“Self-Government”

     Just recently, I stumbled upon this:

     If those percentages still hold, then once again we’re in the mystifying position where an overwhelming portion of the country is demanding a policy change that Congress is resisting with every trick at its disposal. Senate Majority Leader John Thune says one thing but does another. Several GOP Senators have pledged to oppose the SAVE Act anyway, so even were the filibuster barrier to be overcome, it probably wouldn’t garner a majority of the votes.

     Of course, it’s not the first time. A strong majority wanted Obamacare repealed; remember what happened to that? A strong majority wants federal taxation and spending slashed, the troops brought home from wherever, and Jeffrey Epstein’s porno-pedo clients hanged. Given those precedents plus what we know about the dynamic of power, the probability is that the SAVE Act – i.e., the act that would require voters to present proof of citizenship at the polls – will die aborning.

     Yes, that will allow the Democrats to steal future elections with fraudulent and otherwise illegal votes. Likely it will also cost the Republican Party both Houses of Congress in November. But so what? This is “the system.” You know, that nebulous but supremely important thing Pam Bondi has told us will collapse if Epstein’s associates are indicted and tried. Apparently that’s what Pam Bondi has sworn to protect.

     It’s out in the open, now. “The system” will defend itself and its allegiants a outrance against the nation itself. There’s no pretense of anything else any longer. “Self-government” has been revealed as a joke, an empty notion that regime propagandists have foisted upon us to pacify us. We are ruled by men whose aims run counter to our well-being, and they don’t care who knows it.

     Don’t mind me, Gentle Reader. I’m having “one of those days.” I’m sure that I’ll soon be numb enough to get back into step with the thing. I’ll get back to writing these screeds as if the details matter. It’s just that for the moment, I can’t believe any of it.

     Have a nice day.

Get Your Outrage Faces On, Ladies

     ...because I’m about to tell you something you don’t want to hear.

     I’ve argued in the past – and I have not been refuted – that there is no “right” to vote. No such “right” can be justified on natural-law grounds. More, it is flatly contradicted by laws that limit who may vote and under what conditions – laws that have commanded near-universal acceptance since the earliest origins of voting.

     Today, our favorite Bookworm joins the fray:

     People are beginning to notice that the new leaders on the left are female. As a woman myself, some might think that I would find this a gratifying sign of progress in America. I don’t. I find it a worrisome thing because these women are driven by pure emotionalism, which has been channeled over the last few decades, especially at colleges, into a sense of perpetual victimhood and a deep hatred for America and her constitutionally-based institutions.

     My theory is that the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was a mistake. It wasn’t a mistake when women were given weren’t so angry but for the last few years, thanks to academia, and its evil spawn in K-12 education, the media, and Hollywood, women have marinated in anger. For those who embraced that toxic marinade and emerged as Democrats, Progressives, Democrat-Socialists, or whatever name they give their leftism, it’s destroyed them.

     These modern leftist women are not the people who got the vote 100 years ago. They have become a different creature altogether, and not the kind that should be trusted anywhere near power.

     Bookworm’s argument is a utilitarian one. Even if I find her logic questionable, it is qualitatively appropriate. If the franchise is an awarded privilege rather than a right – a position I think she and I commonly hold – then awarding or withholding it on utilitarian grounds is appropriate. It’s been treated that way for centuries. Indeed, it’s the only way to treat the matter.

     However, the question of what utilitarian grounds are appropriate remains to be addressed. Let us frame the question in Constitutional terms:

What basis for awarding the franchise would best serve the purposes set forth in the Constitution of the United States?

     We begin.

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     Let’s start from the Preamble to Constitution:

     We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

     (I went to some effort to preserve the links in the above. No, they don’t appear on the parchment of the original Constitution; the Founders’ grasp of HTML was exceedingly weak. All the same, please follow them.)

     While it was acknowledged that the preservation of the consent of the governed required that the officials of the United States should largely be chosen through an electoral process (NB: Not necessarily purely by popular vote, as was made plain in the segments concerning the election of federal Senators and of the President and Vice-President), it was also agreed that there had to be limits on the use of the vote: both as regards which citizens may vote and for what purposes the vote could be used. Imperative statements in the Constitution, both in its original text and as amended, are immune to repeal or modification by popular vote; they can only be addressed through the amendment procedure set out in Article V. This applies both to direct attempts to change the terms of the Constitution and to indirect attempts via popular referenda. The Constitution could not validly be deemed “the supreme Law of the Land” (Article VI) were its terms vulnerable to the franchise.

     Under the federalist conception of American government, the federal government’s powers were defined by the Constitution. The several states were expected to produce subsidiary constitutions, which in time all of them did. Again, the powers of the state governments were supposed to be defined by those charters. To define, as I have said before, is to limit: That which conforms to the terms of the definition is separated from that which is outside its terms – and in constitutional practice any powers other than those defined are reserved, as Amendment X plainly states.

     Hearkening back to the Preamble’s statement of purposes, it can credibly be argued that extensions of the franchise that have occurred since 1787 have been detrimental to those purposes. However, I would not limit us to the extension of the franchise to women as granted under Amendment XIX. I would go much, much further.

     The vote is a form of authority. Robert A. Heinlein has compared it to the Rods and the Axe of Roman heritage:

     Major Reid paused to touch the face of an old-fashioned watch, "reading" its hands. "The period is almost over and we have yet to determine the moral reason for our success in governing ourselves. Now continued success is never a matter of chance. Bear in mind that this is science, not wishful thinking; the universe is what it is, not what we want it to be. To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives—such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. Force, if you will! -- the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force."
     "But this universe consists of paired dualities. What is the converse of authority? Mr. Rico."
     He had picked one I could answer. "Responsibility, sir."
     "Applause. Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal -- else a balancing takes place as surely as current ‘flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history. The unique ‘poll tax' that we must pay was unheard of. No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead -- and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple."

