Quick survey:
Who would you vote for in the 2012 presidential election given these choices (respond to all three hypothetical scenarios please).
Hypothetical situation 1:
(a) Barack Obama (b) Newt Gingrich (c) Neither
Hypothetical situation 2:
(a) Barack Obama (b) Ron Paul (c) Neither
Hypothetical situation 3:
(a) Barack Obama (b) Paul Ryan (c) Neither
[Edited for clarity]
I think I’d vote for neither, though in the second I would try and spread Ron Paul’s message. Thats where things really matter: the message. The office will be of little use. I’d also rather crap a brick sideways than ever vote for Newt Gingrich.
So, just to be clear, you would vote (c) for all three options?
Newt Gingrich
Ron Paul
Paul Ryan
Obama, in all cases. Let the collapse of the dollar be under his administration, not under Paul’s, where MSM spindoctors can blame Paul’s free market advocacy. And the Republicans have already been thoroughly discredited by Bush, no need to grant power to another faux “reformer” like Gingrich or Ryan.
Correct.
1 - neither
2- Ron Paul, just to watch the reaction of the statists (Obama would win, of course, because it can be no other way, they haven’t completely destroyed the economy yet, but they are now making good progress)
3-neither (don’t know enough about Paul Ryan, I tried to get through his Roadmap 2.0, but I don’t see that he wants to end the Fed. RP is the only acceptable member of Congress. Unless a member of Congress wants to abolish the income tax, end the Fed, end imperial expansion, and cut Federal spending by 90%, then there is no use in voting for any of them.)
Esuric, I’m curious, why do you ask? What do you expect to learn from this survey?
C.
B.
C.
I hate the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Their like PBS in America.
But yeah, C.B.C for me as well.
Voting is compulsory where I am.
Voting only encourages them.
They seem pretty content with apathy, which is how they would translate the ‘non voters’.
The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (by Étienne de La Boétie)
Haha… yes. We’re talking tactics / strategy though, and the above doesn’t deal with the issue at hand at all. (“voting”)
This does however;
…
"Since a principled non-voter sends a message, we must count them and recognize the message they are sending as well. The non-voters need to hold their own “election” by starting a “League of Non-voters” and explain their principled reasons for opting out of this charade of the presidential elective process. They just might get a bigger membership than anyone would guess.
Write-in votes should not be discouraged, but the electoral officials must be held accountable and make sure the votes are counted. But one must not be naïve and believe that under today’s circumstances one has a chance of accomplishing much by a write-in campaign.
The strongest message can be sent by rejecting the two-party system, which in reality is a one-party system with no possible chance for the changes to occur which are necessary to solve our economic and foreign policy problems. This can be accomplished by voting for one of the non-establishment principled candidates—Baldwin, Barr, McKinney, Nader, and possibly others. (listed alphabetically)
Yes, these individuals do have strong philosophic disagreements on various issues, but they all stand for challenging the status quo—those special interest who control our federal government. And because of this, on the big issues of war, civil liberties, deficits, and the Federal Reserve they have much in common. People will waste their vote in voting for the lesser of two evils. That can’t be stopped overnight, but for us to have an impact we must maximize the total votes of those rejecting the two major candidates.
For me, though, my advice—for what it’s worth—is to vote! Reject the two candidates who demand perpetuation of the status quo and pick one of the alternatives that you have the greatest affinity to, based on the other issues.
A huge vote for those running on principle will be a lot more valuable by sending a message that we’ve had enough and want real change than wasting one’s vote on a supposed lesser of two evils." - Ron Paul, address to National Press Club
Other than that - I go with Spooner, Rothbard & Block.
Personally, if they are principled and essentially anti-state, anti-war, pro-market, pro-freedom (Ron Paul) they get my vote and support. If they are Bobb Barr or anyone else, they don’t.
I have seen some dumb lefties think this is a good idea. I think that at least some leftists are like Jehovah’s Witnesses in their absurd cultist mindset towards government, especially “democracy”.
