The Vote

Nobody asked but …

I got a little depressed yesterday — I was at Walmart, in a county that went overwhelmingly for The Big Orange in the 2016 POTUS election.  And I was listening to an audio of Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, The State.  He writes,

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

Using the Pareto Principle, I would estimate that 80% of any group of people are statists (unquestioning statists).  Of the remainder, 80% 0f the 20% are vaguely uncomfortable with the state but have no idea how to achieve self-ownership.  Of the next remainder, 80% of the 4% still think that it is their duty to vote (an example, The Big L, LP minarchists).  And so forth.

Both Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, in my view, had the idea that mass conversion of society to voluntaryism was impossible, since the state always rigs the game so that the majority of the people are being fooled.  It is “the vote” itself which snookers them.

— Kilgore Forelle