     Applause, indeed. If the voter cannot be held responsible for his use of the franchise, he must not have it. But how could any republic enforce those terms upon millions of voters?

     The Founders decided to leave the problem to the state governments, each of which enacted requirements for wielding the franchise. As far as I can tell from my research, they arrived at a single solution.

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     The original conception of the franchise was that it should apply solely to persons with a substantial tie to the locale in which they live: i.e., the ownership of real property. It was wisely conceived and worked well, absent any laws against non-whites owning real property. Here’s the great Isabel Paterson on the subject:

     To form a true and workable federation, the component states must cede the attribute of sovereignty of the border. But they must retain a legitimate control over admission to the state's body politic, to preserve their political entities. This is the power to admit to the franchise. Race, color, or previous condition of servitude are irrelevant. They ought not to be considered disqualifications. The correct qualifications lie in local residence and allegiance and real property. Only in these requirements can a moral principle be found. If the franchise calls for qualification at all, it is clearly conditional, not absolute. So far as the conditions are practical, they must relate to the function of the instrument. The action is that of measured extension from a permanent base, so it must be attached to immovable local property. Liquid capital will not do. These qualifications are moral as well as material, being all within the competence of the individual; a responsible person can fulfill them by his own choice and efforts. But it is absolutely necessary that the power to designate qualifications should also be in the state. If the Federal government has power to fix or alter any particular, even negatively, it has the ultimate full power of fixing all requirements by particulars. And a defect running through the whole structure is much more grave than a localized error. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     Miss Paterson regarded federal interference in the states’ power to award or withhold the franchise as a supremely grave error. She notes in particular the pernicious effects of Amendment XVI:

     Interference in this manner is by decomposition. It was forty years before the decomposition of the bases became fully apparent; but it made the next attack possible, when a national function was nullified, by the income tax amendment. Previously no direct or personal tax could be laid except in proportion to the population. Then the action would be equated in every voter and representative. If a tax were proposed, each would know that he must pay a proportionate share; while if any region were to receive an extra share in expenditure (as in river or harbor works, etc.), its influence would be greatly outweighed by that of the other areas....But when the Federal government could mulct a wealthy state in taxes disproportionate to the population, to buy out a poor state by expenditures disproportionate to the population, the equation vanished. The mass-inertia veto was lost. (The weight, the interest, thereafter took effect in unbalance, as uncompartmented liquid ballast surging from side to side, dislocated mass.)

     [FWP: Note that Miss Paterson’s reasoning applies equally well to every form of income taxation, whether implemented at the federal, state, or any other level. But that’s a discussion for another time.]

     Reimplemented for the 21st Century, a franchise founded on the ownership of real property might work thus: your franchise is tied to the name on the receipt for your property taxes. If you paid property taxes on your residence during the current year, you’ll be mailed a ballot -- one ballot; otherwise, not. This would avoid all questions about the enfranchisement of men versus women, white versus black, and so forth, while simultaneously eliminating the voting power of the non-self-supporting and transients of every kind. It would also tend to exclude persons on welfare or other forms of government-provided support, as such persons are unlikely to own real property.

     Is it normally the case that the payer of residential property taxes is a man – i.e., a male human being? Why yes, it is. So what? If he were so inclined, he could give the ballot to his wife, his ten year old daughter, or his dog. The point is that the franchise has been limited to persons who have invested in the district and would therefore bear the consequences of any decisions made by its elected officials. Escaping those consequences would require him to change his residence, a protracted procedure fraught with several complexities and difficulties.

     I can see no valid arguments for the enfranchisement of persons without that substantial tie to the district which would be affected by their votes. As for persons who rent rather than buy their homes: Sorry, dude. You want a say in how things will be run around here? Buy some land. What’s that? You say you can’t afford it? Well, then we who have committed ourselves to the financial support of the district through our property taxes are indisposed to afford you any say in local affairs.

     I could go on, but I think I’ve established my position clearly enough. Let the arguments begin – and no slinging of insults, or I’ll put you on the banned list. Only evidence and reason will pass muster in the comments section here.

Franchise Fantasies

     In the course of a long life you’ll hear quite a lot of BS. Much of it is “relay BS,” of the “I heard that” or “People say” variety. Great are the tidal waves thereof, especially about persons or events in the news. However, an equally great amount is self-serving BS: the sort intended to get the listener to do something that would benefit the BSer. Political BS is obviously of that sort.

     Much political BS concerns the franchise, i.e., voting.

     A few years ago there was a series of “public service” pitches on the airwaves about “feeling the power” as you pull the lever in the voting booth. Now, as an engineer of much experience (to say nothing of my two extremely muscular cars), I have a considerable acquaintance with power. Power, when exerted, achieves something. It might not be what you wanted from it, but there will be a change.

     There’s precious little power in the vote. Great quantities of votes are cast in most elections, even local elections for minor offices. Yet only one candidate prevails; the others are cast into the darkness, where there is the weeping and gnashing of teeth. Whatever “power” there is in voting is thus diluted by the quantity of voters trying to exert it. Indeed, you’re more likely to wake up in Burkina Faso than you are to determine the outcome of an American election with your individual vote.

