Be Patriotic: Don’t Vote
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Murray Rothbard once wrote that even
the most brutal dictator ultimately bases his power on the opinions that
are held by a majority of the population that is under his rule. After
all, even dictators with large armies tend to be vastly outnumbered by
the populations they rule over, and revolution is always on the
dictator’s mind. That’s probably how he gained power himself in the first
place – the previous dictator was, well, too dictatorial and created the
conditions for his own overthrow.
Democratic regimes also base their legitimacy on their ability to claim
that their rule is "the will of the people." They believe in
democracy with all their will, they tell us, so much so that generations
of American politicians have believed that it was legitimate to wage war
on other nations and to kill thousands of their citizens to impose
"democracy" on them. Lincoln’s armies killed some 300,000
fellow citizens and maimed for life an even greater number, supposedly so
that "government of the people, by the people, for the people,"
i.e., democracy, shall not perish from the earth.
This of course was pure B.S.: Had the South seceded peacefully, democracy
would have still existed in the U.S., the Confederate States of America,
Canada, England, France, etc., etc. Nevertheless, that was an official
purpose of the war, and of numerous other American wars. Woodrow Wilson
brought America into World War I to supposedly "make the world safe
for democracy." We are now supposedly bringing democracy to Iraq at
bayonet point with numerous other Middle East countries in our
sights.
But America was not founded as a democracy. It was a constitutional
republic. The whole purpose of the Constitution, James Madison wrote in
Federalist #10, was to control "the violence of faction," by
which he meant democracy. That’s why, until the Lincolnian "Civil
War Amendments" were added to it, every part of the Constitution was
a prohibition of some kind of governmental power or activity.
Democracy was made into a "civil religion" by Lincoln and
subsequent generations of Lincolnites who have successfully overthrown
the constitutional republic of the founding fathers.
These constitutional prohibitions or limitations are all but ignored
today, of course. The Constitution does not provide for the central
government to get involved in education, let alone sending a man – and
untold millions or billions of dollars – to Mars. There are no longer
any constitutional limitations on the central government.
Washington politicians laugh and sneer at libertarian think tank
employees who occasionally appear before their committees to oppose this
or that government program on constitutional grounds. They laugh and say
to them, "we’ve got the power to do it, and we’re going to do
it." I’ve seen it with my own eyes on C-SPAN.
President Clinton’s Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, went so far as to
assert that the constitution allowed for a federal masturbation education
program. Even Bill Clinton thought that went a little too far and fired
the good doctor.
The Republican Party today stands for an explosive growth of the welfare
state and is spending money on such programs as fast as Lyndon Johnson
ever did. The Democrats are as bad or worse.
On foreign policy the Republican Party is dominated by crazed Wilsonians
who want to involve the U.S. military in perpetual global warfare
"to spread democracy." As with all such imperialistic ventures,
this would eventually bankrupt the country and create countless enemies
who would like nothing better than to destroy us by the millions with
nuclear weapons or poison. The Democrats are as bad or worse.
Both political parties are competing to grant amnesty to all illegal
aliens, as the first step along the way to allowing completely open
borders. Combining open borders with an explosively growing welfare state
will invite all the deadbeats of the world to come to America, with all
their extended family members in tow, to "celebrate democracy"
by voting themselves more and more of the hard-earned dollars of those of
us who work for a living in this country. This would cause the welfare
state to eventually eat up a huge portion of national income, probably
half or more. American taxpayers would be nothing but docile slaves to
the Washington, D.C. plantation.
The government schools long ago gave up teaching anything significant
about the founding fathers, the Constitution, and the philosophy of
limited government – other than to trash and demean them. In a democracy
it is not in the state’s best interest to educate its own citizens about
the virtues of limited government, and ours doesn’t. And it certainly
will never make any attempt to do so with the hordes of new immigrants it
hopes to attract (and register to vote). Belief in the Constitution is
essentially a lost cause.
That’s why it is unpatriotic to vote. Being patriotic in America means
being devoted to the Constitution, if not the natural rights philosophy
that motivated much of it. Since neither of the major political parties
has any interest whatsoever in enforcing the constitutional limitations
on the state, they are all traitors to the Constitution (with one lone
exception, Congressman Ron Paul).
Anyone who supports them is also behaving in a traitorous manner. That
is, anyone who votes for any of them. Voting only allows these
traitors to the Constitution to proclaim that "the people have
spoken" and "I am your president," or congressman,
senator, governor, or whatever. Their legitimacy rests solely on their
ability to make this claim.
Imagine what a patriotic thrill you would receive if, in the next
presidential election, a mere 10 percent of the electorate, instead of
the usual 50 percent or so, voted. The unconstitutional regime in
Washington would be de-legitimized. The upside is that it might just be
possible that some politicians in Washington would get the message and
start behaving more like a George Washington or Thomas Jefferson than a
Tony Soprano or Vito Corleone (with apologies to all the distinguished
Italian-Americans out there). The downside is that they will keep on
behaving as they do now – with complete contempt for the Constitution and
the population it is supposed to benefit. So be patriotic: Don’t
vote.
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