"Two questions come up quite often in e-mails I receive. One is why I do not vote. Another is what a person can do to change the system toward greater liberty, or what I expect to be the manner in which the system gets changed toward greater liberty. Another thing is that letters quite often express resignation, despair, hopelessness, pessimism, cynicism, and frustration.
I don't vote for several reasons. I don't wish to endorse the system that I think is no good. If I vote I am saying that I believe in voting and that I believe in majority rule. I don't believe in majority rule as applied to the political situations in which it is used. I don't believe in representative government under our Constitution. The Constitution has no legitimate authority over me. I have never signed off on it. I do not wish to endorse a system that has produced and continues to produce what I think are pragmatically bad results. I do not wish to endorse a system that has produced and continues to produce what I think are evil results. My religious beliefs are totally inconsistent with what the State does. I don't vote because I believe that everyone should be able to exercise the right of political choice. By that, I mean the right to choose the kind of system he or she wants to live with. It does not mean selecting a candidate who then works within a system not of your choice. I want to choose my dessert. I want ice cream. I do not want to be told that I can choose raspberry or lemon jello, or write in orange jello if I feel like it. I don't vote because I do not want to confuse myself. I believe in dissolving the national government and the Constitution. If I vote, I am more likely to start thinking that my aim is reform of the system. It isn't. My aim is that each of us has the liberty to choose his own system of government. If I voted, I'd soon become confused. A good example of such confusion is the Libertarian Party. I do not vote because I have no intention of imposing my system on you. If my candidate won, I would not want him to impose a system on the minority that it did not want. I don't want the majority to impose its system on me now, so I cannot be in favor of my imposing my system on them if I win an election. Even if I believed in the system as it is, I would not vote. The main reason for that is that my vote is totally meaningless. The representatives will vote on many items that they should not be voting on when they get in office. My vote has no impact on how they vote on these many affairs. I would be fooling myself if I thought it did. A secondary reason is that I get no psychological satisfaction from identifying myself with a party or candidate. They invariably do things I dislike, and I have no way of registering any control over them." http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff224.html [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