     And that’s a minor consideration compared to this one: When voters succeed in replacing Public Official A with Candidate B, what changes?

     In the usual case, even the complete displacement of a ruling regime by its opposition effects no changes of significance. There have been exceptions, of course; the election of Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrats’ takeover of both houses of Congress certainly inflicted a lot of changes on us. But exceptions, as it should not be necessary to state, are exceptional.

     In some ways, that continuity and stability is a good thing. Dramatic change in the legal / political environment usually forces dramatic changes upon private citizens. While such change is sometimes for the better in the long term, in the near term it always demands adjustment – effort. It disrupts the patterns of life, often including plans of long standing. That’s why Thomas Aquinas wrote passionately that instability in the law is itself a source of evil.

     But to return to the “power” aspect of it: there’s precious little to be had, especially when it comes to elections for federal offices. Millions of votes are cast in an election for President / Vice-president and United States Senator. Many thousands are cast in an election for a Congressman. Gubernatorial elections are almost as voluminous. So an individual’s vote must be regarded as of little consequence.

     It’s worse, of course, if your guy loses. Where’s the “power” then? Even notionally, what have you achieved other than casting a ballot?

     A great part of the reason for the Constitutional constraints on government, including the “checks and balances” aspects, is to mitigate the effects of an election. Yes, you might want most ardently to “turn the rascals out,” but the Constitution requires that Congress, the President, and the federal courts concur on any changes you hope will follow. Change can be rapid in “parliamentary” countries, where the party that dominates the legislature gets to choose the executive administration, but not here.

     So don’t be misled by the “Pull the lever and feel the power, America” pseudo public service pitches. There’s far more power in your ability to make decisions for yourself, to plot the course of your own affairs. It’s that power that citizens can, should, and must guard most jealously – particularly against the representations of demagogues about all the problems they’ll solve for you. In the usual case they’re lying, either about what they can actually achieve, or about their real intentions should you elevate them to office. When they’re not lying, the probability that they can deliver is less than the likelihood that you’ll find the consequences as pleasant as you hoped.

     Verbum sat sapienti.

Eliminating The Remains (UPDATED)

     A number of years ago – just after the first inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama, in fact – I wrote:

     To say that some public policy must not be changed is to say that it is right and necessary: right meaning "not a violation of the rights of the unconsenting," and necessary meaning "the costs, however measured, of dismantling it would be unacceptable." But to shout down those who disagree, or to manipulate elections to deny conservatives their fairly earned victories, is by liberals' own standards a denial of others' rights. Not only is this hypocrisy -- "we'll respect your right to disagree as long as you refrain from using it" -- it's a revelation of liberals' deep convictions about both rightness and practicality:

Liberal Conviction #1: Only liberals have rights.
Liberal Conviction #2: What advances the liberal vision is good regardless of its practical effects.

     ...Over the next four years, the "desiccated remains" of Americans' traditional freedom will come under ever more intense assault. This is guaranteed by liberals' assumption of their moral superiority and the steadily accumulating evidence against the beneficence and benevolence of liberal policies. Conservatives and libertarians must expect harsher and harsher attempts, both within and without the law, to silence them and to defraud them of victories at the polls. Violence will be involved more and more often as liberals' failures mount.

     What I did not foresee was that the real, all-stops-out effort to suppress conservatives’ freedom of expression and their exercise of the franchise in a fair election would follow the Obama Interregnum. Indeed, it’s much more intense today than it has ever been. Moreover, it’s ceased to be a covert undertaking. It’s poised for a “battle of the bulge” magnitude offensive. Here’s a bit of evidence:

     Terry Smith, a visiting professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, offers a different response in his new book, "Whitelash: Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box." Rather than excuse racist voters or try to figure out how to live with their choices, he argues that racist voting is not just immoral, but illegal. The government, Smith says, has the ability, and the responsibility, to address it....

     "When voters go to the booth, they're not expressing a mere personal preference," Smith told me. According to Smith, voters who pull the levers to harm black people are violating the Constitution. If the Constitution means that overt racist appeals undermine the legality of union elections, it stands to reason that they undermine the legality of other elections, as well.

     I submit that no deep analysis of this citation is required.

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     I’ve cited the following passage more than once, but in light of the material in the previous segment it is massively relevant yet again:

     [W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by the electoral process. We are urged to believe that so long as we can express our disagreement in words, we have our full rights to disagree. Now both freedom of speech and the electoral process are important to liberty, but alone they are only the desiccated remains of liberty. However vigorously we may argue against foreign aid, our substance is still drained away in never-to-be-repaid loans. Quite often, there is not even a candidate to vote for who holds views remotely like my own. To vent one's spleen against the graduated income tax may be healthy for the psyche, but one must still yield up his freedom of choice as to how his money will be spent when he pays it to the government. The voice of electors in government is not even proportioned to the tax contribution of individuals; thus, those who contribute more lose rather than gain by the "democratic process." A majority of voters may decide that property cannot be used in such and such ways, but the liberty of the individual is diminished just as much as in that regard as if a dictator had decreed it. Those who believe in the redistribution of wealth should be free to redistribute their own, but they are undoubtedly limiting the freedom of others when they vote to redistribute theirs.

     [Clarence Carson, The American Tradition]

     Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch will already be aware of the Left’s various sallies against free expression, especially as practiced on the World Wide Web. Those thrusts have succeeded to an ominous extent, so further pressure against the free expression of opinion from the Right may confidently be expected. The Left is unabashed about its aim to silence “hate speech,” by which it means any expression of opinion it dislikes. Couple that to the opinion of “Professor” Smith as expressed above that voting can and should be limited according to the Left’s assessment of the voters’ “racism.” Note that that opinion was provided to us by a major media corporation. What does all this tell us? What can it tell us, other than that the desiccated remains of Americans’ freedom are under an assault intended to be sweeping and permanent?

