for your cause during an election campaign, all of your momentum dissipates in the off years between elections.
* The game is rigged against us. Our rulers use vote fraud, byzantine election regulations, and onerous ballot access requirements to suppress any serious electoral challenge.
* Any candidate you manage to get elected immediately faces strong pressure to compromise his or her principles in order to get anything accomplished. City Hall, the state Capitol, and especially Washington, D.C., are environments that are morally corrosive in the extreme, and few have the strength to withstand their corruptive forces.
* Democracy is anathema to freedom. One wag described democracy as "two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." Socrates was put to death by democratic vote because a majority of his fellow Athenians didn't like what he taught. Minorities are forever at the mercy of the majority in any true democracy. And few notions are as morally repulsive as the idea that your neighbors have a right to strip you of your property (taxation, eminent domain) or even turn you into a slave (conscription) just because a majority of them vote in favor of it.
* Voting serves only to lend a patina of legitimacy to tyranny. People ruled by a democracy will put up with abuses they would never tolerate from a dictator, because they labor under the false beliefs that "we are the government" and that the mere fact of being allowed to vote for new rulers every few years means they are free.
* The bottom line: in all of human history, no people has ever voted themselves free.
The one case where an election campaign might be useful to freedom seekers is when the campaign is used as a platform to publicize the philosophy of freedom and the government's crimes... as long as the candidate doesn't get distracted by trying to get elected.
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