Just and Democracy

7/28/2019 Just and Democracy

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J ustice and Democr acy

Being unable to make what is just strong,we have made what is strong just.

PascalI proclaim that might is right,justice the interest of the stronger.

Plato

All human governments are organizations devised for the purpose of enabling someparticular man or group of men to rule, i.e. subjugate and dominate, people byadministration of deadly physical force. All politics ultimately revolves around issues ofauthority to engage in violence. Force is employed as the tool to resolve disputes orsolve mans problems in lieu of reliance on reason, communication, respect, dignity, andtrue knowledge of the situation. The greatest care and clarity should inhere in any use

of force or harm results, if not carnage.It is on the presumption that the implementation of destructive force by some peopleagainst others is sometimes necessary that mankind subscribes to governments.Ideally, a government must engage in force in ways and for reasons which areexclusively just and necessary, such as upholding justice by enforcing rules which areknown and accepted by the people and administered by public servants whose actionsare strictly delimited by commonly understood laws and procedures.

Implicit in all this are a number of assumptions:

1. Mankind must have human governments;

2. Governments must rule, i.e. govern, by wielding deadly physical force;

3. People administering the authority of governments know what justice is andcan effect their conceptions by the mechanics by which they operate;

4. The actions of those in a state can be successfully controlled by thegoverned (democracy is supposed to be a means of exercising such control).

These premises may be accepted by a large percentage of mankind, but they are false.

J ustice and the nature of man

Constructive use of faculties is not simply a privilege or option, but a survival necessity.

Man must think, act, work, and exercise his faculties or he perishes. This includesexercise of free will, without which man would have no capacity to choose, and wouldbe a tropism. The ability to perceive, think, feel, conceive, and engage in abstractthought provides endless multiplicity of options. Man is not an automaton, determinedby and limited to singular stimulus-response mechanisms. Being able to makeconscious choices makes man existentially and ethically responsible and grantssignificance to life. Free will makes man uniquely special, capable of both sublimity anddepravity. Without free will, mans life would be as irrelevant as leaves blowing one wayor another in the vastness of impersonal nature.


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Victor Frankl survived Auschwitz and wrote of it in Man's Search For Meaning. Heperceived that regardless of any situation, even in the depths of uttermost pain, despair,suffering, futility, and degradation, man never loses the capacity to make choices anddiscern meaning. Both meaning and free will are innate in man's being. Frankl wrote:

But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior

and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have usbelieve that man is no more than a product of many conditional andenvironmental factorsbe they of a biological, psychological or sociologicalnature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do theprisoners' reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove thatman cannot escape the influence of his surroundings? Does man have nochoice of action in the face of such circumstances?

We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. Theexperiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. Therewere enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy couldbe overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritualfreedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic

and physical stress.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walkedthrough the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. Theymay have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything canbe taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedomsto chooseone's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offeredopportunity to make a decision which determined whether you would or wouldnot submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, yourinner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the playthingof circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the formof the typical inmate.

Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of aconcentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certainphysical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack ofsleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmateswere bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that thesort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and notthe result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can,even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of himmentally andspiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp....1

Do not think that these considerations are unworldly and too far removed fromreal life. It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moralstandards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtainedthose values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example issufficient proof that man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.

1 Viktor E. Frankl,Man's Search For Meaning, Washington Square Press (New York, 1959), pp. 86-87.


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Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confrontedwith fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.2

Every man has the free-will option of utilizing either of two basic approaches to furtherhis life progress: 1) he may be a predator and try to gain at expense of loss to others, or2) he can succeed by exchanges which bring enrichment to others and himself. The

first is reliance on the principle of violence. The second is an expression of the principleof peace.

Predatory behavior clearly damages the victim. In a less obvious way it also harms theostensible victor. An aggressor transgresses against his deeper and more universalnature, injures the external setting of his life, forsakes the good and growth he couldhave achieved by constructive action, and generates harmful consequences by hiswrong actions which are sooner or later visited back upon himself. Gaining by thepredatory principle is in the long run self-defeating, since what ultimately results is harmto all parties. It retards the universal purpose of all life to further its well-being andprogress towards its fulfillment.

Newton's Third Law proclaims that for every action there is an equal and opposite

reaction. Expressed in mans life that is the law of karma: what one does to others willlikewise be visited on himself. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Onereaps what he sows (in a just universe he reaps only the cause/effect consequences ofwhat he sows, not eternal damnation). One may think that action/reaction does notpertain in mans life and he can get away with things the laws of existence will ignore.The ignorance, however, is his own. Everyone must choose whether to function on thebasis of the peaceful or predatory principle. The results will be accordingly. All actionscause corresponding reactions, in mans life as well as elsewhere.

The foundation of the free market is the peaceful principlewin/win interactions whichbenefit all parties in their own terms. Success results from meeting the needs of others.It requires insight into what other people want and directing one's efforts towardssatisfying them. A Chinese proverb sums up the basis of success in freedom: He whohelps others helps himself.

In the short run and narrowed confines it may appear that those who cheat, defraud, oruse force (however disguised) win at other's expense and are happy. As noted above,however, in the long run all actions generate corresponding results in accordance withinviolable principles. As it has been said, It is an unfair world but a just universe.Because there is an interval of time and complex processes between conception andbirth, sowing and reaping, does not annul cause and effect. The fact that themechanics and intervals between sources and consequences can be inscrutable to mandoes not mean that they do not exist. The wheels of the gods grind slowly butexceedingly fine, as Tennyson wrote.

The free market functions spontaneously to further the purpose of man to progresstowards his fulfillment. Freedom is the only social arrangement compatible withuniversal rights. By progressing through benefiting others one learns, grows in content,relates through mutually constructive and voluntary means, acquires understanding andstature, achieves by merit, gains without blame, and increases the general prosperityand well-being of society along with his own.

2 Ibid., pp. 88-89.


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In addition to being a set of arrangements based on mutual benefit, a business is a self-development discipline. One must think, work, gain understanding of self and othersand be beneficial to both in order to prosper. Business requires focus, learning,perseverance, and application of attributes. It necessitates understanding one's talents,propensities, abilities, tastes, and drives, as well as knowledge of the tools andprocesses involved in transforming them into practical usefulness to others. As a wise

man once put it: The secret of life is to ascertain what you most deeply desire to do andget paid for it.

Economic enterprises also require a certain humility, since one must succeed byserving othersnot dominating themas well as risking time and resources on open-ended uncertainty. In the Greek polis those who voted in the democracy were malecitizens, who had the luxury of developing their bodies, minds, and talents while workand business were carried on by inferiors. Women were for taking care of thehousehold and bearing children. Courtesans were for romantic love. Metics (foreignresidents) carried on commerce. Work was done by slaves. The male elitists disdainedbusiness since it would have required serving innumerable people whom they regardedas inferior. Greek civilization, as lofty as it became in many respects, was based (likeRome, ancient cultures, and politics in general) on structuring social organization

through the principle of violence.