The arguments generally go along the lines of;
Edit:
The Parliamentary Library has released a research brief on compulsory voting. Australia has been using compulsory voting since 1924, when it was introduced as a private members bill, after some parliamentarians were shocked at the lack of turnout to an election. Compulsory voting is a bit of a misnomer though, it is more accurately compulsory attendance at an electoral booth on election day. Due to the amazing Australian innovation of the secret ballot, informal votes are impossible to punish. Informal voting tends to make up about five percent of the voting population. Despite there being Compulsory Voting, turnout is never one hundred percent anyway, the Northern Territory just gets over the ninety percent hump.
By the way, guess what they also did - they TAX the votes. If your party gets over 4% of the votes, you get like $.2 per vote. They end up with like $14million each, per major party after the election. (May not seem like much, but it is outrageous).
Here are some more “pros”:
The Pros of Compulsory Voting
The paper mentions that many of the pros take a view of it giving benefits to Australian society. Some of the advantages of compulsory voting;
[:|]
Rothbard on Boetie:
La Boétie’s Discourse has a vital importance for the modern reader – an importance that goes beyond the sheer pleasure of reading a great and seminal work on political philosophy, or, for the libertarian, of reading the first libertarian political philosopher in the Western world. For La Boétie speaks most sharply to the problem which all libertarians – indeed, all opponents of despotism – find particularly difficult: the problem of strategy. Facing the devastating and seemingly overwhelming power of the modem State, how can a free and very different world be brought about? How in the world can we get from here to there, from a world of tyranny to a world of freedom? Precisely because of his abstract and timeless methodology, La Boétie offers vital insights into this eternal problem.
In the first place, La Boétie’s insight that any State, no matter how ruthless and despotic, rests in the long run on the consent of the majority of the public, has not yet been absorbed into the consciousness of intellectuals opposed to State despotism. Notice, for example, how many anti-Communists write about Communist rule as if it were solely terror imposed from above on the angry and discontented masses. Many of the errors of American foreign policy have stemmed from the idea that the majority of the population of a country can never accept and believe in Communist ideas, which must therefore be imposed by either a small clique or by outside agents from existing Communist countries. In modern political thought, only the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises has sufficiently stressed the fact that all governments must rest on majority consent.
Since despotic rule is against the interests of the bulk of the population, how then does this consent come about? Again, La Boétie highlights the point that this consent is engineered, largely by propaganda beamed at the populace by the rulers and their intellectual apologists. The devices – of bread and circuses, of ideological mystification – that rulers today use to gull the masses and gain their consent, remain the same as in La Boétie’s days. The only difference is the enormous increase in the use of specialized intellectuals in the service of the rulers. But in this case, the primary task of opponents of modem tyranny is an educational one: to awaken the public to this process, to demystify and desanctify the State apparatus. Furthermore, La Boétie’s analysis both of the engineering of consent and of the role played by bureaucrats and other economic interests that benefit from the State, highlights another critical problem which many modem opponents of statism have failed to recognize: that the problem of strategy is not simply one of educating the public about the “errors” committed by the government. For much of what the State does is not an error at all from its own point of view, but a means of maximizing its power, influence, and income. We have to realize that we are facing a mighty engine of power and economic exploitation, and therefore that, at the very least, libertarian education of the public must include an exposé of this exploitation, and of the economic interests and intellectual apologists who benefit from State rule. By confining themselves to analysis of alleged intellectual “errors,” opponents of government intervention have rendered themselves ineffective. For one thing, they have been beaming their counter-propaganda at a public which does not have the equipment or the interest to follow the complex analyses of error, and which can therefore easily be rebamboozled by the experts in the employ of the State. Those experts, too, must be desanctified, and again La Boétie strengthens us in the necessity of such desanctification.
The libertarian theorist Lysander Spooner, writing over four hundred years after La Boétie, propounded the similar view that the supporters of government consisted largely of “dupes” and “knaves”:
The ostensible supporters of the Constitution, like the ostensible supporters of most other governments, are made up of three classes, viz.: 1. Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see in the government an instrument which they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth. 2. Dupes – a large class, no doubt – each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a “free man,” a “sovereign”; that this is a “free government”; “a government of equal rights,” “the best government on earth,” and such like absurdities. 3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change.[60]
The prime task of education, then, is not simply abstract insight into governmental “errors” in advancing the general welfare, but debamboozling the public on the entire nature and procedures of the despotic State. In that task, La Boétie also speaks to us in his stress on the importance of a perceptive, vanguard elite of libertarian and anti-statist intellectuals. The role of this “cadre” – to grasp the essence of statism and to desanctify the State in the eyes and minds of the rest of the population – is crucial to the potential success of any movement to bring about a free society. It becomes, therefore, a prime libertarian task to discover, coalesce, nurture, and advance its cadre – a task of which all too many libertarians remain completely ignorant. For no amount of oppression or misery will lead to a successful movement for freedom unless such a cadre exists and is able to educate and rally the intellectuals and the general public.
