I know that Rothbard said that he didn’t favor giving women the privelege to vote. Does he make a good point, in your opinion, or should everyone be allowed to vote regardless of their race, religion, sex, gender, ethnicity, etc.?
I personally think that the state has grown in power, in part, because we have centralized voting policy. If there has to be a state, then it should be as decentralized as possible, and should never include direct election of leaders not at the local level.
I’ve come to be more pro-open borders, but at the same time I do fear if a lot of non-citizens were to vote, then they’d vote authoritarian even more than the citizen population.
I’ve heard Hoppe talk about how if we extended the vote to children, candidates would start calling for later curfews, subsidized toys, and a right to slurpees. Didn’t prohibition coincide with women’s right to vote?
There’s no principle for why some should be allowed and some shouldn’t - the principle is that no one should - but consider that the political sphere will expand the more people there are contesting their interests politically, so it would make sense to oppose the expansion of what is already an illegitimate political machine.
Yes, and that’s not all… Even FDR saw that prohibition was a bad idea. The welfare state itself by-and-large coincides with women’s right to vote.
It seems like a natural function within groups of people, at least forms of it. And in some cases a down right good and sensible way to resolve some issues. Either way, it is probably here to stay in some form or another, so one must acknowledge that fact and move on.
It would “work best” (by which I mean, what most sociologists, politicians, and economists say would be a desirable circumstance generally speaking) for people as a whole the more they were tied to their material surroundings and the consequences of their actions. This is obviously not going to happen in a highly centralized bureaucratic state that can get by talking about vague and quasi nonsense, and use “buzz words” that massive amounts of people can vote on.
It is the system in place that allows for gibberish and a departure from material reality on a grand scale that is more important to pay attention to, than various methods which can be used in conflict - resolution in social groups.
The founding fathers were on the right track by limiting voting to property owners – in other words, to productive people who have a vested interest in protecting property rights. Today, I think it makes more sense to limit voting to people who either have a job or are self-employed, and who have never been convicted of a felony or held a job with the government or one of its contractors.
The idea is to try to short-circuit a number of serious conflicts of interest. People should be strongly discouraged from trying to vote to take money or propery away from others.
Also if you are ever in a situation where people get together to vote on something, and then proceed to vote on something. And than you say they “ought not” do that, you are thinking wrongly.
I gather that we’re not talking about co-owners voting on how to dispose of jointly-held property, or friends ‘voting’ on what to have for dinner.
In these situations, ‘voting’ does not magically change the moral nature of the individual actions taking place. A single owner can unilaterally dispose of his property. A single diner can typically choose what he wants to eat from what is offered to him. ‘Voting’ is just a mechanism to allow for the consensual legal fiction of co-ownership in the first place, and to allow coordination and subordination of a relatively less important preference (what to have for dinner) to a preeminent preference (having dinner with friends) in the second situation.
Yes, we will always have this kind of voting, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
“Political voting” is not the same thing. Voting in political elections has the putative effect of magically transforming unethical actions into ethical ones by force of ritual procedure alone. The climax of Murder on The Orient Express is a good metaphor for political voting. Everyone is implicated in the crime, so no one can point the finger.
The expansion of the democratic franchise is a one-way street. You don’t make it smaller. It gets bigger, all the time, as previously disenfranchised groups crave to wield the knife and draw some blood of their own. Really, trying to “discourage” people from using the vote to commit crimes is like trying to discourage someone from using heroin more than once every two weeks.
There’s no point to this criminal mechanism. Legitimate decisions don’t need to be made politically. By allowing this fiction of supreme collective ownership above all private ownership, you’re just asking for trouble.
“Political voting” is not the same thing. Voting in political elections has the putative effect of magically transforming unethical actions into ethical ones by force of ritual procedure alone. The climax of Murder on The Orient Express is a good metaphor for political voting. Everyone is implicated in the crime, so no one can point the finger.
Three things to think about:
This may very well be, at least in some form, the desired / inevitable sociological and psychological state of mind for most people. Yes, this can change over time. But the reality is now is not that time. It makes sense to me if I want to act in self interest, get what I want for as little as possible, and take little blame while having the ability to cut down any one individual lording anything over me; be it wealth or political power. I would imagine this sentiment would be even more ingrained in me if I was in a part of the world(such as The West) where I have no “higher wealth” societies to compare the pitfalls of these actions to. In other words there would be nothing for me to strive for, no model.
