printThe other day I said to a (male) friend: “I would give up my vote if I could be assured all women would do the same.” He replied: “In that case, I would consider voting.”
So does the vote count? Or does every vote counts?
Not at all. In “Default and Dynamic Democracy,” Loren E. Lomasky observed that, “As electorates increase in size, the probability that one’s vote will swing the election approaches zero” … “[I]n large-number electorates, there is a vanishingly small probability that an individual’s vote (or voice) will swing an election … [F]or citizens of large-scale democracies, voting is inconsequential.”
The winner in an election is certainly not the fictitious entity referred to as “The People,” but rather the representatives of the majority. While it seems obvious that the minority in a democracy is thwarted openly, the question is, do the elected representatives at least carry out the will of the majority?
In reality, the majority, too, has little say in the business of governance – they’ve merely elected politicians who have been awarded carte blanche to do as they please. As Benjamin Barber wrote:
It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends. Politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians.
In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy E. Barnett further homes in on why genuinely informed individuals have little incentive to exercise their “democratic right”:
If we vote for a candidate and she wins, we have consented to the laws she votes for, but we have also consented to the laws she has voted against.
If we vote against the candidate and she wins, we have consented to the laws she votes for or against.
And if we do not vote at all, we have consented to the outcome of the process whatever it may be.
This “rigged contest” Barnett describes as, “‘Heads’ you consent, ‘tails’ you consent, ‘didn’t flip the coin,’ guess what? You consent as well.'”
On a more pragmatic note, here is how my libertarian WND pal, Vox Day, explains why there will be “No Change After Nov. 2”:
“The reason we can be sure that the Republicans are going to betray the tea party once they come to congressional power is that we know that they are not going to even attempt to solve any of the four most pressing problems facing the nation at the moment. In some cases, Republicans are almost certainly going to try to make them worse. Consider:
1) The economy. Republicans have nothing to offer on the subject. They are almost completely silent on the subject of state bankruptcies, pension-fund shortages and the secrecy of the Fed. Trading fiscal policy-oriented Neo-Keynesians for monetary policy-oriented Monetarist Keynesians isn’t going to materially improve anything.
3) Immigration. Republicans are mostly on the wrong side of this as well, being self-destructive fans of unsustainable open borders.
4) The endless wars. Republicans still support invading and occupying other nations despite the overall cost of the Bush/Obama wars now exceeding one trillion dollars.”
(I omitted Vox’s second point, “The massive mortgage fraud.” As you all already know, as much as I abhor the fractional reserve system that embroils banks in fraud, I do not agree that the facts, to which one must cleave religiously, support the case of the deadbeat defaulters. But we’ve both written exhaustively—and respectfully–about our “foreclosure fracas” disagreement.)
To Vox’s list of Republican contributions to the political morass we’re in, Paul Gottfried adds some other intractable accomplishments.
“As electorates increase in size, the probability that one’s vote will swing the election approaches zero”
We have 435 members in the House of Representatives. In 1970 the USA had about 200 million people. This put the size of a congressional district at 460 thousand. In 2000, the USA had 300 million people. This increased the size of a congressional district to 690 thousand. In 2050 the USA is supposed to have a population of 450 million. This would increase the size of a congressional district to over 1 million.
Since almost all of this growth is attributed to immigration, we have yet another side effect of open borders, the watering down of the vote.
The entire election circus is a racket. Both parties are playing the rubes for the fools that they are.
My position is simple: vote by absentee ballot to avoid wasting time going to the polls. Vote no on all spending and regulatory measures. Anything that reduces personal freedom gets a thumbs-down.
As for candidates, unless the name is Ron Paul, be prepared to be disappointed. I leave it blank or vote libertarian in protest.
My conscience dictates that I refuse to participate in the looting and killing machine.
Snooty Frank Rich forecasted the eventual “betrayal” of the mish-mash Tea Party by the Corporate Statist Republicans:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31rich.html
And a Lew Rockwell article skeptical of Tea Party people who have objected to Obama acting as Bushx2 (double the bailouts, double the Afghan war, double the TARP).
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/stevo8.1.1.html
Laurence Vance on a real “libertarian/constitutional” “Pledge to America”:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance213.html
Alternatively, we have James Huggins: “But, we need to do all we can to fight the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is all we’ve got…. I would be certainly interested to hear what some of these folks consider to be solutions.”
My response: (1) Suppose McCain had beaten Obama in 2008 – so he would have continued the TARP and AutoBailouts that he supported and doubled the troops in Afghanistan (2) He probably would have also passed some sort of Romney-Huckabee-Care instead of Obamacare. So what is the solution? We replaced Constitutional (limited) government with Democracy (unlimited) in the 1930’s with popular support for massive federal government intervention in the economy, business, world affairs, and individual health/retirement/education.
ONLY when a majority turns from that interventionist philosophy will there ever be any “SOLUTION” beyond biennial “crook rotation” in Washington DC.
Cannot agree, since I see myself as part of an organic nation, albeit one under assault by demicans/republicrats and globalist wirepullers. So when I go out today and vote against this or that evil (plenty of this available), for this or that good (if any), I express and purify my own morality. I’m not under any illusion that it will Change the System. That, after the coming economic collapse, will be accomplished by other means.
A few years ago, well thirty or so, just something like twenty-five or thirty percent of the registered voters voted in an election, during Carter’s term, I think. The news went nuts- Voter Apathy! The fact that no one liked the choices we had was inconsequential, it was all our fault for not voting. So the country went on a voting binge. Not to get good quality people to run but to get more voters. Voter registration, when you renew your drivers license was one. You still have voter apathy but the number of voters improve. Churchill is reported to have said “Americans will always do the right thing, after they have tried everything else.” We’re still working on it. We’ll get to qualified candidates eventually.
From a purely mathematical perspective the power of a single vote could be defined as the ratio of a single vote to the total number of votes cast or 1/total votes cast. Clearly as the total number of votes cast increases the power of the single vote beomces diminished significantly.
However, in elections where the electorate is divided 50-50 for each candidate the practical power of the vote becomes 1/(differnce of votes between candidate A and B) which gives the voter a higher power rating, if you will. As an example the power of the single voter became much more important in the recent win by Al Franken in Minnesota where he won by a little more than 300 votes.
Now having said all of that the fact remains that whether you vote for candidate A or B, or don’t vote at all you are still stuck with the winner’s representation whether you agree or disagree with how your representative votes in the House of Representatives, Senate, or at a local level.
This will always be a problem at some level in a representative based government. The founders had a much tighter set of requirements for who could vote and for what office. Voting was initially limited to those who had a stake in the outcome. If I remember correctly you had to be a white male landowner to vote (I don’t remember the limitations on age). So in a very real sense the founders not only provided a means to success in terms of limited government and capitalism. Becoming a land owner gave the individual the right to play a more active role in what was then a more limited electorial and governmental process. Those who had a real stake in system had voting rights not those of us who would just vote to increase the benefits paid to us by Federal largese.
As a side note in 1993 I made a business trip to Italy. We stayed in Ostia on the Mediterranean Sea. It was pretty obvious that land was not available to the vast majority of the Italian people. I came back to the States with a whole new appreciation for the founders’ respect for private property rights.