|
It's Time to Vote, With Your Feet by
Joe Blow It’s
that time of year again. How do I know? My sample ballot and voter
information pamphlet just arrived in the mail. As soon as it entered my
apartment I threw it into the garbage pail where it will remain until
it’s taken out to the curb with the trash. A most fitting final
resting place, don’t you think? As
the pundits pontificate and the talking heads blabber, the State is
again doing what it always does: attempting to light a fire under a
decidedly unenthusiastic and largely non-voting public. Once again it is
attempting to convince gullible citizens that voting is not only still
tenable, but a sacred civic duty and the patriotic thing to do,
especially with another imminent undeclared war. Make no mistake about
it, there will soon be another war, but count me out. I want nothing to
do with hegemony and Empire whatsoever. I
recently came to my senses and made the transition from Libertarian to
paleo-libertarian anarchist. I made the moral decision to stop
supporting the illegitimate socialist State as much as possible.
Choosing not to vote was step #1. The
good news is that it’s easy, free, morally right, and totally an
individual decision. Ludwig von Mises would heartily approve. Only
individuals make decisions in the marketplace, and this is one of them.
Removing yourself from the political marketplace is not only morally
right, it is also spiritually and emotionally liberating. Highly
recommended. There’s no time like the present to join the growing body
of former voters who have abandoned the State’s support system of
feigned legitimacy. As
Election Day draws near again, it is prudent to briefly revisit a
libertarian classic, Frank Chodorov’s “Time
for Secession.” This influential piece appeared in Human Events
on October 15, 1952. As the 50th anniversary of this timeless
piece approaches, its message still rings true to those who will take
the time to read it. If
I were governor of a state, or even a legislator, I would put my weight
behind a secessionist movement; not secession from the Union, but
secession from Washington. I would do so exactly because I favor the
Union, as originally conceived and my advocacy of secession would be
based on the same reasoning that prompted initiation of the Union,
namely that divided authority is a good guarantee of freedom. This
will never happen today because individual states are too used to
sucking on the federal teat. The states, then, are out of the picture.
Instead, citizens who have made the conscious decision to abandon
politics (and the voting system that supports it) comprise the new
secessionist movement, albeit one still largely out of the public eye. The
first step I would take, if I were governor of a state, would be to
require every school child to become familiar with the history and
theory of what we call states’ rights, but which is really the
doctrine of home rule. For, it was precisely the fear of centralization,
such as we are now faced with, that prompted the Founding Fathers to
write that doctrine into our basic law. While
this makes for a great sound bite today, the truth of the matter is that
only lip service is paid to this ideal. The states long ago surrendered
their sovereignty by accepting federal funds for anything and
everything, making them lackeys of the federal State and frustrating the
intent of the Framers in the process. The
early American knew that freedom was nothing more than the absence of
external restraint on behavior; the government could not give you
freedom, it could only take it away. And he knew from experience, if not
from his reading, that when a government is detached from the governed
it invariably strives to take it away. Freedom, then, is in better case
when the effective government never gets beyond the purview of the town
hall meeting. This
utopian scheme was relegated to history books years ago, it isn’t even
taught in government schools anymore. And why should it be? It is
counterproductive to the welfare of the State as God, the real goal of
the socialists. …Political
science accepts as an axiom the monopolization of coercion by
government; it must have that monopoly, so the axiom runs, in order that
it may prevent the indiscriminate use of coercion by citizens. There is
no arguing with that point. But, when the individual is free to move
from one jurisdiction to another, a limit is put on the extent to which
the government may use its monopoly power. Government is held in
restraint by the fear of losing its taxpaying citizens, just as loss of
customers tends to keep other monopolies from getting too arrogant. Simply
reading the headlines will suffice to convince you that the State today
is struggling to maintain its stranglehold on unwilling taxpayers who
are questioning the validity of the 16th Amendment and often
are even willing to surrender their citizenship to escape the IRS and
its draconian taxation schemes. Socialistic
experiments did not originate with the New Deal; state governments had
their own laboratories, long before 1932. Many years ago I saw an idle
state-owned cement plant in South Dakota, and early in the depression a
Wisconsin law made it obligatory for restaurants to serve two ounces of
Wisconsin made cheese with every meal, whether the diner wanted it or
not. The platform of the Farm-Labor party, which sprang up around 1920,
and captured several states, was larded with socialism. However, every
state experiment in socialism failed simply because of the
constitutionally guaranteed freedom of movement for both labor and
capital across state lines. Federal socialism can be made to operate
somehow only because there is no escape from its constabulary. As
always, might makes right, but oddly only the federal government
is allowed to utter those words. Microsoft is a public scapegoat, yet
somehow Leviathan is blameless. The hypocrisy is blatant and incredible. If
for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and
state legislator to take a secessionist attitude; they were not elected
to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy. We
are well past that possibility since the states are indeed lackeys of
the federal bureaucracy. As such, Chodorov’s suggestion is much more
appropriate for individual citizens today than governors or state
legislators. There
is no end of trouble the states can give the centralizers by merely
refusing to cooperate. Such refusal would meet with popular acclaim if
it were supplemented with a campaign of education on the meaning of
states’ rights, in terms of human freedom. In fact, the educational
part of such a secessionist movement should be given first importance. If
you substitute citizens for states in the above paragraph,
you will understand where I am headed. Since the states have succumbed
to sucking on the federal teat, it is now up to individual citizens to
take the necessary actions that Chodorov suggests. He speaks of refusal
to cooperate with the federal State. It’s time to vote, but with your
feet instead of a ballot. And
those who are plumping for a "third party", because both
existing parties are centralist in character, would do well to nail to
their masthead this banner: Secession of the 48 states from Washington. Substitute 100 million citizens for 48 states above and there you go: the real third party. |