Much similar anti-economic bias exists today. Many politicians and intellectuals thinkthey are so superior as to deserve money and power without the genuine service andcontribution required to be entitled to it. They dislike the tastes of the masses andwould legally impose their own while disparaging the merchant mentality that engagesin money-grubbing activities of everyday business.

Illusion, hubris, and violence are interconnected. People who live by such inferiorattributes often disdain those who succeed by work and self-worth. One Europeanprince recently opposed his daughter's marriage to a wealthy man because the latterwas not nobility. Having earned his wealth, rather than inheriting a position as head ofan artificial-station, violence-administering organization called a state, made the suitora commoner. It is easy to be grand if one can dominate others and live off theirefforts without having to give value in exchange.

Self-reliance requires work, application of thought, and assuming responsibility for one'sactions and fate. To default on self-reliance is to forsake dignity and crucial aspects oflife development, no matter what other trappings one may assume.

For someone to believe that he has a special right to be a ruler i.e. dominate andplunder other people, is hubrisnefarious delusion with no ultimate ethical andexistential legitimacy. Such megalomania, to varying extents, is the nature of allpoliticians, since politics means exerting power over the lives of others through anartificial institution specifically designed for that purpose. To rule others by political

means, instead of governing by the power of ones being spontaneously influencingthe world in life-furthering ways, is exercise of the principle of violence, howeverdisguised.

Regardless of whatever lofty pretenses may be proffered, politics inherently involvesobtaining rewards without commensurate efforts, abrogating the rights and options ofothers, bypassing communication, eliminating freedom, supplanting free choice, and ingeneral functioning by force. Citizens who gain by political means default on thecourage even to engage in their own theft and violence, relying on a sanitizing (crimelaundering) institution to do their dirty work for them. Worse yet, by cloaking predatory


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behavior in guises of respectability, endless inferior pursuits are legally undertakenwhich are unlawful and destroy the foundation of justice.

To abandon governments and live by freedom is to rely on the peaceful principle. Insuch climate self-reliance, honoring universal rights, and relating in mutuallyconstructive ways must be the basis of both economic and social success. To adopt

political means for socio-economic organization is to utilize and build on the principle ofviolence, overriding honorable means to achieve objectives by force. The inner strugglein man may be between good and evil, but the outer conflict is between the ideas andforces which would enslave, subjugate, and rule man vs. those that would liberate him.

J ustice and the basis of rights

Man's right to exist derives from existence. Life emerges out of, consists of, is afunctional expression of universal being. What self-exists has innate right to be itself.That includes people, so long as they do not transgress against others.

Man's purpose is to grow, progress, and evolve towards fulfillment. All life expressesthe drive for endless progressmore, different, and better. Such growth can transpire

only within and through one's unique nature and towards realization of its fullness ofuniversal being. The purpose of justice is to optimize the capacity for life developmentto transpire in the greatest actualizable degree of safety and societal coherence.

Since the survival of man's physical body depends on his use of faculties, he acquiresproperty to support his desires and progress. That requires time, effort, and energy, i.e.expenditure of life force. A man's propertyif acquired honorablyis inviolably hisown. Property rightslike life and freedomare universal rights of man.

Whenever someone takes from another his freedom, his property, the soundness of hisfaculties, or his life, the aggressor has over-reached to remove something whichrightfully belongs to his victim. In so doing the predator becomes contractually indebtedto the one he wrongs.

It is protection against and rectification of such transgressions that alone justifies use offorce. Man has the right to defend his existence and its outgrowth, property, as well asrecoup or attain compensation for what has been unjustly removed from him. Suchlegitimate uses of force are justified in three basic areas:

1. Arbitration of disputes between people who cannot agree on just rightsbetween themselves;

2. Rectification of injustice, i.e. righting wrongs already committed;

3. Self-defense, either from foreign or domestic predators.

The issue is how these matters are to be undertaken. J ust as no individual can doeverything in life for himself, and needs others who are accomplished in fields he is not,so it is true of law, force, and justice. But what others are truly authorized to use forceon one's behalf? How are they chosen? What force can legitimately be used?

The usual answer to those questions is governments. It is assumed that by having aninstitution with exclusive right to make and enforce laws, justice will be servedi.e.arbitration, rectification, and self-defense. Through government, society canpresumably have a reliable means to secure protection, consistency, and ordera


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foundation upon which men can dependably structure their lives, a stable context inwhich to enjoy freedom without opposition. Without an official over-archingforce/obedience monopoly to make and enforce laws, society would presumablydisintegrate.

Such sentiments may sound reasonable in abstraction. When thought through or put

into practice, however, governments are found to be impossible vehicles for achievingthe promulgated basis for their existence. It is impossible for any government toachieve genuine arbitration, rectification, and self-defense. States are the wrong toolsfor the job. A government's innate nature, the mechanics which constitute its being,automatically negates, and cannot achieve for real, the worthy ends expected of it. Allattempts are self-poisoning, self-falsifying, and self-negating. Political processesalways exacerbate, and can never cure, whatever ills they address.

In The Laws, Plato wrote:

(the Lawgiver) condemned the stupidity of the mass of men in failing to perceivethat all are involved ceaselessly in a lifelong war against all States....every Stateis, by a law of nature, engaged perpetually in an informal war with every other

State.3

Had Plato listened to his own words he would have understood that his entire systemwas inherently wrong. That might have saved the world incalculable grief. Hismethodology, like all forms of statism, consists of designing abstract socio-politicalsystems (including statutory laws) and using state might to make society conform tothem.

Perceiving the mechanics of governments renders Plato's statement self-evident. J ustas everyone's perceptions of life are unique, if force is to be deployed everyone willhave different orientations and motivations for using it. Any state, as a force institutionfunctioning out of competing perspectives, is innately in conflict with internal factions ofitself, the people it subjugates, with other states, and with existence itself. Stress anddiscord are innate in all attempts to enforce external biases on life. Such interferencesdisintegrate societal coherence so that political power deteriorates the base of its ownsupport.

By founding a government, a static and abstract contrivance is imposed upon free-flowing, real life and a dialectic is created between the two orders. The invented,compulsory, externally enforced, outside-in, top-down artificial is legally (coercively)established over and against the real, free, internally originating, inside-out, ground-upunfolding of life. The irreconcilable conflict is debilitating, so that over time all empirescrumble, stagnate, or are conquered.

Existence cannot be conformed to any abstract models of itself. Manipulation prevents

awareness of transcendence and precludes emergence of its order. Reality is thestate's rival. Statism assumes that some man or group of men can cognize a superiororder to the unfathomable, ever-emerging order of life and free people, has the right toimpose it, and can succeed by the means used. Since none of those is true, politics isan invalid means of social organization.