     Don’t wave it aside as harmless blather, unlikely ever to command any significant power. We once said that about the income tax, the welfare state, and the right to keep and bear arms. The danger is real and daily draws nearer. They who would rule over us in all things, absolutely and permanently, are measuring the remains of our freedom for its coffin.

     Spread the word.

     UPDATE: Here’s a bit more evidence of the Left’s intentions, in case you had any remaining doubts. I rest my case.

Rationality Versus Allegiance: A Comment On Voting Habits

     A rational army would run away. – Baron de Montesquieu

     What applies to armies applies with equal force to voters and voting blocs. We know from long experience that the majority of citizens don’t reach their political positions through rational analysis. Rather, they inherit them from their parents, or adopt them for social or commercial advantage, or wear them as persona masks intended to achieve some non-electoral effect.

     This is not the condemnation it might appear. A perfectly rational approach to voting would cause the overwhelming majority of persons to abstain from it. After all, what are the odds? How likely is it that my vote will decide any election? Add the notorious infidelity of politicians to their campaign promises, and just what is electoral victory really worth? So why not forget the electoral charade and choose one’s supposed politics on the basis of personal advantages available thereby?

     (Yes, yes, I know that many citizens refrain from voting. Some of them do so in keeping with the argument above. But the majority of non-voters abstain out of laziness or indifference. A poll of non-voters taken in the Seventies, which asked them “What would motivate you to go to the polls on Election Day?” a healthy plurality responded “A candidate worth voting for.” There’s a moral in there, somewhere.)

     However, there are influences at work other than rationality.

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     My thoughts this morning were stimulated by this statement by J. J. Sefton:

     Along with the myth of the blue wave being exploded, when you take into account how completely wrong the polls were in 2016, the nature of polling in general (that they are meant not to measure public opinion but to influence it) and the fact that the past 4 election cycles have seen the Democrats lose something like 1,200 seats at every level down to dog catcher, that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was the final rejection of Obamanism/Hillaryism, a 24-month economic miracle not seen in decades that underscores the abject failure of Democrat policies and personalities, the campaign of violence and intimidation of the Democrat-Media Complex against this President and those who elected him (Scalise, Kavanaugh, #MeToo, Mueller witch hunt), a series of special elections that were supposed to be the harbingers of Trump's downfall which saw only one or two Dems elected, the fact that Democrats who are struggling in red to purple states (and even some blue ones) are scrambling to cover their embrace of socialism and Joo-Hate as well as clamming up when it comes to amnesty and immigration - the optics of the staged migrant invasion alone are an absolute disaster for the Left - and guns (for the most part) and crucially the Trump factor and his ability to communicate directly with the people and in doing so make the Dems and media look like utter fools, it just makes absolutely zero sense to me that any sane, rational voter would abandon all of this and give a book of matches to a pyromaniac in an oil refinery by voting Democrat.

     Despite all that, it’s virtually certain that millions of Americans will vote for Democrats tomorrow, just as many already have in the early balloting. It’s not about what’s good for the country, or what would be in those voters’ best interests. It’s about allegiances they’re excessively reluctant to abandon.

     An old friend once said to me that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for a Republican without suffering a seizure. He’s black. He regards the Democrat Party as “his party,” unalterably and forever. When he goes to the polls he pulls the Democrat straight-ticket lever and walks away without a moment of thought or regret. Yet he’s fairly intelligent. He needn’t be told that the Democrats and the policies they’ve championed have harmed him and “his people.” He simply can’t bring himself to vote against them.

     Allegiances are like that.

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     The long-time partisan – i.e., he who has voted straight-ticket for many years – is as close to being politically unchangeable as a human being can come. Whatever his original reasons for choosing his party alignment, the persistence of that alignment over time has burdened him. The burden consists in this: the difficulty of admitting that his partisanry, if not all partisanry per se, was / is a mistake.

     No one likes to admit to error. “I was wrong” is one of the hardest of all English phrases to master. “I’ve been wrong for decades” is an order of magnitude worse. When the subject is politics, with the implication that the victories of one’s chosen party might have brought harm to millions, the conscience factor creeps in...and then, as Alexander Rose wrote in Pay The Two Dollars, most people would prefer to plead guilty to murder.

     The “rational” voter finds such an attitude incomprehensible. Wouldn’t it be better balm for one’s conscience to admit to error and resolve not to repeat it? This discounts the terrible aversion most of us have to accepting guilt, even when that guilt is widely shared. That Smith’s own vote didn’t “elect the bastards” by itself matters less than that Smith ratified the choice with his ballot.

     A similar attitude can be found among the doctrinaire anarchists. (The true anarchists, mind you; not the assholes that actually espouse socialism, syndicalism, or communism.) An anarchist rejects all government, regardless of its form. He feels that by voting, regardless of how his ballot is cast, he would ratify a system of government. It doesn’t matter that his vote can’t determine who will win or what policies will be followed; the act of voting is itself immoral, so he abstains. Neither does it matter that one party is far more inclined to expand the State than the other. His moral precepts forbid him to participate.