If you are ever in a situation, no matter how fair or just you think it is: where people realize that they have the power to group together and take your stuff (via voting or any other method), you have messed up in your calculations and are wrong to call them wrong.
A society of 100,000 and good affluent custom will probably have a more concrete view of it’s material surroundings than an imperial bureaucratic centralized democracy of 350,000,000. This is probably just the nature of things.
Yes, exactly. Democracy these days is a justification for statism. It used to be the more liberal option, but when the alternative is individual liberty democracy is the authoritarian alternative. When people go on about how democracy makes anything sacrosanct, ask them whether they think that the majority of people in their street should be allowed to have a vote and take their stuff.
Voting or not, the ethics of all actions will be decided by the (customs and subjective valuations of the) majority anyway. There’s no escaping from it. The only solution is to pick the majority that surrounds you wisely.
That’s fine, you don’t have to go any further than people’s preferences. No one likes being stolen from or killed or kidnapped. The food you buy is also a subjective economic preference, but I bet you don’t eat gravel and cat droppings.
You know, something is only ever “subjective” insofar as humans vary.
Decision by majority vote only works for small groups where there is a meaningfully non-zero probability that an individual vote will be the deciding vote. How small? Probably less than 1,000 and certainly less than 10,000.
But the problem isn’t the voting system. The problem is that property is taken from private hands and placed into the public purse where it ultimately becomes the property of politically enterprising thugs. Today, this process is justified by welfarism and other tugs on the collective heartstrings but the money transferred from the productive to the unproductive in the form of welfare is merely a cover for the true purpose of the State which is to transfer property from the productive class to the Elite parasitic class - the wealthy and powerful crime lords who are our rulers.
This transfer is always inherently immoral but it can be done in better and worse ways. I believe the least destructive way to tax is for the government to perform a random lottery and take half of all property which it can locate belonging to the unfortunates whose names were drawn. No measure taken to conceal or hide one’s assets would be illegal. Tax losses, then, can be insured against (getting taxed would be like being hit by a natural disaster) and the government’s revenues would be limited by the measures to which insurers will go to hide their clients’ assets. The more avaricious the government’s revenues (the more names it draws in the lottery each year), the more worthwhile it is to insure against tax losses which would drive insurers to invest in ever more elaborate methods of hiding their clients’ assets. There are a few more caveats, such as the government has to refrain from monopolizing, subsidizing or regulating any industry (including law and security).
Part of the reason a “Libertania” has never come into being is because governments tax and subsidize the production of armies which are then used to conquer territories that do not tax and subsidize an army to keep out the subsidized armies of other governments. Hence, taxation is everywhere inevitable if it is anywhere tolerated. I think the tax system listed above might be a good model for a city-state (think Singapore) to adopt in order to make a move towards a more libertarian society. The government would be maintaining its tax base and, hence, would be able to subsidize its army to keep out the subsidized armies of other governments yet it would be doing so in a way that minimizes the destructive effects of government revenuing on the economy. This would give a territory that adopted this system an advantage vis-a-vis all other governments in the manner described by Hoppe whereby the more liberal societies tend to become home to the most aggressive governments. In time, all other governments would be forced to adopt a similar model. The last remaining step would be abolition of the monopoly on armed force.
There is a big difference between how voting should work and what people should be allowed to vote on. The latter is directly tied to the proper role of government. Voting by the public, though, should really be limited to electing representatives. Policy or law should never be something that the public directly votes on.
In fact, my vision is that there should be a small set of laws that are fixed by the constitution; it shouldn’t be possible for elected representatives to add new ones.
If one has to have voting, one should at least be allowed to sell his right to vote to whomever he likes. A tiny percentage of the population would than cast the vast majority of votes and we’d be back to oligarchic republics.
I don’t consider voting per se to be a problem, as it’s just a means for making decisions. What I do think is a problem is the plena potestas (Latin for “full power”) bestowed upon elected government representatives - this means there’s no (theoretical) limit to the set of issues they’re allowed to decide on. Combine this with legal positivism (“what those with power decree is what should be obeyed”) and you have a very dangerous situation IMO.
Thats not what legal positivism is; its the view that law is not necessarily made valid or invalid by morals or ethics. It is a positive (value free) approach to law and as such cannot say what should be obeyed outside of teleological terms (if you don’t want to go to jail, then you should obey the law).
Wikipedia says “law is a system of rules and guidelines, usually enforced through a set of institutions.” All that I would add to that is that law is created by men, whether through spontaneous order or king’s declaration.