3 Plato, The Laws, translated by R. G. Bury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961) p. 7.


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Statutory laws enable some group of men to set themselves over and above societyand the market, assuming an independent right to govern. This is to make rules thatrestrict, obligate, expropriate from, and punish innumerable individuals on whom thewould-be rulers actually have no just claim whatsoever. Legislators determine thecriteria by which everyone should be forced to live, justified on such pretexts thatofficials are elected, or wiser, or simply because they occupy constructed pecking-

order positions of power that provide a context to devote full time to exercising theiralleged superiority.

To organize society politically makes the state a deity or Super-Parent (parenspatriae). People are not allowed to live by their own freedom, choices, stature, learning,and growing, but must adhere to rules determined and imposed by authorities. Peopleso governed generally do not personally know those exercising power over their lives,let alone have direct and substantive relationships with them. One no longer relates tolife as supreme authority, to succeed or fail by how well he constructively interacts withothers and complies with his own conscience and the laws of being, but defaults onthought, work, development, and necessity to discern truth in favor of living byconformity to the dictates of a state. This turns society into an authoritarian, if nottotalitarian, nursery school.

In such a climate people are not allowed to live and learn truths of life in their owntermswhich may be the only way possible to gain genuine understanding andgrowbut are smothered with layers of moralizing and official meddling.Disentanglement from the mass of pressures and assaults becomes impossible.People should abstain from drugs, gambling, or engaging in prostitution because thedrive for self-preservation and achievement propels them to shun harmful or wastefulactivities. Everyone should take care of his health and affairs because suchconstructed uses of faculties are an innate right and responsibility of life. Instead,through government, one's course is determined by third parties presupposing right tomake his decisions and take care of him. The help government gives to societywhen people engage in vice or foolish behavior is violenceas though bashing peopleinto submission was superior to true knowledge, dignified caring, and genuine remedy.

A just social order would consist of free associations and voluntary contractualagreements based on universal rights and protection of private property. The only waysuch a situation can be realized is in the total absence of governments. Governmentsexist by people surrendering rights, falsely presuming they gain through the loss.Stateless freedom is essential to evolve organizations and ways of relating whichuphold the integrity of the market and protect universal rights. Having a coercionmonopoly overlay the entire social order in an effort to encompass and manage it isperpetual assault, distortion, and oppression. That is the opposite of honoring andliberating life. It disallows life's integrity and self-expression from being able to manifestand prevail.

The free/economic and coercive/political are mutually-exclusive. An institution whichexists by eliminating freedom cannot be relied on to secure it. The point of a state is torule, i.e. to exercise power over the lives of others. This is why power, once granted thelegitimate foothold of a government, cannot be held in check, regardless of the mostsincere and ingenious efforts. Success in terms of those in governments is thedegrees to which they can effectively govern, i.e. control peoples behavior. Onceindividual sovereignty and rights to self-determination are abnegated, they are lost.Whether they can ever be regained is always an open question. The drive towardstyranny is self-perpetuating and has no inner mechanism to be self-correcting. Those in


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authority inexorably utilize whatever power has been legally established to attain yetmore of it.

States are often promoted as necessary to express the will of the collective. This isthe biggest con in history. Action on such basis is undertaken out of someone'sparticular idea of the collective. There are an infinite number of such

conceptionsevery one of which exists in the mind of some individual. The reality ofthe collective is the open-ended totality of all individuals and their interrelationships witheach other and existence. No abstractionof the collective or anything elseis thereality it purports to represent or can encompass the totality it may aspire to express.States use force to conform society to collectivist concepts and therefore injure theactual reality they claim to represent.

The fact that man has free will invalidates all forms of collectivism. Nothing caneliminate, compensate for, or override that fundamental aspect of mans being. Eachindividual has the right of self-ownership, the obligation of self-responsibility, and aunique nature, duty, and life meaning which only he can fulfill. For governments tocontrol society is to negate the supreme right, privilege, and duty of every man todetermine and fulfill his unique life meaning. To obstruct such a primal aspect of mans

being is overtly evil.

Society cannot be found: it cannot choose, has no rights, nor brain with which to think.Being a generalization, there is no way to ascertain the degree to which uses of forceare successful in serving it. Whose version of society is selected to be imposed on anindeterminate number of diverse and otherwise free people? Who can encompass anddecide their destinies or has a right to try? What is the ultimate source of theprerogative to annul universal rights in the name of society? Damage and blameresult from all efforts to efface someone's real nature and just rights and replace themwith external rule. If one adopted what he considered to be the finest possibleconception of social organization, utilized the sum total of a nation's resources,employed the most pervasive force to attempt to achieve conformity to it, andproceeded to the end of time, the ideal could never be attained.

To believe that the individual belongs to the collective, or is justified in being made atool of it, is irrational and unethical. As a derivative abstraction, the collective is animaginary entity which cannot own anyone. Yet all politics functions on such basis andmust, to varying degrees, regard people as objects and state propertyslaves and/ortropisms with at most an amorphous nature and only secondary rights. Politicsdishonors individuals as unique, unfathomably complex entities with free will and aspiritual dimension, as though such centrally important aspects of mans nature wereeither non-existent or irrelevant.

Although it is axiomatic that no concocted conquest/plunder organization labeledgovernment can own anyone, every states mechanics of functioning belies the

premise. From origin and foundation to the outermost limits of its power, the intrinsicnature of every government is systematic enslavement of the governed. Howeveranyone may regard life, one thing is certain: it is not the creation of any government.People are the property of existence and themselves. To presume otherwise is to usurpownership of living beings, which is violence, aggression, hubris, and slavery. Simplyby virtue of existing man has the unalienable right of self-ownership and duty to managehis own life. For a state to coerce people into being tools of any of an infinite number ofconceptions of how society should be is to attempt to wrench mans life from its ownexistence. All such efforts twist life grotesquely askew and cast it into spurious and


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exhausting realms. Such a course is insane, unjust, and ruinous. If one does notabuse his freedom by harming others, his right to live and be remains intact.

Yet, as though unable to comprehend or learn, statists proceed on the same mindless,knee-jerk basis of taking over political management of society to help it, and therebymore deeply and pervasively subvert what they allegedly would like to better. They

presuppose that people under state rule can and should docilely capitulate, like sheepor cattle, and not think for themselves or consider their own interests more valid. It wereas though statists wished not only to subjugate people by determining their behavior,but transform man's ultimate nature, reality, and will into the perspectives of agents ofstate.

It is a psychological aberration to think that because one perceives existence in somemanner, others should experience it the same way. Totalitarian regimes haveslaughtered en masse those who have had the temerity to be and express their ownnatures, or sent them to concentration camps, or indoctrinated them in re-educationcenters to be re-programmed into the correct way to see reality. Other governments,including representative democracies, enforce the same insanity on more benignscales, e.g. conformity laws, public education, manipulation of mass media,

entertainment, mountains of bureaucratic regulations, the criminal justice system, etc.

