RNVan,
May I suggest the following to add to your reading list?
Mises, The Last Knight of Liberalism
It’s 1,000 pages, just skim through it to get a sense of Mises life. You might want to ask yourself why conservatism does not embrace these ideas.
Your vote literally does not matter. Your vote literally doesn’t make “your voice heard.” And I’m not talking in some moralistic sense where “they” just won’t ever listen; no, I mean mathematically, your vote is actually negligible.
But the process of being involved in democratic politics and the way that it matters can vary from person to person and situation to situation does indeed matter. Example: the fact that I say that I will vote for or against position X and if the result ends up in position 1 over 2 I will do ___ as a consequence, the results can, will, and does matter from person to person, from situation to situation, and can affect and effect a differing amount of people. I can promise you that.
Moreover, a vote that “does not matter” can only “not matter” if X number of population is hit. Is the vote the same in the “pure” democracy of some small Hellenistic city-state vs a “pure” democracy of an EU or USA style population, I should think not.
Does anyone have statistics or some way to substantiate how non-voting is supposed to affect politics? I mean, if you don’t vote does that make people in power more or less likely to use their power -is not voting a check on gov. or is it a further empowerment?
T’would be interesting if there was a positive correlation between voting rates and expansion of, or corruption of government (and if there wasn’t. but that doesn’t prove my position )
A) Rational Ignorance makes effective voting essentially impossible.
See also Public Choice Theory
B) I disagree with it in principle. Voting is the practice of widescale falsely justified coercion. The act of voting is an attempted act of forcing your neighbor and community to involuntarily alter their behavior, in accordance with your own ignorance. It’s giving the power of the gun(coercion) to all of those rationally ignorant people out there, and expecting something good to come of it. We are taught that it’s a good thing, and that you are a good citizen if you participate in this massive cesspool of collective coercion.
C) The system undermines the free market, and the pricing mechanism. It took me a while to understand this but this is why I hate comparisons between a democracy and a market.
Can you undermine the price mechanism? What i’m saying is, won’t it still exist regardless of the economic system? (It may not be as efficient, etc)
Isn’t that what eventually crushed the USSR was that they thought the price mechanism was something we made up that they could change and control?
I believe, that if majority (or certaind whatever amount) of people didn’t vote, the government would pass a law of forced voting or something similar…
Correct, you cannot eliminate the function of the market, but you can alter or impair it’s behavior. IE prices would formulate differently had they otherwise been left alone. Otherwise we would never have things like business cycles and intervention would have no impact on the market. Get it?
Consider LvMi’s argument against full scale socialism.
It would be interesting, but correlation doesn’t prove causation.
That’s Australia. You can get into trouble if you exercise any political choice outside the establishment false chocies.
Many libertarians justify it as a second best, but my opinion on second bests is that as long as you choose them, you will never achieve a first best.
It all comes down to how radical the individual is in their passion to achieve a truly free society rather than a fundamentally unfree but superficially improved situation.
It also speaks to the political powerlessness people feel outside the system, and a lack (knowledge?) of other activist options. The internet is going to encourage more people to choose other activities than voting, and to choose outside the narrow A/B choices presented by the mainstream and establishment.
wow, this is insane. Didn’t know that… now reading Wiki and can’t believe. Well… this is Autralia, after all… I heard they tried to ban the internet or small women tits..
Exactly.
Australian gamers are actively fighting the government to be allowed to legally buy rated M games. Banning the internet wouldn’t suprise me.
That’s pretty insightful from an AE perspective. I mean, if you’re willing to prefer a second best society at the margin, then that’s what you’ll get as opposed to a truly free society.
Of course one can say “if wishes were fishes” but from my studies it seems that material objects (and political systems) seem to more and more come under the will power of people as long as said people take the time to study them -most dreams are at least theoretically possible.
bump
Does someone have a good link to a paper/essay on the practice of not voting? This link was provided above but it doesn’t work anymore. I’m writing a column and would like to have a few sources from which to gain different concrete perspectives. I haven’t found too many interesting ones online.
EDIT: Nevermind, I found it here.
Haha, that’s true. You always have to apologise for the awful person you voted for. 
Chloe thanks so much I will indeed do that.
I can’t believe not a single person has had the sense to quote George Carlin
In case anybody wants the thoughts of a pro-government kinda guy, here they are. I don’t vote because I don’t really see the utility in doing so, at the end of the day my vote is very unlikely to have any effect on the outcome between two political parties that aren’t all that far away from one another anyway. And I don’t think this is a particularly bad thing, the reality is that political parties will tend towards to median voter in a two party system. Even if there are more than two parties they’ll tend to do more or less that provided that the wingnuts balance one another out. That said, I don’t have any scorn for people that vote (unlike Carlin and no doubt a bunch of you) but if I want to express my political views its much easier just to put a like on Facebook.
For what it’s worth, the whole expected utility approach is just one voting strategy. If one were to use a minimax voting strategy then the whole voters paradox goes away and people are rationally voting.
Yes, mathematically, my vote alone is meaningless. But did you see how few votes were the difference in the Bush/Gore election? If 1m more people voted (not an unreasonable amount, 350m people in the country, only 30% vote [numbers based on rough guestimates]), it would have been a wildly different election.
So you’re basing your choices on statistical outliers? Look, if you go through all the elections, ever, in any modern state with a reasonable population in recorded history you’ll still only find a handfull that were decided by a single vote. By the way, here’s a fun little fact for proponents of the whole democratic values bullshit, in recent times where internet voting or mail voting has been introduced there’s been a somewhat perverse effect. Presumably as the marginal cost of voting goes down the quantity increases. However… it turns out that voting turnout actually kinda decreases. Why? Because voting is actually a decent enough signalling mechanism, take away the cost of going to the polls and all of your signalling about democratic values becomes cheap talk. It’s like I said, even if there was a candidate I really supported, I still wouldn’t do more than put a like on Facebook.
vote for some radical, then when someone asks if u vote lie, that benefit is greater lol.