The Reality of the Influence of 'The Myth'

I seems like the tragedy of the commons as applied to politics. Given that it's all about perception; through the vote, political power is available to all and you better get yours cause that's what everyone else will do when they get their access.

There is no collective will except the will

of the beast. It is too much to expect that millions of voters can in any way get together and decide what shall be in the collective interest. The best hope on such a scale is that an enlightened elite can foist such on the people. Hence, the constitution.

Unfortunately, even the enlightened tend to underestimate the capacity for corruption of political power.

TCL,

Yes, there are "minarchists" in the libertarian camp, my point being that it's the nature of the state to devour its host. We have a constitution, after all, that clearly limits the powers of a government that now exercises unlimited power.

David White,

I don't know what your link is, but it dosn't seem to be working, I just get an error message.

As for my post, I wasn't giving my personal opinions on the state. I was just saying that for a person to be defined as a libertarian they do not HAVE to be a proponent of disbanding the nation state, though they CAN be.

The Cynical Libertarian,

If you had it, would you want LESS cancer or NO cancer? How about restricting the cancer to "national defense"? But no, even THAT is a myth:

http://www.mises.org/store/product1.aspx?Product_ID=171

I don't see what the irrationality of voting has to do with libertarianism. It's an interesting and, I think quite true, idea, but it's not something specific to libertarianism (I am sure there are libertarians who disagree with it, and I am sure there are non-libertarians who agree with it). Libertarianism is not inherently anti-voting, anti-democracy or anti-state*.

*To the point of wanting no nation states to exist. This might be the opinion of some libertarians but it not required to be a libertarian. Libertarianism is, however, anti-state so far as wanting LESS state, not NO state.

Democracy is a stupid idea, because people are stupid. This was known since the time of Socrates, if not earlier. however, our representative republic is the next best thing to philosopher kings, so far. i'm sure it would be much better with some edits/repair to the Constitution too.

re muirgeo above: no govt = no freedom either because then you have a "state of nature" and you will have a govt very soon...whether you like it or not!

Ahhh, got it. Your saying that it's only rational to put any energy into voting if your vote is going to be the tie-breaker and the probability of being the tie-breaker is, for all practical purposes, zero.

So, I have to assume that since most everyone else who participates in this particular forum is a rational libertarian, that none of you bother to vote? After all, even taking the time to go and pull the lever (or punch the chad, or whatever), is a waste of effort and therefore irrational.

I vote. As do the majority of Americans at least once in their life. I suppose Bryan Caplan could use that fact to prove that American voters are, by definition, irrational.

I vote because I believe it is a duty for all citizens. The fact that it is irrational from Libertarians' perspective means little to me.

I also believe that preparing to vote is a duty. It would make no difference to me, regarding the amount of effort I expend to study the issues, whether or not I knew that my vote would be a tie-breaker. Simply doesn't matter.

It would also follow that others who irrationally vote because of duty would also put in the effort to study the issues.

muirgeo,

The corporate (fascist) state depends as much on the corruption as any other modern state and will colllapse when the global fiat fraud collapses, beginning with the dollar. Just read the USAToday article "Taxpayers on hook for $59 trillion." These are liabilities that the US government cannot honor and will accordingly inflate away, never mind that it will use the euro-like amero to cover up this fact.

The bottom line: As historian Will Durant said, "Money is the root of all civilization," the corruption of which is unsustainable and dooms all states dependent on it to collapse.

It's only a matter of time.

@ Bret:

If no one voted, then MY vote would be worth something.

David,

Thanks for a interesting post. Great points and lots for me to mull over.


I guess my concern is moral authority will be only a nice concept unrecognized by the Corporatist Fascist State that will devolve from a "free market" economy. That same moral authority has existed through all sorts of slavery, authoratarianism and dictatorships. You are against aggregation of control into the state but the economics supported here would /has pretty much allowed for a world run by one massive corporate state. I think the Carlyle Group has more influence on world politics then George W Bush.

And no I don't support the status quo. I want greater representation of the people, I want fairness in the market place (good and minimalist rules and regulation) I want money separated from politics, I want open government and I want severe jail sentences for politicians and their cronies who abuse the public trust.

Unfortunately the nature of modern weaponry makes the idea of independent small states impractical.

muirgeo,

The state as we know it did not come into existence until the 13th century and has only been the most important of all modern institutions since the 17th. Furthermore, as Emory University philosopher Donald Livingston points out, "the nineteenth century was a hundred years' war against smaller polities of all kinds in favor of unification, centralization, and consolidation, and the twentieth century was an eighty year's war between the giants created in the nineteenth century."