It is not that governments sometimes abuse their authority. Their very existence isabuse. What is tragic is that good men become seduced by the false allure andsincerely enter politics to attempt betterment by its counterfeit means. No matter howearnestly anyone tries to accomplish beneficial results by political means, it is at bottomwielding force in error and ignorance without valid and verifiable authority. The entirescope of action of politicians is restricted exclusively to expanding a realm whichdeteriorates the very society whose good is allegedly sought. Even if a politiciansucceeds, his success is not genuine. His results are fraudsveneers of surfacebehavior achieved by coercion to create sham appearances and transientconfigurations. Government has merely bashed, cajoled, and intimidated whateverindividuals are thus victimized into outwardly compliant action based on fear, atexpense of their own rights, autonomy, and having developed real solutions.

When a state rules, society is captured in a virtual prison of invisible statutory wallsthat can be transformed to real jail cells by any of an inconceivable number of arbitraryconsiderations of those in power. Those who invent and impose laws are operating inthe dark. They have no basis to decide criteria, penalties, and punishments but theirown world views, consensus, precedents formed of previous statutory laws, andinterpretations of other men, times, and places.4

Police have the right to engage in all manner of physical force to impose the laws ofthe statewhich pays their salaries and provides them with authority and all theiroperating criteria. Politicians manufacture laws to subjugate society at profligate rates.

In the United States, there are approximately 150,000 new laws passed every year by

4 The State wields great power in enormous ignorance. Illustrative of the insanity, arbitrariness, and brutality of

government is a recent example from a North Carolina court. A man was sentenced to ten years for the mutually-

voluntary, non-harmful act of engaging in sodomy with his girlfriend. On the same day the same judge sentenced a

murderer to five years and an arsonist to eight . In a stateless society, who would have the time, money, interest, or

authority to engage in such criminal stupidity and arrogance? (Incident cited in "Privileged Information," New

York, May 1, 1990.)


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the combined Federal, State, and municipal legislatures. In 1984 there were over200,000 such new laws.

Every new so-called law is merely the means whereby the state creates powers foritself out of nothing. Each one adds to an ever-expanding machinery of domination,making political control over life ever more totalistic, pervasive, and irreversible. Look

at all we can now legally do to you. After all, we have passed all the laws which grantourselves the authority to do so. Can any ordinary citizen have even the remotestidea of what rights to use force lurk in the ever-increasing mountain of self-grantedpowers governments invent for themselves?

Increasing power in government creates ever less ability for people to exercise force onthe only basis for which it is legitimate in the first placetheir own self-defense. Lawslike gun-control disarm citizens, leaving them at the mercy of criminalsordinarytransgressors and the far more powerful and dangerous predators who have politicalcontrol of law and government.

Freedom is an innate aspect of man's true nature. As R. G. Ingersoll put it: What lightis to the eyeswhat air is to the lungswhat love is to the heartliberty is to the soul

of man. Inherent in life is the drive and necessity to exercise faculties for self-increase,i.e. breathe, experience the ever new and learn and grow thereby. Man cannot properlydiscover and develop when confined to the familiar, especially the enforced familiar ofother men. That deranges the psyche. It suffocates capacity to expand into newdomains of knowledge, experience, achievement, and consciousness.

Addison wrote:

When Liberty is gone,Life grows insipid and has lost its relish.5

It were as though those who hate or fear freedom wished to excise the depth,spontaneity, and wonder from life to substitute the known, consistent, and safe. Thatstifles the aliveness of life, replaces awe and reverence with obligation to conform toconvention and officialdom. Society becomes a herd of humans of which government ismaster and shepherd. Such a situation is an expression of the assumption that ultimatetranscendence is not alive and man is merely matter and therefore fair game. If theethical, spiritual, and free-will dimensions of man are denied, no reason exists toprevent man from treating other men as so much dirt. In such case anything is allowed,and dog-eat-dog power struggles are the rule. It is reverence for life and its inherentdivinity which alone elevates man above the food chain.

Majority vote

Because man has a right to live, he has a right to use force to defend his life and the

consequences of its utilization called property. He has no right to engage in initiatoryforce which transgresses against the innocent, unalienable rights of others. By thesame logic, man likewise has the right to resist or not acquiesce to any man-madeinstitutions engaging in initiatory force, since such impositions are violations of rightsman possesses by virtue of his existence.

5 Addison, Cato , II, 3.


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Because man is an autonomous, free-will, sentient being, his life is his choices. Everychoice is a vote. All thoughts or impulses acted or not acted upon are votes. Everypenny spent or not spent is a vote. Such real life votes are genuine. Political voting isto decide which men and policies are to control masses of people through a hugecoercion machinery which is unreal, illicit, futile, and destructive ab initio.

The U.S. political system exists on the pretext of being validated and determined bymajority vote. People have legitimized states through democracy, believing thatthey can thereby configure government and control the actions of officials. This is atragic if not fatal error. It is off-the-scale incomprehensibly stupid and unethical. In sodoing the populace does not realize that they are surrendering, perhaps irreversibly,their lives, rights, freedom, and destinies. Nor do they comprehend that quantity ofopinions does not constitute truth and cannot sanction the intrinsically illicit. There isnothing either sacred, real, ethical, or efficacious in the will of the majority. Becausepeople can hate and kill, or breed like rabbits, or covet their neighbors wealth, is novalid basis for invoking state power.

The faults of democracy are systemic and irreparable:

Majority vote does not, and cannot, eliminate unwarranted uses of force. Itestablishes a platform of ersatz authority from which politicians launch an unendingarray of initiatory force controls that otherwise would be recognized as criminal.

Democracy does nothing to erase or mitigate the fact that the state remains the soleinstitution with right to engage in official violence. All exercises of that force self-validatea government's authority to engage in it, regardless of the pretenses under whichactions are undertaken. Every action of state is prima facie affirmation of its allegedright to exist, and serves first and foremost to entrench and reiterate its falselypresumed sovereignty.

Democracy purports to grant a preeminent cover of legitimacy, out of which electedgovernments endlessly wield legal violence. This is ever and always supremely for astate's own sake, but attention from that centrality is deflected by involving the people ininterminable schemes that appear to be for their betterment. Improvementsnecessarily occur, however, by furthering some segments of society at the expense ofothers and/or all. It is not possible for any government action to occur without causingharm to some segment or aspect of society.

Democracy cannot produce justice, advancement, or peace. It permanently establishescontention, power pressures, and discord between individuals and groups, all of whomwant government to enforce their priorities. It becomes impossible for society to beeither civil or tranquil. Life is forced to be absorbed in disputes over competing uses oflegal force. Debates are acrimonious, replete with name-calling and recriminations.Those whose causes or candidates lose elections feel moderately to severely dis-

enfranchised. Turmoil, conflict, and discontent become ensconced in the social order.Voting is not self-sanctifying. The process cannot validate what a voter may wish to seeput into effect or grant any ethical or lawful authority for resulting officials to implementthe issues voted on. What is illicit remains so regardless of quantity of opinions orphony trappings like secret ballots. If 17 people in a town of 20 vote to kill, injure, orplunder the remaining 3, such majority vote does not legitimize the process. Yet alldemocracies do the same things on mass scales that supposedly makes them right. Ifeveryone uses the law to steal from everybody, is the process ratified because ofcomplexity or quantity?