     We can expect to see millions of votes cast for Democrats tomorrow. Many of those who cast their ballots thus will suffer loss or harm due to Democrat policies and perfidies. Moreover, many of those voters are already aware that that would be the case in the event of a Democrat victory. Nevertheless, they will go to the polls and pull the straight-ticket Democrat lever. Their allegiance is to the Democrat Party. They can’t even imagine renouncing it. And there is approximately nothing that anyone can do about it.

Ultra-Quickies: A Hypothetical Alteration To The Franchise

     Imagine, just for the sake of an interesting thought experiment, that instead of being an individual property, the vote were a family property. That is: the privilege of casting a vote in some election would apply to a recognized family, perhaps as registered with the local school district.

     That’s one vote. For the entire family. Not one for Dad, one for Mom, and one for each spratling over the age of eighteen.

Which member of the family, in your estimation, would be most likely to decide how that vote would be cast?

     Give your opinions in the comments.

What Freedom Is...And Isn’t

Michael Walsh has posted an interesting piece about the Left’s aversion to the late Robert A. Heinlein. It’s rather difficult to excerpt constructively, so I’ll simply exhort you to read it for yourself. My thoughts for the morning flow from the following comment to the piece:

Aargh! "Starship Troopers" is NOT "authoritarian"! Nor is the government depicted fascist. It explores the nature of duty and one way of trying to assure that the people who vote actually care about the nation. Every citizen in ST could vote, and every adult, regardless of race, sex, or economic status could become a citizen - if they cared enough to put in the service time required (and not just in the military, there were civilian jobs that qualified). One of Heinlein's subtle points was most people didn't want to!

I was reminded at once of Paul Verhoeven’s movie Starship Troopers, which, though colorful and entertaining, did violence to the book’s moral and political themes. But I was reminded even more strongly of two other works: Clarence Carson’s The American Tradition and Robert Nozick’s masterwork Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Dr. Carson, an underappreciated writer and thinker, had some incisive things to say about one of the most pernicious fetishes of “democracy:” the “right” to vote:

[W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by the electoral process. We are urged to believe that so long as we can express our disagreement in words, we have our full rights to disagree. Now both freedom of speech and the electoral process are important to liberty, but alone they are only the desiccated remains of liberty. However vigorously we may argue against foreign aid, our substance is still drained away in never-to-be-repaid loans. Quite often, there is not even a candidate to vote for who holds views remotely like my own. To vent one's spleen against the graduated income tax may be healthy for the psyche, but one must still yield up his freedom of choice as to how his money will be spent when he pays it to the government. The voice of electors in government is not even proportioned to the tax contribution of individuals; thus, those who contribute more lose rather than gain by the "democratic process." A majority of voters may decide that property cannot be used in such and such ways, but the liberty of the individual is diminished just as much as in that regard as if a dictator had decreed it. Those who believe in the redistribution of wealth should be free to redistribute their own, but they are undoubtedly limiting the freedom of others when they vote to redistribute theirs.

Professor Nozick sharpened Dr. Carson’s point still further in what he called “The Tale of the Slave:”

• There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master's whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.
• The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.
• The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.
• The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.
• The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.
• The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.

Let us pause in this sequence of cases to take stock. If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed monster can do this also.

• Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers.
• In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.)
• They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome.

The “sting in the tale” is Nozick’s concluding question: At what point in this sequence is it no longer the tale of a slave?

Ponder that for a moment.

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I wrote some time ago that there is no “right” to vote, that the vote itself is not an essential of freedom, and that certain conditions and qualifications should be imposed upon that privilege to render it less harmful to the Republic. That essay drew a lot of hostile commentary, mostly from persons who draw a check from the federal government and deem both that check and their “right” to vote as beyond morally legitimate criticism. Not all of them were idiots. Still, they were wrong then and they remain wrong today, for reasons Carson and Nozick make plain in the citations above.

Frederic Bastiat made the very same case in his 1850 pamphlet The Law:

A closer examination of the subject shows us the motive which causes the right of suffrage to be based upon the supposition of incapacity. The motive is that the elector or voter does not exercise this right for himself alone, but for everybody. The most extended elective system and the most restricted elective system are alike in this respect. They differ only in respect to what constitutes incapacity. It is not a difference of principle, but merely a difference of degree. If, as the republicans of our present-day Greek and Roman schools of thought pretend, the right of suffrage arrives with one's birth, it would be an injustice for adults to prevent women and children from voting. Why are they prevented? Because they are presumed to be incapable. And why is incapacity a motive for exclusion? Because it is not the voter alone who suffers the consequences of his vote; because each vote touches and affects everyone in the entire community; because the people in the community have a right to demand some safeguards concerning the acts upon which their welfare and existence depend.

I know what might be said in answer to this; what the objections might be. But this is not the place to exhaust a controversy of this nature. I wish merely to observe here that this controversy over universal suffrage (as well as most other political questions) which agitates, excites, and overthrows nations, would lose nearly all of its importance if the law had always been what it ought to be. In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

Under these circumstances, is it likely that the extent of the right to vote would endanger that supreme good, the public peace? Is it likely that the excluded classes would refuse to peaceably await the coming of their right to vote? Is it likely that those who had the right to vote would jealously defend their privilege? If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone's interest in the law would be the same. Is it not clear that, under these circumstances, those who voted could not inconvenience those who did not vote?

Bastiat was concerned with freedom. More, he was capable of distinguishing between a genuine right and a political privilege. Some years later, Louis Thiers said this about rights:

Either rights exist, or they do not exist. If they exist, they involve absolute consequences...Furthermore, if a right exists, it exists at every moment. It is absolute today, yesterday, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in summer as in winter, not when it pleases you to declare it in force.

