Individualist Voice - Some Thoughts on the 2004 Elections

Some Thoughts on the 2004 Elections
By Logan Feys

In any presidential election, your vote won’t matter. That is, it won’t matter in the sense that it will determine who the next President is. It may matter to you psychologically or emotionally, but even if you live in a battleground state, the chances of your state putting one candidate over the electoral top and the popular vote in that state coming down to one single vote (after all the recounts and legal battles) are much worse than the chances of you being struck by a meteorite (let alone an automobile) on your way to the polling booth.

So if your objective in voting is to influence the outcome of the election, you’re being irrational. It won’t happen.

But supposing that somehow you knew your vote this year would determine who occupies the White House, there’s no way of knowing which of the two establishment candidates to pick. There are no fundamental differences between them. They’re both big spending statists who want to be involved in virtually every aspect of our lives. Bush favors tax cuts, which is good, but refuses to curtail spending, which means they probably won’t last beyond another 4 years. Moreover, Bush is an evangelical Christian, which is scary. Kerry is less likely to infuse public policy with religion. That’s the closest thing to a fundamental difference between the two statists. Despite their posturing on foreign policy, both men believe essentially the same thing. They want a bigger military and believe it’s perfectly acceptable to force taxpayers to fund and soldiers to die in overseas wars and occupations to liberate oppressed people and remake their countries, even as this country’s borders remain wide open to potential terrorists. Both men would sooner commit hundreds of billions of our dollars toward tearing down the authoritarian structures of some other country’s government than eliminate a single layer of predatory bureaucracy here at home or free a single person, such as Martha Stewart, rotting away in a U.S. prison for supposed “crimes” against no one in particular. (U.S. citizens suffer from the highest per capita rate of imprisonment in the world, the most lawsuits, and an extortive IRS that is far more powerful now than when Clinton left office. The U.S. government’s nightmarishly gargantuan tax code imposes obligations on citizens that no absolute monarch from days gone by would have ever dreamed of trying to impose. But let’s hope our government makes Iraq a free country.)

I actually hope Kerry wins, because Bush is the incumbent and needs to be punished. If there is to ever be a groundswell of opposition to Big Government and a pro-freedom Republican candidate for President, they will only emerge as a reaction against with a Democrat, like Kerry, who was perceived to have gone too far. In reality, it's doubtful that Kerry can possibly outspend Bush. He'll be just as bad but perceived as much worse by the Right and, if the economy deteriorates, worse by most Americans, setting up an opportunity: A Republican candidate in 2008 who (unlike Bush) would be worth something and might actually lead a successful effort to dismantle significant components of the command-and-control regulatory leviathan.

But that's speculation. In the near term, we know Kerry won't make anything in this country substantially better. Which is why I won’t vote for him. A vote is a symbolic sanction of a candidate’s agenda. Voting for someone is tantamount to offering up your consent to be ruled by him. I may not be able to affect the outcome of the election, but I can at least, as a matter of principle, withhold my consent of what the government will do over the next 4 years. Once I consent to a politician’s rule over my life, I’ve lost my moral basis for opposing it.

How can you claim that it's wrong to be forced into Social Security or a violation of your rights to let IRS agents unilaterally go after you, your family, and your assets without due process when you've voted for someone (Bush or Kerry) who you know beforehand believes otherwise? How can you plead that you as an individual don't choose to accept the will of the majority when you've voluntarily joined in with it (assuming your lesser-of-two-evils candidate wins)? Why, for the sake of some imagined, non-existent influence on the outcome of the election, would you surrender your soul at the voting booth?

Politicians need our votes. It's like food to them. The more they get, the better and more legitimate they feel about the authority they wield over us. Which is why we should withhold our votes from them.

I could cast a protest vote for the Libertarian Michael Badnarik -- however nutty Libertarians may be -- knowing that that’s the only real means of expressing, in an official way, my desire for less federal authority over my life. I think it would be great if Badnarik got enough votes in New Mexico or some other toss-up state(s) to throw the election to Kerry. Not great, maybe, but the best scenario an advocate of freedom could realistically hope for this year. Republicans need to learn that Faith-Based Big Government is not a proper philosophy and not a winning philosophy, and if a secular, small government Libertarian costs Bush the election, that's the message they just might get.

Logan Feys is the founder of Individualist Voice, a web site dedicated to providing an independent, rational, and uncompromising voice for individual freedom in all areas of human existence.