And while we can expect further unification, centralization, and consolidation in the early 21st century -- including the creation of an EU-like North American Union: http://www.thought-criminal.org/2007/02/09/the-... -- these mega-states are doomed to collapse once the corruption of money (upon which all states now depend) has finally run its course.

As for the non-existence of a truly free society, the fact is that any society exists only insofar as it retains sufficient power vis-a-vis the state, as the total state is everywhere and always doomed to fail, being as a cancer on its host. And as the market is fully capable of protecting the lives, liberty, and property of a given society, one can hope that with the demise of the modern state and the subsequent devolution of power back to smaller and smaller polities, experiments in stateless societies will be undertaken.

Moreover, the notion that there can't be "government or society with out some loss of liberty" is true only insofar as one forfeits the "right" to aggress against the lives, liberty, and property of others. However, since retaining this "right" is but to be ruled by the Law of the Jungle, which is no law at all, it really has nothing at all to do with liberty, which is purely a social -- as in civil -- construct.

Lastly, Lew Rockwell doesn't need "data" to support his claims; he only needs moral authority. For the non-recognition in today's world of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property does not vitiate that right, nor does it in any way delegitimize the struggle to realize it. Sadly, people such as yourself, who support the status (as in statist) quo, only make the struggle that much more difficult.

Bret,

You confuse two different propositions. No one claims that the outcomes of (honest) elections are not determined by the way voters cast their ballots. Obviously, if a few million more voters had voted for Nixon rather than Kennedy in 1960, Nixon would have taken the Presidential Oath of Office on January 20, 1961 rather than JFK.

But just as surely, no one can deny -- or, rather, no one can deny with any intellectual legitimacy -- that in the act of casting a ballot, the outcome of the election from EACH VOTER'S perspective will not turn on how (or whether) he or she votes.

Anyone who insists that each individual vote matters is elevating romantic wishes above palpable reality.

You balding analogy also doesn't hold up. With each loss of a strand of hair, you do have less hair; you're closer to being bald even though the visible results are nil for each hair strand that is lost. An election is different. There are no gradations from Kerry to Bush; the result will be either all Bush in the White House for the next term or all Kerry in the White House for the next term. If a candidate has a vote lead over another candidate of more than a two votes, then any one voter who would have voted differently will not make the losing candidate less of a losing candidate or the winning candidate more of a winning candidate.

Don Boudreaux wrote: "No matter how Sam or Suzy votes, or whether Sam or Suzy vote, the outcome of any election will be no different."

That's the crux of Bryan's argument? Hmmmm.

It reminds me of the argument I use to prove that I'm not bald: I once had a full head of hair. One hair fell out. Was I then bald? No, clearly not. A second hair fell out. I still wasn't bald. Same for a third. Indeed, for N hairs falling out, having just one more fall out didn't cause me to be bald. Therefore: (a) I must not be bald, and (b) no single hair falling out ("voting for baldness") made any difference. So, after this airtight proof, you can imagine my surprise when I look in the mirror and see a bald guy looking back at me.

Maybe it's just my unique bald perspective, but based on personal experience I'm really convinced that every hair (and vote) makes a difference.

Being somewhat more serious, yes, if any one Sam or Suzy stayed home and didn't vote or instead cast his or her vote arbitrarily, then I agree that it would almost never make a difference. But if EVERY Sam and Suzy (and John, Mary, Moshe, Sameen, Etc.) stayed home or voted arbitrarily, it looks to me like it would absolutely make a difference (I'd still have hair!!!).

So I guess I'm a little lost as to the nuance of Bryan's argument. Unfortunately, I won't have time to read the book so I guess I'll remain in the dark.

muirgeo,

Libertarians, properly speaking, are anti-state not anti-government. That is, the state is a form of government (the worse form), and libertarians simply believe enough in the self-organizing nature of society that it can function far better without territorial monopolies on the use of force (the minimal definition of the state, though no state so minimizes itself).

As Lew Rockwell puts it in a recent interview:

"To be anti-state is to hold the intellectual position that there is nothing that society needs that the state can do better than the market. If you hold that view, you are anti-state. ... I would defend the anti-state idea in every aspect of human life. The market is better in schools, energy, food, housing, charity, trade, consumer protection, justice, security, and even international relations. I know of no exceptions. ... The struggle for freedom is precisely this and no other."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/liberal-post-interview.html

as one Vladimir Lenin put it: "It is nonsense to make any pretense of reconciling the State and liberty."

Posted by: David White

That's actually an excellent quote. If I'm understanding it right, any "state" will require some loss of liberty. And I think that may be the crux of the what I would call the fallacy of libertarianism. You want complete liberty but you still want some sort of state....an impossibility.