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At what number does the practice magically become virtuous? A hundred people? Athousand? A million? An entire country? The world? If the majority and electedofficials are fools or knaves, and transform the law into tools of their own purposes, isthat warranted? If not, where is the defense against the process?

Representative governments purport to be legitimate because the populace is involved

through democracy. It were as though democracy were an alchemy that couldtransmute otherwise false and wrong principles into institutions, processes, andpractices that are true, good, ethical, and efficacious. In reality, all that happens is thatthe error, blame, and deceit are disbursed throughout society. Numbers or rusescannot transform the innately wrong into the genuinely just. Majority vote cannot justifyoverruling the rights of anyone, let alone everyone. Involving people in governmentthrough democracy does not ennoble government; it drags down both society andpolitics into a mutual morass.

Is anyone authorized to send a bill to anybody he wishes as is implied in all politicalwealth re-distribution programs. By such logic one is entitled to confront anyone atrandom and say: I have needs I can't pay for, so I'll send my bills to you and you canpay them instead of me. Oh, you won't pay because they're my debts? But I need

things out of life. If you won't pay my bills I could take a gun and rob youbut thatwould get me in trouble. So, to get around that I'll send my bills to 'government' andpoliticians can transform law into an instrument of plunder to steal from you at legalgunpoint to pay for what I need.

H. L. Mencken wrote:

[Politicians] have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principledevice to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something theycan't get and promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten, that promise isworth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In otherwords, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanceauction of the sale of stolen goods.6

Political clamoring for a piece of the pie is really clawing for a part of the prey.Everyone is entitled to his world view, needs, desires, propensities, and goals. But thefact that there is an institution that can be used to seek their fulfillment through coercioninstead of free, benign, and mutually voluntary means is the crux of the matter.

If abstaining from voting enabled one to remain immune from the outcome, there wouldbe somewhat more legitimacy for the practice. An election would be confined to thosechoosing to be subject to the results. As it is, democracy is just another scheme toeliminate freedom and stake legal claim on the lives of others. It is a way to submergeindividual sovereignty in a herd mentality so that people can be dominated, used,restricted, and plundered by whatever clique currently holds political power.

Majority vote cannot justify using law to coerce and steal. Neither can the fact thatsome ideology may exist somewhere that purports to condone the exercise of violenceto steal and subjugate because it is law. Nor, of course, does brute force vindicate thelawmaking process itself. Real law is the laws of being. The very idea that men canmake laws is sickening arrogance. Neither majority vote, nor ideology, nor brute force

6 H. L. Mencken, quoted in "Financial Survival," Vol. I (Clackamas, OR, 1990), p. 41.


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own the rights of those on whom politicians would impose legal force on the basis ofsuch disastrous hubris.

Is it sane to think that one must engage in political voting to fulfill his life? Must onerelinquish his life to the machinations of politics to better it? Does not fulfilling one'sunique nature, duty, and responsibilities require ones full effort and devotion?

Dilettantes and half-hearted, non-single-minded people rarely succeed in life. Dopeople have the time and energy to divert to maintaining control over a governmentinstead of their own lives? Do people not have the right to maintain as much of theirresources and control of their destinies as possible without being forced to give up whatis justly theirs to leaders who would replace their life meaning with governmentdetermination and control?

Trying to rule anyone other than oneself is unethical and aberrant. Trying to rulemasses of people is insane. Everyone has his hands full with his own life. One isfortunate indeed to fulfill his life, attain self-sufficiency, and eradicate weaknesses andwrongs in himself without trying to transform and control other people by the innatelyimpossible, injurious, and blameworthy means of government.

Voting is an extremely sloppy process. It occurs in a quasi-vacuum with no actualconnection to the people and issues upon which it allegedly bears. One goes into abooth and marks an X for who knows what reason or with what knowledge. There isno contract formed, no agency agreement established, no designation of responsibilityon either side, no connection between the one who votes and the elected officials whoare then beyond direct control of the voter in uses of political power. Does votingchange anything? What is the right for the change to be made, by whom, at whoseexpense, by what mechanics, and with what legitimacy and soundness?

Can anybody take unsigned pieces of paper such as ballots into court and claim theyare lawfully binding on anyone? What kind of direct, valid, and lawfully enforceablecontract can ever be formed by and between a voter and a politician? A votercould form a contractual agreement for mutual exchange of goods, services, valuableconsideration, including forming an agency authorization to perform certain specific andlegitimate duties bearing on his own life, rights, and property, but such a course wouldbe purely contractual, with each party acting in an individual capacity, and no politics orgovernment would be part of the equation.

No one short of a larcenous mental incompetent would sign away generalized powers ofattorney to someone (especially a stranger) to engage in open-ended acts of violenceagainst himself and others. That is giving ones life away and committing criminal actsagainst oneself and ones neighbors. One may be entitled to self-enslavement, but hasabsolutely no right to contract with someone else to harm, dominate, or steal from thirdparties. Yet that is what the inconceivably specious and absurd process of votingpresumes to validate. If something is illicit when purportedly authorized by mutually

agreed express contract, it is preposterous to think that it is rendered magicallylegitimate by the unutterable farce and non-contract of voting. J ust as a murdercontract is not valid for absence of lawful object, the implied or constructed contractspurporting to authorize politicians the right to engage in violent and illegitimate acts onbehalf of the state are likewise contractually and lawfully nugatory.

No one has a right to dominate anyone other than himself. Politicians cannot derivelegitimate authority to rule others from conjured-up fabrications of the mind such asvoting or democracy. Voting is a chimera, a non-contract on the basis of whichpoliticians purport to be authorized to exercise illicit force on behalf of figments.


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No one can go to court with unsigned papers and claim they are contracts binding onanyone. If contracts as supposedly form the basis of legitimacy for democraticgovernments to act were adjudicated between individuals, any legitimate court woulddeclare them utterly void in conveying any right, power, or obligation. Yet the statepasses laws, collects taxes, obligates, imprisons, and kills on mass scales with noauthority but its own pretexts of power and people's disengaged and specious

acquiescence expressed through voting.7

No voter will agree with any candidate on all issues. Voting for or against someonedoes little if anything to identify policies to be effected. One may vote for a politician onsome overriding issue, e.g. abortion, while being adversely affected by policies thepolitician advocates on other issues, e.g. taxes and spending. Moreover, there is noguarantee that what a politician says expresses his real sentiments, or that he will notchange his mind once elected, or that the elected man will not bow to greater pressuresor even be able to do anything about an issue if he wished.

No one knows anyone else well enough to grant him power over ones life (as well ashaving no right whatsoever to grant anyone power over other peoples lives). No onesexistence is superficial. Even to live a lifetime with someone does not enable fathoming

his/her totality or intricacies. Voting (like governments in general) makes a mockery ofuniqueness and depth. Does one vote for some particular politician because he hasgood TV ads, a nice smileor because his opponent is worse and one must engage ina bizarre attempt to defend himself from people and policies he may consider morehostile to his interests? In such case one votes for an evil of two lessers.

