The 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.