Look at the illogic of Mr. Caplan. He proposes some solutions to democracy but how does he propose we adopt his solutions? With a vote???

Oh dear god, they're quoting Lenin...

::loads rifle::

;)

K writes:

"The great weakness of democracy is that people are inclined to vote for what benefits them personally rather than what might benefit the group."

No, the great weakness of democracy is that it descends into mob rule as soon as governmental protections of life, liberty, and property fall victim, inevitably, to the inherent fallacy that is the state. For mob rule is but mindless subservience to the ruling elites, which is why, as one Vladimir Lenin put it: "It is nonsense to make any pretense of reconciling the State and liberty."

Until and unless this is understood, we are but rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

No matter how Sam or Suzy votes, or whether Sam or Suzy vote, the outcome of any election will be no different.

What it really means is that the feedback connection between action (voting) and eventual consequences is stretched out of each voters perception. The perceived personal consequnces are nil.

By "no personal consequence" of voting I -- and Bryan (and others who write about this matter) -- mean only that no single voter will determine the outcome of an election. No matter how Sam or Suzy votes, or whether Sam or Suzy vote, the outcome of any election will be no different. Therefore, materially, once someone is in a voting booth, it costs that person absolutely nothing to cast a ballot one way or another -- no personal consequence from voting for candidate Jones or candidate Smith.

Of course, everyone will suffer or enjoy the consequences of the election's results.

The great weakness of democracy is that people are inclined to vote for what benefits them personally rather than what might benefit the group.

Even neglecting selfishness the group benefit is often uncertain while personal benefit is tangible.

So as democratic governments expand into financial redistribution each dollar is a positive feedback to more redistribution.

This is often said about direct welfare. But it is also true for social security, and for federal money to local schools and hospitals and for obvious pork earmarks.

It is true for military spending which keeps unneeded bases operating. And when a base is actually closed a perpetual federal program with the same number of jobs is almost always secured by the local representative.

Big government is good for government workers. And it remains good for them after retirement. And each has a family.

If the government simply dropped money from planes onto Collins CO one Sunday morning we would immediately see that the inhabitants liked that program.

Then, noticing that it would wreck the currency if expanded, they would urge it be annualized as ethnic celebration for the unique peoples of Collins.

Others have pointed out out that our government has become opaque - it may be impossible to know what a politican publicly advocates and what he actually works for behind the scenes.

The double speak works best if no matter is clear, no law is simple, and spending can be disguised. So that is what happens.

A crude but timely example is the Iraq funding just approved. It came with a minimum wage increase. Whatever one's view on either part, the bundling was to provide a CYA sound bite.

Don Boudreaux wrote: "And because voting is done without personal consequence"

No personal consequence? No matter how I vote? Really? Excellent. Glad to hear it. Then there is absolutely no reason for me not to vote for heavily redistribution and nannyist governmental policies. After all, there's no cost (personal consequences) to me. I'm not sure how that can be true, but I've heard it from a reliable source - an esteemed professor of economics at GMU.

How depressing. There seems to be no real answer. I suspect there is ultimately no way of escaping Darwinism....I only hoped we could really be different from all the other species and rise above. In some ways I think we did...if only for a moment.

Air Conditioning. Before its invention, Washington DC was an uninhabitable swamp in the summer, so everyone went home!

Don't they still knock off for the summer?

Perhaps we should use the term "non-rational" instead of irrational. Many do not vote on what they 'know', but on what they feel.

The politics of democracy are about manipulating the perceptions of the voter counting on their emotional reactions to fear issues.

What can we expect from a system that utilizes extortion as its main instrument of affect.

This certainly isn't a new issue. Political philosophers such as Tocqueville, Nitzche, Marx, and Mill have posed this problem for ages.

The Constitution was framed for three million people in thirteen sovereign states. When the first Congress met in 1790, there was one representative for every 30,000 people. By 1920, the U.S. population was 90 million, and Congress capped representation in the house at 435, where it remains today. Now, however, there are 300 million Americans, yielding a ratio of one representative for every 690,000 people. If we apply this ratio to 1790, there would have been only four members in the House of Representatives. Or, to put it another way, if the ratio of the framers existed today, there would be 10,000 members in the House.

Obviously, representative democracy has long been a farce in this country and only becomes more so with every passing day. The only way, then, for representative democracy to prevail is to dismantle Leviathan and devolve power back to the states. Once done, it would then be a matter of devolving power down to the county level (or multiples thereof), the ideal being the privatization of all property and the elimination of all political boundaries.

In other words, the elimination of the state and the establishment of a truly free society.

One could argue that the representative form of government has un-economies of scale. That is, in a smaller community where people know each other, the likelihood of selecting a representative who will represent the interests of the voters rather than the interests of the representative is greater than when the representation is for a much larger population (I know that's a mouthful).