Economic votes are genuine. Political votes are hopeless in advance. Economic votesare choices involving voluntary exchanges of mutual benefit. Political votes are for whatother people and policies are to exercise power, i.e. elimination of free choice.Economic votes are decisions dealing with what are to varying degrees within one'scontrol. Political votes are combination pool shots in the dark, trying to guess who willbe best at using a massive coercion machinery which is illegitimate to begin with. Witheconomic votes, if one votes no, he simply keeps his money. With political votes, ifone votes no and others over-rule him, he loses both money and freedom.

Democracy is the delusion that some vague consensus can or should be made thelocus of sovereignty and platform from which coercion may be exercised. That is farremoved from justice, freedom, universal rights, being in unity/harmony with existence,or fulfilling one's life through genuine accomplishments and self-actualization. Trying toachieve conditions externally through contrivance and coercion that have not beenattained internally and existentially, i.e. genuinely, is trying to make the imaginary realthrough unremitting exercises of organized force. That is considerably worse thanfutility. It is outright catastrophe and mass suicide.

If the masses are to be led, it implies that they are deficient. What, therefore, is the

value of their consensus? If the majority are fools and the majority rules, the society isruled by fools. If people are so utterly lacking in acumen as to fall for so vacuous and

7 Voting in law is a statutory privilege by which the voter signifies assent to and participation in government

policy-making. By registering to vote one forms an adhesion contract with the state. As with any contract, to accept

the benefits is to incur the obligations, which in this case are invented and changed at will by the state without

obligation of disclosure to the pathetic suckers fulfilling their civic duty. Shades of Faust selling his soul to the

devil and Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of porridge.


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inane a phenomenon as voting, democracy, majority rule, etc., what merit can be evensuperficially alleged to inhere in their alleged collective decisions? As J ohn Drydenwrote: The most may err as grossly as the few.8 Sherman put it more tersely: Voxpopuli, vox humbug.9 Better to let folly remain in individual and localized realms thantransform it into power and law.

People could vote on whether the moon is made of green cheese, or if the world is flat.Of what significance is voting to the truth of what is? As for what should be, whoknowsexcept that everyone lives, chooses, and acts, and a new configurationemerges every instant anew from the sum total of an unfathomable immensity ofnatures, thoughts, actions, and interactions of countless spiritually autonomous, free-willpeople with each other and existence. Trying to supersede and determine that byvoting lends color of legitimacy to the con men in power to wield a huge coercionmachinery by which the very masses who voted are enslaved, exploited, plundered, andultimately destroyed. Ultimate disintegration is guaranteed by the cause/effectoperational mechanics by which every government functions. Without functioning bycoercion under color of law an institution might be something, but it is not a government.

The corrosive mechanics of the state are equally damaging whether wielded by one

man, a group of men, or all, or whether for good motives or evil. The innately andunredeemably fraudulent, self-destructive, and unethical nature and consequences ofpower nevertheless underlie and imbue all governmental processes. Whether one isfined, imprisoned, or killed for good reasons or otherwise renders one nonethelesspoorer, incarcerated, or dead. God protect us all from good people attempting toachieve beneficial ends by the hopelessly evil means of politics.

What is right does not need to be voted on; it needs to be acted on by people as eachindividual uniquely perceives it. Voting will neither substitute for personal choice andaction, nor can it transform something imaginary and wrong into reality and virtue.

Conversely, how much knowledge and right does any alleged leader have to decidematters for a deficient populace, and thereby deny people the capacity to choose,learn, experience life on their own terms, change and grow based on perceiving thereality of ones life-situations, and attain to fulfillment of their own unique natures viafollowing the path unique to each individual? Everyone, including a leader, sees lifefrom his own unique perspectives, and cannot be expected to see it from another'svantage point. Nor can a politician, having only deadly force as his tool to attempt toachieve results in conformity with his perspectives, do anything genuinely constructiveabout fulfilling other people's lives even if he were able to fully and accuratelyexperience their subjective experience. Even if acting selflessly, a public servant canfunction only on behalf of his own conceptions of the country, the public, or othergeneralizations as he abstractly (and cosmically inadequately) conceives of them. Thatwill necessarily be different than the conditions and needs of the particular individualsover whom the criteria are imposed.

Even if voting were unanimous, which in the public domain it never is, there is noactual connection between a won election and right to exercise power over anyone.Consent of the governed is a fiction. Consenting to the enslavement of anyone is

8 John Dryden,Absalom and Achitophel, 1681.

9 William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to his wife, June 2, 1863.


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nugatory in advance. Moreover, there is no such entity as the governed to sanctionthe violation. The governed is a collectivist fantasy. It is also a cruel one, sincepeople are browbeaten by guilt into submitting to some alleged social or nationalbetterment to which they must sacrifice their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

Democracy is mass folly. It is like people agreeing: Let's all have a huge system that

enslaves us. We'll keep (hopefully) enough freedom to vote about various forms andstyles of our subjugation, maintaining the illusion that we are exerting some control overwhat is actually going on, and call the whole thing liberty. It is a sort of invent yourown Moloch. What more secure basis can a tyranny have than the illusion of enslavedpeople that they are free?

Majority vote does not guarantee elimination or change in 98% of a government. Themass of government employees and career bureaucrats remain regardless of anelection. To these people, elected officials are looked upon as temporary residents.McMaster wrote: At the federal level today, for every elected official there are 5,500unelected bureaucrats.10 Nor is the small elected fraction prevented from exercisingthe error, waste, and abuse inherent in the nature of government and potential in thediscretionary powers attained. Voting guarantees one only an indeterminate influence

in changing the particular persons who subjugate and plunder him. Players change; thegame remains.

Democracy grants only an illusion that people are deciding their leaders and the policiesof their government. Although the party line is that elected officials can be turned outof office by the people through voting, with votes tabulated by computer it may beimpossible to know if results of an election are true or fixed. Even if any electoralprocess were accurate, however, the potentiality to be voted out of office merely meansthat politicians must be even more deceptive and prevaricating than if the pretense ofdemocracy did not exist and despotismthe honest truth of the situationruled nakedand undisguised. Moreover, the clever and powerful appoint as candidates for electedoffices only men carefully selected and groomed as puppets whereby the would-berulers of the world ensure that only their own agents can be elected. No matter forwhich straw-dog one votes, state power increases and social power declines. For thestate, the whole game is Heads I win, tails you lose.11

Through democracy one is forced to be a party to all manner of profligacy andillegitimacy with no recourse but going to prison. Tax money is squandered on a cosmicscale, draining the economy to give endlessly to those who have not earned it, andused to regulate people who have an inherent right to be free of such suppression. FewAmericans seem to understand that the IRS is a private intelligence-gathering, revenue-collecting agency of the world banking Cartel that has placed the US in Chapter 11bankruptcy via the paper-money banking swindle of lending bookkeeping credits andcharging interest thereon until the victimized government is rendered hopelesslyinsolvent. Taxes are payments on the bankruptcy reorganization, meaning they go,

not to run the Government, but to the private coffers of a few Elite whose identities, andeven existences, are unknown to the nave mass of Americans.