And in the discourse Boetie mentions tyrants that arise from democratic means.
C,C,C - good luck Ron!
Gingrich, RP, Paul Ryan. I’d prefer Paul Ryan over the rest though for practical reasons and because I think my views are more in line with Ryan than RP.
Haha, thanks for the quote - but it is unnecessary & irrelevant.
“Voting only encourages them. [politicians]”
“They [politicians] seem pretty content with apathy, which is how they would translate the ‘non voters’.”
“The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude”
“Haha… yes. We’re talking tactics / strategy though, and the above doesn’t deal with the issue at hand at all. (“voting”)”
Yeah and where does it explicitly deal with the tactics / issues of voting as part / concept of strategy?
It doesn’t. Here is something that does:
NEW BANNER: Some libertarians have recommended anti-voting activities during the 1972 election. Do you agree with this tactic?
ROTHBARD: I’m interested to talk about that. This is the classical anarchist position, there is no doubt about that. The classical anarchist position is that nobody should vote, because if you vote you are participating in a state apparatus. Or if you do vote you should write in your own name, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with this tactic in the sense that if there really were a nationwide movement – if five million people, let’s say, pledged not to vote. I think it would be very useful. On the other hand, I don’t think voting is a real problem. I don’t think it’s immoral to vote, in contrast to the anti-voting people.
Lysander Spooner, the patron saint of individualist anarchism, had a very effective attack on this idea. The thing is, if you really believe that by voting you are giving your sanction to the state, then you see you are really adopting the democratic theorist’s position. You would be adopting the position of the democratic enemy, so to speak, who says that the state is really voluntary because the masses are supporting it by participating in elections. In other words, you’re really the other side of the coin of supporting the policy of democracy – that the public is really behind it and that it is all voluntary. And so the anti-voting people are really saying the same thing.
I don’t think this is true, because as Spooner said, people are being placed in a coercive position. They are surrounded by a coercive system; they are surrounded by the state. The state, however, allows you a limited choice – there’s no question about the fact that the choice is limited. Since you are in this coercive situation, there is no reason why you shouldn’t try to make use of it if you think it will make a difference to your liberty or possessions. So by voting you can’t say that this is a moral choice, a fully voluntary choice, on the part of the public. It’s not a fully voluntary situation. It’s a situation where you are surrounded by the whole state which you can’t vote out of existence. For example, we can’t vote the Presidency out of existence – unfortunately, it would be great if we could – but since we can’t why not make use of the vote if there is a difference at all between the two people. And it is almost inevitable that there will be a difference, incidentally, because just praxeologically or in a natural law sense, every two persons or every two groups of people will be slightly different, at least. So in that case why not make use of it. I don’t see that it’s immoral to participate in the election provided that you go into it with your eyes open – provided that you don’t think that either Nixon or Muskie is the greatest libertarian since Richard Cobden! – which many people, of course, talk themselves into before they go out and vote,
The second part of my answer is that I don’t think that voting is really the question. I really don’t care about whether people vote or not. To me the important thing is, who do you support. Who do you hope will win the election? You can be a non-voter and say “I don’t want to sanction the state” and not vote, but on election night who do you hope the rest of the voters, the rest of the suckers out there who are voting, who do you hope they’ll elect. And it’s important, because I think that there is a difference. The Presidency, unfortunately, is of extreme importance. It will be running or directing our lives greatly for four years. So, I see no reason why we shouldn’t endorse, or support, or attack one candidate more than the other candidate. I really don’t agree at all with the non-voting position in that sense, because the non-voter is not only saying we shouldn’t vote: he is also saying that we shouldn’t endorse anybody. Will Robert LeFevre, one of the spokesmen of the non-voting approach, will he deep in his heart on election night have any kind of preference at all as the votes come in. Will he cheer slightly or groan more as whoever wins? I don’t see how anybody could fail to have a preference, because it will affect all of us.