The point being that as representatives are chosen by "parties" (which are run by entrenched representatives and special interests), the choices of the voters are limited to those pre-selected in a process that is not necessarily representative. Consequently, the selection often boils down to "the lesser of the evils" or "none of the above." Unfortunately, "none of the above" is an option in elections which means that the choices the voters make appear to be irrational.

The closest thing to "democracy" appear to be specific ballot proposals that appear on the ballot because enough voters sign a petition. Then the voters get to go "yea" or "nay" and their voices are "heard." Once the voting is turned over to representatives chosen in a party-system process, the voters can only hope for the best.

Of course, with the media presenting filtered "truths" it is difficult to identify what is in one's best interest when voting... which may be part of the cause of perceive irrationality.

"Democracy" (or "representative government", or whatever you want to call it) has become fetishized in this country, to the point that it's treated as an end in itself rather than what it really is: a means to the end of individual liberty, that is to be modified or thrown aside entirely if it should fail to serve that end.

All of the above is the reason why we have a Constitution, which limits the powers of government to those enumerated therein.

Too bad it doesn't impose a size limit too. I guess we'll have to await another revolution to incorporate lessons learned.

Try re-reading the Tenth Amendment.

(My nomination for the worst invention in the history of man: Air Conditioning. Before its invention, Washington DC was an uninhabitable swamp in the summer, so everyone went home!)

Save_the_Rustbelt:

You misunderstand Bryan's point. It has nothing to do with little-people vs. big-people. It has to do with the perverse incentives that voting gives to ANYONE who votes. Put differently -- and to simplify only a bit -- his argument is not that persons who vote are generally stupid or irrational. Rather, it is that ability to vote does not make any person who votes informed or even rational about the issues on which he or she is voting. Most persons are very smart and informed about their personal lives and occupations; most people are uninformed and dreamy about the nature of society. And because voting is done without personal consequence, no voter has much incentive to become informed and rational about the issues at stake in elections.

The early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman said, "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." Or as Marquis de Flers said around the same time, "Democracy is the name we give the people whenever we need them."

"We," of course, are the ruling elites that voters get to choose between every few years, never mind that the elites are but two sides of the same coin. And with the total corruption of that coin via centralized, fraction-reserve banking, voters have found that they can vote themselves money, which Ben Franklin correctly observed "will herald the end of the republic."

And it has, as the ruling elites vie solely to buy votes in this fashion, resulting in a welare-warfare colossus that rides roughshod over other peoples even as it smothers its own in debt-financed largesse.

What it all comes down to is the reality that what Francis Fukuyama (in)famously called "the final form of human government" is but the final form of the state. As such it is what Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his brilliant book by this title, said it is: "Democracy: The God That Failed."

And ony when we stop worshipping this false god will we have any hope of ridding ourselves of it and of freeing mankind accordingly.

One other comment - I can't say that I'm immune either to the allure of certain issues. If a politician comes out against outsourcing, I find it very easy to swallow anything else he/she says. You almost have to wonder if our brains are hardwired in some way to be susceptible to irrational appeals.

I can't comment on the book itself having not read it, but politicians have known for a long time that many voters don't rely upon reason when casting votes. Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?" book described how politicians have been able to convince people to vote against their own political and economic interests by appealing to their biases. There are "red button" issues that seem to override common sense in the minds of many voters. If we can't figure out a way to overcome this, then we will lose our way as a republic.

Yes, the little people are stupid, only the east and west coast elites should run the country.

I'm reminded of a quote by one of my favotite professors, who was a retired trial lawyer and had been a scholar during and after his legal career.

"Most PhDs couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel."

I'll stick with the little people.

(Don't Condi Rice and Wolfowitz have PhDs from prestigious universities? I rest my case.)

The early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman said, "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." Or as Marquis de Flers said around the same time, "Democracy is the name we give the people whenever we need them."

"We," of course, are the ruling elites that voters get to choose between every few years, never mind that the elites are but two sides of the same coin. And with the total corruption of that coin via centralized, fraction-reserve banking, voters have found that they can vote themselves money, which Ben Franklin correctly observed "will herald the end of the republic."

And it has, as the ruling elites vie solely to buy votes in this fashion, resulting in a welare-warfare colossus that rides roughshod over other peoples even as it smothers its own in debt-financed largesse.

What it all comes down to is the reality that what Francis Fukuyama (in)famously called "the final form of human government" is but the final form of the state. As such it is what Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his brilliant book by this title, said it is: "Democracy: The God That Failed."

And ony when we stop worshipping this false god will we have any hope of ridding ourselves of it and of freeing mankind accordingly.