10 R. E. McMaster, Jr.,No Time For Slaves, Research Publications, (Phoenix, Arizona, 1986).

11 Anyone in society falling for the election con is like being a merchant in a neighborhood in which all shop-

owners are subject to a Mafia protection-extortion racket, on whom a Mafia representative calls and announces:

Our Crime Family is holding an election on your behalf. Would you prefer Luigi or Vito for your enforcer?


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Equally criminal is the act of siphoning off countless billions of dollars of the Americanpeople's earnings to be thrown away in foreign aid where the plundered wealth goes tocorrupt officials' Swiss accounts, support their lavish life-styles, build up armaments,finance endless wars and rumors of wars, and strengthen capacity for the receivinggovernments to keep their people more pervasively subjugated. Citizens are forced tobe bound by treaties and obligations made, acquiesce helplessly to wars waged, and

suffer hostility from other peoples of the world who are directly or indirectly strong-armed by foreign policy. No American can know how much of his life, rights, andresources the Government has forfeited without his consent, and Americans aredespised and endangered all over the world because of the actions of theirgovernment over which the hapless American people have no control.

The United States is a statist, indeed Fascist, nation.12 Everything is either overtlystructured or at least regulated by government. Roads, schools, courts, lawenforcement, public services, armed services, space program, and so on ad nauseamare functions of fiat/force and not freedom. All have structured in them the negative by-products, unavoidable weaknesses, artificiality, and degenerate consequences of themeans used to effect them. Society is imbued with the influences and people cannotlocalize the source of their malaise.

Economically, people may want to cut government spending in general but rarelyanything specific, and certainly not benefits to themselves. When masses of citizens tryto receive back more than they pay out the result is collective bankruptcy. This isexacerbated by the treachery of trying to disguise the process through making benefitsconcentrated and costs diffuse. Society becomes pervaded with a deep frustration bornof an impossibility to discern who is responsible for or deserves what. The result is atrashing of clarity and sound values along with an ever-increasing centralization ofpower. Tytler's oft-quoted observation bears repeating:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist onlyuntil the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the publictreasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidatepromising the most benefits from the public treasurywith the result thatdemocracy collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed bydictatorship.

Statism, democratized or otherwise, weaves dishonest principles and overtly falseeconomic, legal, and existential ones into the fabric of life. The influences are pervasiveand inescapable, like pouring ink into water. Some of the fatally treacherous criteriawhich government infuses into society include:

Through use of law one can obtain something for nothing;

Government and society owe people a living, a right to be taken care of;

Stealing is valid when done by the law;

One is justified in using the state to force others to conform to his own worldview;

12 Note the fasces on the walls behind the President of the United States when addressing both Houses of

Congress, e.g. for the State of the Union Address.


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One can escape from the existential obligation to be self-reliant and self-responsible by dependency on government.

If both governments and people using them may stake legal claim on the lives andresources of others, on what basis are freedom and property ownership evenmeaningful concepts? If people have a legitimate entitlement to the rights and wealth

of others, what portion can they claim? On what justification? Who are the ultimatearbiters of the matter?

Democracy and self-government

Any kind of government implies that people have neither the right nor ability to rulethemselves, i.e. live for the sake of the self-responsibility, self-determination, learning,and becoming anchored in reality which is the point of everyones life. Yet out of thisdeficiency which allegedly necessitates being externally ruled one is neverthelesssupposed to know how to vote for other men who would govern him. If people are soinept or corrupt as to be unable to manage their own lives, and thus require beinggoverned, it is absurd to expect them at the same time to be so wise as to know how tovote for people and processes which are beyond their understanding or direct ability to

control.

No one can be more self-governing through elections which serve as a cover forcharlatans to remove matters from his province of control than he is in statelessfreedom where all votes are free choices, express true self-governing, and count for reallife. If people are unable to manage the direct/self-responsible/free/economic, willacting on the farce of voting to attempt (hopelessly) to control use of the (illegitimateand destructive) inaccessible/coercive/political save them? The process is self-evidenttravesty.

No external system, including any variants of democracy, is actual self-government.Self-government is governing oneself, autonomously acting on one's judgment andconscience. Any kind of deferring of sovereignty and locus of control from the heart,mind, and soul of each unique being is default on life. It is other governing regardlessof all labels and trappings to the contrary.

As soon as one submits to the authority of an external government, grants it the right todecide matters of his life, he has abandoned self-government. He no longer makescrucial choices and judgments for himself; other people make such decisions for him.

What one primally trusts and depends on must be within oneself. To accede to anexternal organization is to forfeit self-determination. There is at that juncture a loss ofcontrol that is at best difficultif not to impossibleto retrieve. The momentum andinertia increasingly amass to tidal-wave proportions. One cannot live by self-government and other-government at the same time. The two will be vastly different in

perspectives and priorities, and demand contrary things of oneself. No man can servetwo masters.

If people are not self-governing, neither they nor anyone else can fabricate a self-government, i.e. a democracy, that can compensate for or accomplish what theycould not be and do when left with their full freedom, options, and resources. All suchefforts are not only absurd but enormous losses. No one who is deficient becomessounder, fuller, and richer by surrendering his life, rights, and property to the control ofother men. People who live foolishly cannot be saved by relying on an external


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government. They merely depend for security, order, and progress on charlatanswielding endless destructive force.

Abdicating control of life to governments is a kind of spiritual suicide. It projects contentand centrality from where it actually resides onto an artificial seat of power in the form ofa man-made coercion machinery. That forfeits the possibility to establish life on a

sound foundation. Life is made permanently unstable, impossible to bring into focus,and perpetually at odds with itself. The populace becomes embroiled in a ceaselesslychurning mix of compulsion, violence, and artificiality.

Democracy is supposed to transmute and salvage this nonsense because the peopleare the government. By voting, people purportedly keep their sovereignty, hold thegovernment in check, and relegate it to the status of serving their will. For that,however, everyone would need both total knowledge of what absolutely everyone ingovernment does and direct control over all of their actions. That is of courseimpossible. No one in government can be responsible to individual members of thepublic, or he would be the explicit agent of a private party. Then there would be nogovernment. There would be only direct contracts between autonomous peoplewhichis the right way anyway.

Politics functions on a far different basis. A myriad of people with diverse and ever-changing natures, needs, and priorities are lumped together into groups, e.g. nation,society, or various sub-classifications like races, industries, ages, needs, etc. A statewields discretionary power on behalf of abstractions. Its perspectives and priorities areentirely different from those of individuals.

