Why I Refuse To Vote

The most obvious thing that makes voluntaryism different from any other “political” philosophy is that it advocates NOT participating in politics at all. That means, among other things, NOT VOTING. While everyone else is frantically trying to “get out the vote” and convince everyone it is their civic duty to vote, voluntaryists proudly refuse to vote. No matter how many people accuse us of apathy or shirking our responsibility as “citizens” or letting the bad guys “win,” we know that ours is the moral position.

Some people argue against voting from the practical perspective. A simple look at the numbers makes it evident that one person’s vote cannot possibly influence the outcome of a national or statewide or even local election. You have a better chance of winning a lottery than making a difference in an election. Even if you spend a lot of time “campaigning” so you can get other people to vote with you, the odds are against you having any significant effect on the election. Voluntaryists agree with that logic but consider it a minor consideration.

Another practical argument against voting is that it takes far too long to learn enough about the candidates to make even a slightly informed decision about which candidates might do the things you would want them to do. Even if you don’t bother learning about the individual candidates and vote along party lines because you take it on faith that all the candidates will follow their party’s lead, finding out where each side stands on each issue is a daunting task. With only two or three parties to choose from, you can be sure that none of them agree with you 100 percent on every issue that might come up. That means that whoever you vote for is bound to do some things that you do NOT want them to do. The most common solution for that is to avoid getting any information about what your candidate does after being elected. Trust me; you don’t want to know.

An equally valid practical reason for not voting is the opportunity cost of whatever amount of time you have to spend on evaluating the candidates and their positions, determining the likelihood of them keeping their campaign promises (very unlikely), and going to the voting places on election day. With the fast pace of life today, there are a significant number of productive things you could accomplish in the same amount of time. Why would you want to spend time on things you can’t control when there are so many things in life that you can control?

However, voluntaryists do not base their decision to not vote on any of the “practical” reasons. It is mainly based on the moral reason. No matter who said it, George Washington, Kansas Senator John James Ingalls, or someone else, “government is force.” Every law that government passes is enforced by violence or the threat of violence.

Even something as innocuous as the law against driving your car with a broken taillight can result in you being legally killed, as happened to Philando Castile on July 6, 2016. Although Castile politely complied with every order given by the government employee who shot him to death with seven shots at close range, his killer was found “not guilty” of breaking any law.

There is a saying that the military is only good at “breaking things and killing people.” That is also true of the government in general. The government does a lot of things, like building infrastructure and providing “services” to various classes of people, that it claims could not be done by anyone else. It argues that people show they want the government to do everything it does by voting for representatives who vote to spend money to do all those things. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While it is true that there are lots of people who have been brainwashed to think the government is necessary for “public goods,” the fact is that free markets allow people to “vote” directly with their own money for everything they want. If people want something, entrepreneurs will always find a way to provide it for a profit, unless the government’s monopoly on legal violence and on any enterprise it chooses prevents them from doing so. For example, in 1844, Lysander Spooner proved that his private company, the American Letter Mail Company, could deliver the mail for almost half the cost of the US Post Office. Naturally, he was forced out of business by arrests and fines, which would have been called kidnapping and extortion if done by anyone other than the government.

Because the government doesn’t have to satisfy customers who pay voluntarily for what they want, it has no incentive to provide the best products and services at the best price. In fact, it has no way of knowing what the best products and services are or what people would be willing to pay for them. At the same time, the people have no way of knowing how much less expensive those goods and services would be if provided by competition on the free market.

What does that have to do with voting? People who understand the true nature of government and the evil it does must take a moral stance in dealing with it. It isn’t immoral to give a mugger your wallet to dissuade him from killing you, but it is immoral to participate in his crime by finding other victims for him. Acting as if he has done nothing wrong so that other people can’t see him as a criminal is immoral. Participating in the political process is a public way to enable the crimes and injustices of government. It is explicitly giving your consent to all of its actions in breaking things and killing people.

Also, voting gives you a vested interest in the outcome psychologically. No matter how much you tell yourself that you were just voting for the lesser of two evils, it has put you on the side of rooting for one of the evils. As if it were a game, your human nature makes you see only good in “your side” and only evil in the “other side.” If your guy “wins” the game… er, election, how can you then protest the evil he does as if you had no part in enabling him? If your guy “loses,” how do you avoid the rationalization that things would have been different if he had won?

There was a popular 1983 film called War Games in which a military super-computer almost starts World War III when a young hacker starts playing what he thinks is a game called Global Thermonuclear War with it. Disaster is averted only when the super-computer learns the concept of mutually assured destruction and tells its creator that nuclear war is “a strange game” in which “the only winning move is not to play.” Politics is the same kind of game. The only winning move is not to play.

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