Mind you, Thiers disagreed with Bastiat’s conception of genuine rights. That didn’t keep him from recognizing their nature.

---

Thomas Jefferson’s enumeration (in the Declaration of Independence) of our God-given rights flowed from a deeper conception: that of the individual as an autonomous being. He, and the many thinkers who preceded his formulation, realized that if rights exist, they cannot possibly contradict one another—that you cannot have a “right” that requires the abridgement of any “right” I possess. Your rights to your life, your liberty, and your property cannot and do not entitle you to infringe upon my rights to my life, my liberty, or my property. One who possesses those rights is wholly autonomous: i.e., he is both free to do as he wills (subject to the constraint that he not infringe upon others’ rights), and is responsible for the consequences of his decisions, actions, and inactions.

Quite a lot of persons recoil from this conception because of that trailing condition. (“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it!” – George Bernard Shaw) They demand to be “free” without the responsibilities that attach to freedom; they want others to shoulder the burdens they create. The obvious asymmetries and instabilities that arise from such a division of responsibility from freedom are much of what bedevils us today. Ralph Waldo Emerson was practically brutal on the subject:

The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem - how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual bright, etc. from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end....We can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow.

Heinlein made it maximally explicit in Starship Troopers:

“Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.”

Jefferson understood freedom – the rights to one’s life, liberty, and honestly acquired property – as a natural condition prior and superior to political organization. He understood politics and government not as goods to be pursued, but as unfortunate necessities to be confined within the cage of men’s God-given rights. Heinlein, though he allowed one of his teachers in History and Moral Philosophy to denigrate the Jeffersonian conception, grasped and adhered to it even so.

Carson, Nozick, Bastiat, Jefferson, and Heinlein had no trouble explaining to you why there is no “right” to vote -- and why you should be glad of it.

---

To sum up: You are free to the extent that your decisions, actions, and inactions are wholly at your discretion, rather than being constrained by punishment or the threat of punishment. Archibald MacLeish summed it up nicely:

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

Political freedom is merely freedom from punishment for one’s choices by a politically constituted body: a government. To distinguish it from absolute and unqualified freedom, we call it liberty.

There cannot be liberty without responsibility. The “right” to vote has nothing of liberty in it; as Heinlein notes, it is merely a delimited exertion of political authority. When you vote, you are not exercising any aspect of liberty; you are functioning as an agent of the political authority. In our “democracy,” in which the voter bears no direct responsibility for the consequences of his vote, for that brief instant in which you “pull the lever and feel the power,” you are functionally a master, if only an infinitesimal fraction of one.

When you pull back the curtain and leave the booth, you’re back to being wholly a slave.

Always bear that distinction in mind.

The Masks Are Off

A long time ago back at Eternity Road, in connection with the "McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act," I wrote:

In his fine 1967 book The American Tradition, Dr. Clarence Carson noted that liberal opinion about freedom had settled on a rather stunted view: that free speech plus a voting mechanism provided all the freedom the nation could ever require. Of course, that view leaves everything else to be legislated, regulated, and taxed to the hilt -- an electorally ratified totalitarianism in which everything not compulsory is forbidden -- but that's all right because we're still free to complain about it....

Should our legislators ever presume to pass a law criminalizing "hate speech," and should a case under such a law reach the Supreme Court, would the Justices uphold the law, taking refuge once more in "international opinion"? Given recent developments, it's hard to be confident that they wouldn't.

Liberal attachment to free speech and open elections has always been shaky. Herbert Marcuse's famous essay "Repressive Tolerance" has beckoned to them from the ideological darkness for forty years. Considering how far they'll go to overturn an election in which they came out second best, just how much would it surprise anyone were they to use "evolving standards," "living document" and "clear and present danger" themes to attack what remains of the right of free expression guaranteed by the First Amendment? And given the demonstrated proclivities of supposedly conservative Republican legislators, who want to retain their power and perquisites quite as much as their liberal Democratic counterparts, how much resistance to the notion could we expect the GOP to mount?

Well, concerning that final question, now we know:

Last month during a town hall meeting in Phoenix, AZ, with Senator John McCain (R-AZ), a Marine by the name of Blaine Cooper voiced his disdain for the Senator, along with other Congressional leaders, and Barack Obama, in a patriotic and impassioned speech. Cooper stated that the aforementioned guilty parties have turned their back on the American people, values, and core beliefs, even so far as aiding terrorists. While McCain stood there grinning like an idiot and posturing like an impatient five year old, Cooper went on to state that while representatives like McCain were elected by their constituents to protect them from the enemy, they have, in fact, become the enemy.

To finish off this truly admirable speech, Cooper said that if he were elected to office, he would try McCain and others for treason against the United States of America. With the exception of McCain grinning like the elitist RINO that he is and a few liberal trolls giving the thumbs down and booing, several of the town hall members erupted in applause at Cooper's speech. The Senator responded to Cooper’s speech with the same condescending demeanor he displayed during the possible Syrian intervention.

While his town hall speech in Phoenix is earning him widespread support and recognition among Conservatives, the Leftist regime we are all ruled under has certainly kept its eye on Cooper. According to Police State USA, Cooper was contacted by local police and interrogated by the FBI for remarks made on Facebook referring to the federal government as being a "police state." During his 45 minute interrogation with the FBI regarding his "questionable" Facebook comments, they informed him that the alternative to him not coming down to the local police station was for them to raid his home. In addition, the FBI pulled up a file of every known Facebook post Cooper has made, as well as information about his wife and parents.