When the two domains interface it is always at the supremacy of the state, and directlyor indirectly a loss to the citizenry. People either suffer the naked might of the state'slegalized violence or receive benefits consisting of the return of some small fraction oftheir state-expropriated rights or resources. In short, the existence of the state and allactions constitute a net loss to society. On what, then, are people voting?

Holders of political power are always the few, not the many. To say that in democracythe people are the government is sophistry. To equate democracy with freedom issheer silliness. Government officials are not controlled by the public but by powerfulElite and monetary interests. The vast majority of Americans have no idea whatsoeveras to what people and organizations actually operate the Government. What is obvious,however, is that U.S. democracy is a cacophony of petitions and demands forunearned financial largess and legal control over others. The truly major benefitsaccrue first of all to the hidden power at the core and secondarily to powerful, well-organized groups at expense of real or potential competition and the less well-organizedgeneral public, i.e. taxpayers who pay all the bills. The people pay through the teeth forfinancing their own subjugation.

Mencken wrote of the fallacy of democracy:The light began to dawn, I believe, at the precise moment when theprohibitionists ceased arguing that prohibition would cure all the sorrows of theworld, and began arguing that it ought to be submitted to simply because it wasthe lawin other words, at the moment when they introduced the doctrine of lawenforcement. That doctrine, it soon became obvious, had little foundation inlogic; it was almost purely mystical. What it amounted to was a denial that thecitizens of a free state had any natural and inalienable rights at all. If, bywhatever chicanery, a law was passed ordering them to cut off their children's


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ears, then they were bound to obey. If, by the same chicanery, a law waspassed forbidding them to wash the same ears, they were equally bound to obey.

It needed little gift for ratiocination to penetrate to the absurdity of this doctrine.Or to grasp the fact of its extreme antiquity. Even a moron could see it wassimply the ancient dogma of the king's divine right in a new false face. It could

not be disentangled from the concept of the citizen as a mere subject. Abovehim stood an occult something called the government, a force distinct from thepeople and superior to them. Did the people, under democracy, create it andgive it the breath of life? Then, once created, it was nevertheless distinct fromthem and superior to them. They were forbidden to resist it. By the moreextreme prohibitionists they were forbidden even to denounce it.

...The plain people suddenly began to see that a vast machine for oppressingthem had been fabricated, and that once it got into full working order they wouldhave a dreadful time escaping from it. More, they began to look behind themachine to the force operating itthat is, to the potent and inscrutable powercalled the government. And what they saw was simply a gang of menmenexactly like themselvesmen, in many cases, inferior to themselves.13

To democratize illusion, wishful thinking, hubris, avarice, weakness, enslavement, andpredatory propensities does not transmute them into wisdom, generosity, strength,freedom, and virtue. It establishes a nightmare by making such ills and evils into law.

Conclusion

Because one wants to live left or right, be liberal or conservative, does not meanthat an organized coercion machinery should exist to gratify his propensities or enforcethem over everyone else. In freedom, the consequences of all natures and actionsreveal themselvesin physical and mental health, spiritual well-being, socialrelationships, economic success or failure. Those affected by decisions should be asmuch as possible the ones who make them. Only in freedom is it possible for rights,rewards, and responsibilities to coincide.

Many people seek refuge in governments to escape self-responsibility, avoid facingthemselves and truths of life, and fend off consequences of actions. That is not onlycowardly, spiritually false, and intellectually sloppy, but delusional and absurd, since noone can abnegate his own free will (what he is), and natural law ensures that everyoneexperiences the exact consequences of his actions. No external forces can negate thelaw of karma, including the most gargantuan governments operating through the mostmassive and pervasive exercises of force possible to muster. Any belief that one is notself-responsible and can escape the consequences of his own thoughts and actions byreliance on the actions of a government is self-delusion deifying a man-made institutionattempting to effect the existentially impossible. Clarity, integrity, and justice are

dissociated, lost in a dazzling smear of political complexity and immensity. Suchdistraction provides no shelter. It does not fool natural law. It is a siren call luring oneaway from truth and self-realization into a mirage the pursuit of which results in certainexhaustion and dissolution.

13 H. L. Mencken, The Bathtub Hoax, (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1958), pp. 182-183.


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Were democracy to have any grounds of legitimacy (which it does not), it would have topresuppose individual autonomy and free will. Otherwise there could be no basis ofvalidity for the voting. Who could vote if not someone with authority to do so? Of whatsignificance would the results be? Only one's autonomy can grant him the right toabnegate it. Autonomy likewise gives one the right to keep it. No numbers orconsensus can justly remove freedom, sovereignty, and rights from anyone. Yet If

people preserved their autonomy, democracy in particulargovernments ingeneralwould disappear.

No one can confer on anyone a right to use force for any purpose other than his ownself-defense. No one is entitled to exercise, or delegate to others to exercise, any rightsor powers other than those which he himself possesses. No one has any such right inthe first place. All proposed pretexts purporting to grant third parties the right to use thepolitical machinery to enslave, rob, meddle, and kill are utterly nugatory.

Granting generalized power of attorney to other men to exercise power over oneself isdefault on one's existence, giving away rights, surrendering control over life, throwingaway capacity to become master of one's destiny. Perhaps one has such a right withrespect to himself.14 No one, however, has any such right concerning others. Voting

(or any other delegation or designation) for third parties to have authority over anyoneother than oneself is patently unethical and unlawful. All the consensus and conventionin the universe cannot grant an ethical right where none exists.

Votingputting an X in a boxforms no contract, grants no rights, establishes noagency agreement, validates no policies, conveys no authority for anyone to act in anymanner, let alone over other living beings on whom one has no claim. Democracy is adisgusting farce. It is embarrassing that the mass of mankind, including otherwiseseemingly intelligent people, lend credence to a sham any third grade child should beable to see through.

Freedom does not require justification: coercion does. The burden of validating forcefalls on the user. Since only self-defense and rectitude can legitimize force, and onlyeach individual can decide whether such just force is to be used on his behalf,governments are usurpers of life to which they have no right at all.

The only way society can be built up soundly is from a foundation of mutually voluntaryinterchanges between free people. Compulsion structures tension and defects into thefabric of social and economic relationships. One-to-one interactions betweenindividuals are real, direct, and primal. The only ethical and existentially valid way forpeople to relate, and hence for civilization to emerge and subsist, is for everyone to givevalue for value on a one-to-one basis. There are genuine and honorable ways to dealwith poverty, injustice, and predatory behavior. It is neither sane nor just to rely on anorganization that not only engages in the abuses against which it claims to protect butemploys them on enormously vaster scales than could otherwise occur.

14 It can be argued that no one has the right to abnegate his true nature and lien his un-a-lien-able rights, since all

presumption of right to do so involves the formation of a bona fide contract between the abnegator and the

agnegatee. To form a valid contract requires that one be capable of contracting, i.e. not be a juvenile or insane

person, whereby engaging in such an insane act as throwing ones life away to unknown parties by agreeing to be

subject to a government might well be considered inherently null and void in law.

Just and Democracy

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