NEW BANNER: What other activities would you consider appropriate for libertarians during the election?
ROTHBARD: Well, as I tried to indicate – supporting candidates. I think there will be two main groups of libertarians this year. One group will be the non-voting group. The other group will be the Dump Nixon group of which I am an enthusiastic member. I almost take the position – anybody but Nixon. Dump him! Punish him! Smash him! Retire him to the private life which he so richly deserves. Get him out! I think there are all sorts of reasons why, if you want to pursue it, why Nixon should be dumped.
I do not support Ashbrook, but I think it is a very interesting development, because there is a possibility that the extremists in the conservative camp are hoping that Ashbrook will run on a 5th party ticket in the general election, which is the important thing. Because, if he runs in Ohio, California, etc., he can break Nixon by just getting 10 per cent of the conservative vote. That is, if he has the guts to run in a general election.
I support the voting aspect, but not the “endorse, or support, or attack one candidate more than the other candidate.” Since they are essentially the same and it is useless to pretend they are any different. - THIS however, was from Rothbard in a 1972 interview… and as such, there was no Libertarian Party - or Ron Paul, so I find it completely understandable this was considered an option.
NEW BANNER: David Nolan is forming a Libertarian Party. Its membership has indicated an interest in nominating you for its Presidential candidate in 1972. What is your response to this overture?
ROTHBARD: Ha, ha, ha (prolonged laughter). I really don’t think, as lovable as third parties are, that a libertarian party at this stage of our development is anything but foolhardy. There are just not that many libertarians yet. There’s no finances, there’s no people, there’s nothing. Maybe eventually we will have a libertarian political party.
NEW BANNER: What would be the purpose of a libertarian party?
ROTHBARD: I think if there were a libertarian party – and I don’t want to make it seem as if this is a realistic thing at this time – if there ever were a strong libertarian party it could do several things. Tactically, we could have a balance of power. Even better as an educational weapon. If we had ten guys in Congress, let’s say, each of whom are constantly agitating for libertarian purposes – voting against the budget, etc., I think it would be very useful.
Also, we have a long-range problem which none of us has ever really grappled with to any extent. That is, how do we finally establish a libertarian society? Obviously ideas are a key thing. First off you have to persuade a lot of people to be anarchists – anarcho-capitalists. But then what? What is the next step? You certainly don’t have to convince the majority of the public, because most of the public will follow anything that happens. You obviously have to have a large minority. How do we then implement this? This is the power problem. As I’ve expressed this in other places, the government is not going to resign. We are not going to have a situation where Nixon reads Human Action, Atlas Shrugged, or Man, Economy and State and says “By God, they’re right. I’m quitting!” I’m not denying the philosophical possibility that this might happen, but strategically it’s very low on the probability scale. As the Marxists put it, no ruling class has ever voluntarily surrendered its power. There has to be an effort to deal with the problem of how to get these guys off our backs. So, if you really have a dedicated group in Congress or the Senate, you can start voting measures down or whatever. But I don’t think this is the only way. I think maybe there will be civil disobedience where the public will start not paying taxes or something like that. If you look at it, there are several possible alternatives in dismantling the state. There is violent revolution, there is non-violent civil disobedience and there is the political action method. I don’t know which of these will be successful. It’s really a tactical question which you can’t really predict in advance, it seems to me that it would be foolhardy to give up any particular arm of this.
It’s incumbent upon people to come up with some sort of strategic perspective to dismantle the state. For example, Bob LeFevre somehow works it out that it’s almost impossible to get rid of the state – from his own point of view. He is against violent revolution – okay, now that is a very respectable position; he’s also against voting; he’s against political parties – it becomes very difficult to really see how one can get to the state at all with this kind of procedure. I don’t see why we should give up something like political parties. It might be a route eventually to dismantling the state or helping to dismantle it.
He went on to write at length about strategy in many places elsewhere. This is kind of a glimpse into that before hand.