So, what the FBI does to address comments about them operating as a police state -- is to act like a police state! Makes perfect sense. Luckily for Cooper, once he was deemed not a "threat," he was released. Who gave the directive to investigate Blaine Cooper? And why?

But of course.

---

I keep saying it louder and louder, but it sometimes seems that no one is listening:

The politician's #1 priority is power for himself.
Your rights are insignificant,
If not antithetical to that desire.

Indeed, the whole of the federal machine is behind the consolidation of total power in Washington. This morning's news could hardly provide more evidence:

• Using a disconnected warrant, Maryland state police seized a reporter's notes on corruption in the Department of Homeland Security.
• A prominent Democrat Congressman has called for Obama to usurp the power of the border from Congress.
• Yet another Congressional Democrat has called Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act sedition. He's echoing or being echoed by numerous "private citizens," several major Websites, and a cable-TV news outlet.
• Forget voting our way out of our current mess: the Census Bureau has just announced that we're outnumbered.

Does any Gentle Reader of Liberty's Torch think any of that was coincidental?

---

It's all out in the open now, Gentle Reader. The forces of totalitarianism are advancing swiftly. The Democrats are the mobile army in the field; with a few honorable exceptions, the Republicans provide the mere appearance of an opposition. The two groups share a single agenda: more power for each and for all.

Partisan commentators who claim that we should support all Republican candidates unquestioningly as the only hope for the defense of freedom are either unable to admit that the GOP has sold its soul for a piece of the action, or are in on the game. There are a few nonpartisan commentators clear-eyed enough to see what's happening before us all, but their influence pales before that of the heavily promoted partisans. At any rate, what with there now being more recipients of government largesse than non-recipients, and the treasuries of the state governments having become dependent upon revenue from the federal coffers, the vote has been effectively neutered.

What, then, must we do?

It's a grim question for a Saturday morning in October. Only three paths forward remain:

• Fight,
• Flight,
• Submission.

I don't much like any of them. Indeed, I'm too old and infirm to fight. Fleeing to some chaotic Third World refuge seems to me to be just a form of surrender. But just sitting here and continuing to orate is like asking to become the next Blaine Cooper. I have no smallest doubt that his experience is merely better publicized than many others.

What, then, must I do?

---

I write fiction as well as these op-ed essays. My most popular stories are about heroes of freedom and justice and a uniquely, completely free society. In aggregate, they've sold about 100,000 copies. Their readers write to me from all the corners of the globe, mainly to express their yearning for persons like my protagonists and to ask if I know of anyone like that in real life. I can't tell them that this or that public figure was the model for Louis Redmond, or Christine D'Alessandro, or Armand or Althea Morelon. I can only commiserate with them.

At least such stories provide a temporary escape, and a vision of something better. But such visions are of the fantastic. There's nothing like them in the here and now; should the United States fall into open, outright totalitarianism, no one alive today will live to see anything like them.

Free speech is being squelched by intimidation.
The vote has been rendered ineffective by government largesse.
We're steadily being deprived of the chance of success by force of arms.

The masks are off.
The walls are closing in.
Someone please tell me differently.
I'll be waiting patiently.
Hopefully sober.

The Un-Franchising: Civic Virtue And The Decline Of the Republic

Geez, I have to take a day off for real one of these days...

---

John Hinderaker of PowerLine presents us with a sample of Democrat hate-campaign tactics:

This email arrived yesterday from MoveOn, whose communications are generally indistinguishable from those of the Democratic Party. The subject line was "New York Times stunner."

Republicans are trying to steal control of the U.S. Senate by making it harder to vote.

Pitch in to help defend the right to vote and stop Republicans from stealing the 2014 election.

This plea requires a certain chutzpah, as stealing elections at the polls has always been a Democratic specialty. I think what they are actually referring to is Republican efforts to ensure honest voting so that Democrats can't steal elections.

Well, yes. But behind the obvious assault on the trustworthiness of American elections lies a subtler assault on our understanding of the legally created, defined and constrained privilege of voting. That attack dovetails with an even deeper and more threatening attack on the very concept of rights.

You might be nodding at this point. The Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch tend to be much more intelligent than average – anyone below IQ 130 would be unable to grasp most of what's posted here – and correspondingly quick on the uptake. But there’s a trap in that: an increased likelihood of "skimming" out of excessive confidence. So: Do you think you read and comprehended the previous paragraph accurately?

If you answered "yes" without rereading it slowly, the rest of this post is for you specifically. Take your time over it.

---

When the Republic was young, a would-be voter had to present evidence of certain criteria:

• He had to be a citizen.
• He had to be at least twenty-one years of age.
• He had to own real property -- land.
• He had to have been a resident in the district where he proposed to vote for a legally stated minimum interval -- usually, one year.

Those qualifications had a very pointed point: They constituted prima facie evidence that he would take a sober interest in the consequences of the elections in which he wanted to vote. In a sense, they were a proxy for an attestation of civic virtue.

No, those qualifications are not infallible proof of civic virtue. But then, whether a man possesses genuine civic virtue is a very tough thing to certify with perfect confidence. Even those who know him personally can get it wrong.

---

Civic virtue might be the hardest of all the virtues to practice routinely. It consists of the ironclad resolution not to use one's legal privileges -- note: not one's rights -- to one's own advantage at the expense of others.

The privilege of voting is the most important venue for civic virtue in our time. That so many Americans vote their personal interests at the open and obvious expense of others --"ObamaPhones," anyone? -- is a dead giveaway that we suffer a severe general deficiency of civic virtue, at least around election time.

