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IPFS News Link • Voting and Elections

The Efficacy and Ethics of Voting

• https://www.libertarianinstitute.org

As many times as I have spoken and written on this topic, I chose restraint on formally addressing it again until the madness of the 2016 election cycle faded. The reason for this restraint is that I have suffered the extreme hyperbolic madness of the election frenzy ten times during my life and I have learned not to attempt to reason with piranha while they are feeding. Not that every national election has this effect on the voting public. There have been thirteen national elections during my life, and I remember every one of them. But the frenzy only took hold ten of those thirteen times, because it was only needed ten times to control and manipulate the public.

As an adult, I have spent a great deal of effort studying the American election cycle and I can say with confidence, the election of 2016 was not unique, but rather a built-in aspect of the design of American politics. When any serious resistance to the powers of DC begin to show themselves, magically a hero appears to speak for the American people and lead them back to freedom. (A freedom that exists in their memory but never in reality.) This great hero always appears as an outsider, yet is actually a hand selected member of the elite. Three times incredibly wealthy and powerful New York businessmen from extremely wealthy and powerful New York families, have emerged to convince middle America that they were the champion of the little man, the trust buster, the hero of the downtrodden, and then they went on to cut backroom deals with the banking and industrial powers to start wars and further rob the wealth of the average American. Twelve times the persona of a great general has been used for the same purpose and produced the same results. Once, out of desperation, a movie actor was used. But the lesson to learn here is that no matter who the hollow soulless figure is that is offered as the hero and savior of the people, Leviathan grows and consumes the lives and wealth of all who honestly trade their sweat, blood, and intellect for a few morsels of bread and whatever shelter we can erect. In other words, the winner of every election is the State, and the losers are always the voters.

As you can see from the above statements, I have no confidence in the myth that voting can change the system and bring freedom to the downtrodden. I have said before that voting in a national election is numerically almost identical to playing the lottery with the exception that on a rare occasion the lottery can actually change a person's life. Others have said that to understand a national election you would need to be a wise mathematician or a good economist. And a wise mathematician or good economist wouldn't waste their time and effort to vote.

If we make the grand assumption that every vote is counted and reported in an honest fashion and that no voter fraud takes place (already we're in the realm of magic and mysticism here), then we must also convince ourselves that the candidates we are offered are honest with us about their intentions. As outlandish as this thought experiment should be to any logically thinking human, you must remember we don't live in a society of logically thinking humans. We live among a people who can believe that a product sold to us in a television ad can be both "new" and "improved" at the same time. We live among a people who believe that by painting an item green and labeling it "earth friendly" this negates the damage done by obtaining the minerals used to make it's core components by strip mining a rain forest in Africa.


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