Most People Shouldn’t Vote

By On August 15, 2012 · 6 Comments · In Book/Article Reviews, Current Events

When I see people with an “I Voted!” sticker, my first thought is, “Shame on you!”

See my post at the Princeton University Press blog here.

 

Tagged with:
 
  • Sean II

    Great post. I did have one problem with your jury analogy, though. In a criminal trial, you can find a single defendant guilty or not, so an informed juror at least has some chance of doing the right thing, if he could once escape from his own ignorance and lethargy.

    With voting that’s not the case. Given the grotesque package deals that have grown up in American politics, even the most conscientious person can’t vote for anything good without also voting for ten things that are hideously bad.

    Want gay marriage? Cool, you can get it! You just have to vote for this guy who also happens to be a total stooge of the prison guard’s union, and who wants to impose a massively regressive tax on energy.

    Want lower taxes instead? You can get them, simply by supporting a helmut-haired maniac who, eleven months from now, will introduce a joint resolution to authorize preemptive war against Iran.

    To make the analogy perfect you’d have to imagine this: Start with the same jury box you described in your post, only this time let there be six separate defendants on trial for totally unrelated offenses. The six defendants run the gamut from obviously guilty to almost certainly innocent, with various shades in between. That catch is that the jury can only hand down one verdict for all six defendants, so that any decision they reach will be repugnant and wrong.

    That’s what elections are like!

  • ThaomasH

    The paper seems self-defeating. Anyone who refrains from voting becasue he is aware of his ignorance or bias is likely to be someone who is well informed and impartial compared to those who do not refrain.

    • http://peacerequiresanarchy.wordpress.com/ PeaceRequiresAnarchy

      “Anyone who refrains from voting because he is aware of his ignorance or
      bias is likely to be someone who is well informed and impartial compared
      to those who do not refrain.”

      This suggests that some people (the people who are so ignorant as to be ignorant of their ignorance and bias) will vote anyway even though they shouldn’t. This is what tends to actually happen in elections.

      I am curious who the some people are that Brennan thinks don’t fall into the category of people who shouldn’t vote, that is if there are some people who don’t fall into that category. He doesn’t go as far as “All people shouldn’t vote”, but this could still be his view. Maybe he simply didn’t think he could successfully defend this stronger claim in such a short blog post and thus stuck with “most people shouldn’t vote.”

      I am curious what good Brennan thinks a well-informed, benevolent, impartial voter (or politician) could do. Can’t all politicians of monopolistic governments only do harm?

      As Roderick Long defines it: “Market Anarchism is the doctrine that the legislative, adjudicative and protective functions unjustly and inefficiently monopolised by the coercive State should be entirely turned over to the voluntary consensual forces of market society.”

      The key part to understand is the “unjustly… monopolised by the coercive State” part. Anything that the voters vote for (unless abolish of government is an option, but I don’t think it is) can only do harm because the politician’s position of power are unjust. The only just thing they can do is “throw the crown away” ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0HtWSlFCAQ ).

      • Jay_Z

        Not only would you have to throw the crown away, you would need to destroy it and prevent anyone from making another crown, ever. This would require coercion, quite a bit actually. An organized posse of government prevention. Now I’m sure there’s no way someone could figure out how to exploit THAT source of power…

        • http://peacerequiresanarchy.wordpress.com/ PeaceRequiresAnarchy

          I disagree that “this would require coercion.” For one, it is certainly a logical possibility that everyone could be persuaded to not violate peoples’ rights without using any coercion. This would make your claim false.

          But to go beyond this, I would say that not only is it possible to persuade people to get rid of the crown for good, but really the only way that the crown will ever go away for good is if we try to persuade people to get rid of the crown. No amount of force alone would work.

          For example, the crowned US Government people take away the freedom of all of the people in the geographic US to possess marijuana. In order to regain this freedom people must persuade the US government people to throw their crown away. The government must be persuaded to not put on a new crown at any point in the future. In other words they must be persuaded to stop violating peoples’ rights. They must be persuaded to stop harming peaceful people for possessing plants.

          No matter how much force people gathered to try to forcefully defend their right to possess the plant, if the US government people still *wanted* badly enough to violate peoples’ rights to possess the plant then they would be able to get rid of it at least some of the time. They would violate peoples’ rights and manage to cage or kill some people for possessing the plant. Even if you were to give a tank to each person who wished to possess the plant, the US government would still be able to have it’s crown–it would still be able to violate peoples’ rights.

          Thus, while defensive force and the threat of defensive force can deter rights violations, it can by no means by itself completely eliminate rights violations. Persuasion is absolutely necessary for that.

          Another example: If someone wanted to break into my house and kill me in my sleep they could. They absolutely could. I could spend my entire income on security to try to prevent this and it would still be a hopeless cause. If they wanted to kill me badly enough my defensive force alone would not be able to stop them. Locking the doors to me home and/or the threat of the person being locked up for life or executed for killing me can deter the person from killing me, but it remains that the main reason why they don’t kill me is because they don’t want to.

          This is how it is with the crown. You said, “This would require coercion, quite a bit actually.” The reality is that some defensive coercion could help, but it certainly doesn’t require coercion. What it does require is persuasion. For no matter how much force we have to defend ourselves, if we have failed to persuade people not to violate our rights then they will successfully manage to violate our rights to one degree or another.

          We don’t need guns to end the drug war. We don’t need guns to end any war. We don’t need guns to prevent people from letting us be free. We need only to persuade them to to stop fighting and let us be free.

          As Etienne de La Boetie wrote over 460 years ago: “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.” – Etienne de La Boetie, The Politics of Obedience ( https://mises.org/rothbard/boetie.pdf )

  • Yuval

    I see one strong and important disanalogy here between the jury and the voter: the juror decides somebody else’s fate. The voter is deciding on something that affects him/herself as well. Don’t I have a right to determine what happens to me whether I do so in ignorance or not?