In his early award winner Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein famously proposed that the vote should be conditioned upon prior honorable military service. Heinlein believed that to expose oneself to the rigors and hardships of military service better certified civic virtue than the legal qualifications enumerated earlier -- and he might well have been correct. But then, Heinlein was already clear on a critical concept that the Left has done its best to obscure:

Voting is not and has never been a "right."

Needless to say, leftists and one-worlders generally detest Heinlein and all his works.

---

If you have my sort of elephant's memory, you probably recall, from the 2008 elections, a seriously meant proposal to allow the citizens of other countries to have a voice in American elections. The argument was that since our federal government's decisions have an impact far beyond our own borders, owing to our military power, our "world policeman" role, and our many bases overseas, it's unfair that the many millions of non-citizens so affected should have no say in those decisions. By that "logic," it's only "right" that persons the world around should have some sort of influence over the selection of the persons who make those decisions.

As with so many other specious arguments, if you buy the unstated premise, you buy the consequent. The unstated premise is, of course, that merely being "affected" by Washington's decisions is a sufficient rationale for claiming the "right" to influence them, indirectly through the electoral process.

I could spend the entire day ripping that premise to shreds. Given your already postulated top-3% intellect, Gentle Reader, I'll pass on, having merely noted it.

---

I'm not the first to pulverize this notion of a "right to vote," of course:

The followers of Rousseau's school of thought — who consider themselves far advanced, but whom I consider twenty centuries behind the times — will not agree with me on this. But universal suffrage — using the word in its strictest sense — is not one of those sacred dogmas which it is a crime to examine or doubt. In fact, serious objections may be made to universal suffrage.

In the first place the word universal conceals a gross fallacy. For example, there are 36 million people in France. Thus, to make the right of suffrage universal, there should be 36 million voters. But the most extended system permits only 9 million people to vote. Three persons out of four are excluded. And more than this, they are excluded by the fourth. This fourth person advances the principle of incapacity as his reason for excluding the others.

Universal suffrage means, then, universal suffrage for those who are capable. But there remains this question of fact: Who is capable? Are minors, females, insane persons, and persons who have committed certain major crimes the only ones to be determined incapable?

A closer examination of the subject shows us the motive which causes the right of suffrage to be based upon the supposition of incapacity. The motive is that the elector or voter does not exercise this right for himself alone, but for everybody. The most extended elective system and the most restricted elective system are alike in this respect. They differ only in respect to what constitutes incapacity. It is not a difference of principle, but merely a difference of degree. If, as the republicans of our present-day Greek and Roman schools of thought pretend, the right of suffrage arrives with one's birth, it would be an injustice for adults to prevent women and children from voting. Why are they prevented? Because they are presumed to be incapable. And why is incapacity a motive for exclusion? Because it is not the voter alone who suffers the consequences of his vote; because each vote touches and affects everyone in the entire community; because the people in the community have a right to demand some safeguards concerning the acts upon which their welfare and existence depend.

I know what might be said in answer to this; what the objections might be. But this is not the place to exhaust a controversy of this nature. I wish merely to observe here that this controversy over universal suffrage (as well as most other political questions) which agitates, excites, and overthrows nations, would lose nearly all of its importance if the law had always been what it ought to be. In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

Under these circumstances, is it likely that the extent of the right to vote would endanger that supreme good, the public peace? Is it likely that the excluded classes would refuse to peaceably await the coming of their right to vote? Is it likely that those who had the right to vote would jealously defend their privilege? If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone's interest in the law would be the same. Is it not clear that, under these circumstances, those who voted could not inconvenience those who did not vote?

[Frederic Bastiat, The Law, 1850]

Bastiat's logic remains crystal-clear, diamond-hard, and beyond refutation. Yet the Left is unaffected, for a simple reason: Leftists are determined to use government power as an instrument of plunder.

Reflect on the "Occupy" nonsense, and the millions who support Barack Hussein Obama in hopes of getting more "free stuff."

---

Lurking behind the notion of a "right to vote" and all similar notions is the phantasm of human equality. He who proposes such a thing implicitly assumes that as we are all "equal," we "should" all have the same "rights." In the usual case, he lacks an understanding of all three quoted words. The exceptions are outright villains.

No two persons are "equal." Neither can we be made "equal," even under the utterest application of State power. The best we can do -- indeed, the absolute requirement of a free society -- is equality of individuals' rights:

• Recognition of each man's natural rights to his life, his liberty, and his honestly acquired property;
• Pace Bastiat, the constraint of the law to the protection of those rights;
• Absence from the law of any exemptions for particular persons;
• Absence from judicial procedures of any special allowances for particular persons.

The alternative is a class structure that awards different privileges and enforceable responsibilities to persons of different classes: what Isabel Paterson called a Society of Status. That's the antithesis of the American ideal. It exposes some to unbounded predation by and for others, and makes individual freedom effectively unattainable.

But we cannot have an equality of individuals' rights if we're unclear about what those rights are and whence they originate.

---

In The Discovery Of Freedom, Rose Wilder Lane observes trenchantly that "no one is born with an inalienable ballot." This is as true today as it was in 1943, when she wrote it. It's even more important in these days of rampant political predation in quest for electoral invincibility.

The original qualifications for the vote might have been flawed. Yet the motivation behind them -- the effort to certify an acceptable degree of civic virtue in the would-be voter -- was sound, and remains imperative. We cannot and will not return to Constitutional, freedom-respecting government unless a serious attempt is made to renew that effort.

Quite a lot of people must be taught that their ballots are not inalienable -- and the sooner, the better.