Ed Bugos here. Jeff is en route from the Casey Research conference in Florida to Canada for the Saskatchewan Investment Conference and so I man the controls of the TDV ship today.
I am sure Jeff will have some comments on the big news of the day, the reported killing of Osama bin Laden. Until then, it is national election day here in Canada and I wanted to add to Jeff's commentary on Friday and hopefully persuade a few Canadians to abstain from the political process.
Don't vote. That is a right too. The objections to this idea typically fit into one of the following categories:
1) it is our duty – our forbearers and contemporaries have died for the right to vote
2) if you don't vote you can't complain about who is elected
3) if you don't vote you don't care
In practical terms it is irrelevant. Your vote does not count. How many times do we have to see politicians push unpopular legislation through to realize this. Unless you have influence over more than your vote, whatever you say at the ballot box is inconsequential – and this is most true where, like today, the options are all nearly the same…and you are simply voting for the lesser of evils. The one that, as someone once said, “charges you the least blackmail for leaving you alone”. It would be downright awful if our forbearers and contemporaries fought and died to uphold the right to vote. For as F.A. Harper wrote in contrasting freedom with democracy:
“Willis Ballinger's study of eight great democracies of the past — ancient Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, the First and Third Republics of France, Weimar Germany, and Italy — reveals… …that liberty perished peacefully by vote of the people in five of the eight countries” – http://mises.org/mobile/daily.aspx?Id=5173
As for not having the right to complain about who governs me without my consent? C'mon.
Not that we should run from our problems. In matters of politics one often can't.
But it need not be through the ballot box. One can exercise more influence with the stroke of a pen or by uploading a video these days…or even by changing just one person's mind one exercises more influence.
There is something intrinsically wrong with voting for something you don't fundamentally agree with just due to a strategy, like the lesser of evils – unless you can organize other votes around the same aim. But then you are trying to deal with the world's problems via political means – an avenue that has only corrupted the best of us.
So go out there and change the world by abstaining from the political process altogether.
Exercise your right not to vote. It is not a privilege (to vote)…it comes with no real perks.
Voting is at best a form of consent to whatever your rulers happen to be doing, which makes the voter the one who should not have the right to complain – especially the voter who voted in the winning party.
I'll leave it to George Carlin to basically state all of what I stated above, in a much wittier and more entertaining way:
