Who to blame under democracy?

Published Sun, Jan 10 2010 4:17 PM

In No Treason the democratic government is described as a secret band of murderers and thieves, it's members unknown to their victims as well as each other and made accountable to no one.

In this sense democracy is a much more horrific form of government then the King who says "I am the state, the only right is the right of my sword!". He can be held accountable for the actions of the government and his is a more honest and less immoral form of oppression then that exerted under democracy.

I do realize there are ways in which democratic influence can be used to limit government power and make it less evil then a government with no democratic elements. But that has nothing to do with democracy as such and is not the topic of this text.

Under a democracy with secret ballots we can never know who the government is.
We don't know how people voted or even if they did. Furthermore (as Lysander Spooner point out) some people vote in self-defence.
The logic is that since other people are trying to rob them using the ballot box their only option is to use the ballot box themselves and try to point the gun at someone else. In No Treason an analogy is made with opposing soldiers on a battlefield.
They must fight to the death, but that doesn't mean that they support the cause of the war they are fighting, they have (usually involuntarily) been put in a kill or be killed situation.
The ballot box can be viewed in the same way, unless you vote for the government to spend it's money to oppress someone else it will be spent it to oppress you.

There are other viewpoints on voting. Some arguments claim that even voting against the government make you complicit in all crimes committed by it. I won't go into that issue any further here but we can at least say that voting as a means of self-defence (misguided or not) is done because people perceive a threat and feel coerced into voting. This threat is very real and even if it isn't enough to grant a full pardon it is a great alleviating factor when determining their share of blame.

Anyone who willingly voted for the government are complicit to all the crimes of the government. Their relationship to the agents of the government that commit these crimes are no different then that of someone who hires a hitman and the hitman.
The problem is that we have no way of knowing who these people are. Their identities are protected by the system of secret ballots as well as the fact that we don't know who votes willingly and who does so only because they feel coerced to participate.

But there are other parties in these crimes that are easier to identify.

Anyone who lends money to a known criminal organisation is aiding and abetting crime. This relationship is the same with the government.
Anyone who lends money to the government (buy government bonds) is in part responsible for the murder and thieving the government does. Government has always relied on money to exert its power.
In the past it took loans to hire solders to murder anyone who opposed it and ensure greater tax revenues in the future. Today it still take loans to pay police to stop any opposition against tax collectors, but it also loan money in order to suppress opposition through welfare bribes which are simply a modern form of panem et circenses (bread and games).

The last party responsible are the agents of the state. The politicians, police, soldiers and tax collectors etc.
First "I was under orders" is never a valid excuse to commit atrocities.
Secondly they can never prove who they got the orders from. Most government agents have some form of superior that they can blame for doing what they do. The top of government, the elected officials, can however not prove who they work for and take their orders from cause they are appointed by secret ballot.
This means that any government agent must be held individually responsible for all of their actions and orders.
Anyone working for the tax agency is guilty of theft, a politician voting for a tax is guilty of theft, a cop who arrest someone for crimes which have no bases in natural law is guilty of kidnapping and so forth.

Many of these individuals does of course not understand that what they are doing is wrong because they rely a ethical system of duality thought to them by the government in the first place.

The individuals I have assigned blame to here could be brainwashed and manipulated or never have been able to obtain enough information to effectively criticise their own actions. Also many of the agents of our modern democracies can only be individually held responsible for crimes that are petty or at least don't justify capital punishment.
These are the only reasons they shouldn't all be shoot on sight...

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