The truth, by Papa Joe

The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

Joseph Stalin 1879-1953

The consent of the governed

A column for which I took notes two years ago and failed to complete:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ...

This "governed" believes, as Henry David Thoreau said (and as Kirsten noted the other day in her must-read essay "Casting My Whole Vote"):

"I heartily accept the motto, — “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all” ..."

Voting is the process by which we are said to give our consent. All the more reason not to vote if you are fundamentally alarmed by the nature of your instituted government, especially if no one appears on the ballot who agrees with you.

The most profound summaries I know regarding government, beyond the pithy statement of Paine (and others) adapted by Thoreau, are these: "Government should defend our shores and deliver the mail and otherwise stay the hell out of my life" (former Wisconsin governor Lee Dreyfus) and "Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem" (former president Ronald Reagan).

In contemporary times, one group of candidates has campaigned on such proposals as a single-payer health care system with government as the single payer and therefore (since Dreyfus' golden rule notes that "he who has the gold makes the rules") the arbiter of our health choices — no care for you if you smoke, eat too much, don't exercise regularly, etc.

Another group also wants the government dictating our life choices, only with a different emphasis — whom we may marry legally, for example. And both groups embrace this government's alleged right to send troops around the world to "protect our interests."

My perception of freedom is that what people do with their minds, bodies and property is their own business as long as they don't infringe on others' free use of their minds, bodies and property.

No one on the ballot speaks for freedom in these terms. "Lesser of two evils?" Surely you jest; the differences between these two opponents of liberty are negligible in the end. I am effectively disenfranchised. Therefore, I withdraw my consent and will not vote.

Politics is not the answer

As if to confirm my second thoughts comes the essay "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss" by Sheldon Richman. Samples:

Politics is more like show-biz -- specifically, melodrama and soap opera -- than anything else. And people behave differently in the political realm than they do in the marketplace. (When was the last time you chose a car dealership because the salesman choked back tears on the thought he was losing your business?) ...

The "free-enterprise approach" to medicine, to judge by this campaign, is to tinker with the existing state-riddled system in order to create "incentives" for private insurance companies to do what the politicians want them to do. That's the supposed alternative to proposals for taking the profit out of medical insurance. It's a bad joke. No one points out that the politicians have imposed so many regulations and mandates and taken over so much of the financing, that there is barely a medical marketplace left ...

For six decades the guiding lights at FEE [Foundation for Economic Education] have understood that at best politics is the trailing, not the leading, edge of social change. Until a critical mass of people understand that liberty is moral and practical, and demand that the state back off, the politicians will continue to give them shoddy theater instead of respect.

On second thought ...

... you have to wonder what's the point of voting if The Powers That Be don't plan to count your vote.

The general consensus among reporters, editors and political insiders that Paul will not win and therefore deserves little or no coverage - combined with incidents such as the disappearance of 31 votes for Paul in Sutton, N.H. (would that error have been found and corrected if the total hadn't originally been reported as zero?) tends to dampen what little enthusiasm I had worked up for one last trip to the local polling place.

A fascinating new site called CheckTheVotes.com raises some chilling questions about what's going on out there. It turns out that when votes were filled out by the voter's hand in New Hampshire, Barack Obama outpolled Hillary Clinton by 38-35 percent - but when voters used machines (with no legitimate paper trail), Clinton had a 40-36 percent advantage. The result was a 39-37 percent Clinton victory that went against every pre-election poll. You have to wonder who programmed the voting machines, and how.

Here is the Democratic breakdown, and here is the Republican breakdown, where Ron Paul again nudged past Giuliani among the paper votes.

Joseph Stalin famously said, "He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything." In increasingly Stalinist America, Obama and Paul voters may just be S.O.L.

Why I will vote in the Republican primary

I have sworn off voting. At best it's a symbolic exercise, at worst a condoning of the use of force and the throttling of freedom. But I now feel compelled to participate in this symbolic act one last time, and here are two minutes that summarize why.