Brush Fires of Freedom

To make it perfectly clear: abstaining from voting is not a vote to abolish government. And if you wanted to pencil that in, you would still have to cast a ballot! 

To anarchists that refuse to use the political system as a tool to oppose the State, I poses this:

 If everyone person in America(besides the politicians) were to not show up to the poll booths on election day, would the State dissolve itself? Or would it continue on without democratic oversight?

If a direction election was held asking whether to abolish the State, would any claim that voting against the state would actually be a vote in support of the state? So why should voting against the state only be allowable in the aggregate? Suppose the vote was on whether to disband the EPA. Or to end the Iraq War. Are we to say that because this vote only opposes one part of the state, not the entire institution, that it would be not compatible with anarchy? Destroying the EPA would be a reduction in government aggression, brought about without the use of aggression. Clearly, a direct vote against the EPA is a moral action.

Now suppose it is not a direct election, but one for a political office. There are two candidates, both exactly the same, except politician will end the war. The situation is the same as earlier, a vote for the anti-war canidate would achieve a reduction in government aggression; a more moral outcome.

What is the alternative? Refuse to vote, choosing to not come between the State and its victims? How is that act anymore moral than a vote in favor of the war candidate?

Assume that anarchists can not be political. As the country grows less statist, the government will be less opposed and thus more powerful. That fact that such an outcome is counterintuitive ought to suggest the invalidity of the assumption.

Our ancestors killed and died to create these nonviolent anti-state tools, and yet some refuse to use them for their intended purpose!

Faith without works is dead. If you oppose the State, act.

It is a cliche to compare political collectivism to insect behavior or a "hive mentality."  The imagery is efficively simple; that people are nothing but expendable indentityless drones slaving away for the lazy Queen.  But the analogy is amazingly shallow, since insect swarms are entirely devoid of politics. The Queen is not the hub of the hive, she does not direct or punish. She sits idle in a way we only wish our politicians would.

As National Geographic's article Swarm Behavior explains

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

This understanding has created Swarm theory, which explains the phenomenon of simple organism performing simple functions creating a complex system. This is perfectly applicable to grander organism, like humans. Mises proved that humans do not possess the capacity to plan economies, yet people unwittingly create them by pursuing their own petty interests. Biologists Deborah M. Gordon seems to have stumbled upon this human economic truth by saying, "Ants aren't smart. Ant colonies are." People can not order economies, but markets can.

But sadly, Biologists help to prove this theory about inability to plan when they begin to plan how others should use this knowledge. The article continues:

"We don't even know yet what else we can do with this," says Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We're not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can't control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere. But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that's very exciting." 

His termonology gives him away, he hopes to shape traffic. External "shaping" it is not consistent with self-organizing.

The only recommendation National Geographic can muster is directed at the individuals, not the planners:

"A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do," says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert. "None of us knows what society as a whole needs, but we look around and say, oh, they need someone to volunteer at school, or mow the church lawn, or help in a political campaign." 

We, the individuals, need to predict what the planners would tell us to do. Perhaps someday the bee experts will learn a lesson from bees, things work best when you don't try to force others to act as you want. The lesson of swarm theory is not for the acters, but the planners.

 Strike-The-Root blogger Robert Kaercher charged Ron Paul with "converting people to statism" in response to him attracting people to political activision for the first time. His assertation lies on a several assumptions that I don't believe are valid.

1. That people who ignore the political system are part of the solution.
2. That participating in politics means you approve of the system.

Robert Kaercher's actions are not inline with the first assumption, he does not ignore politics, he critiques it. Kaercher's outlet for his views is the internet, Ron Paul's is his campaign's platform. Nonparticipants in the political process are not de facto anarchists. Complacency is what enables the establishment. They have gone from complacent subjects to vocal opponents of the status quo, powerful allies even if not "true believers."

Contrary to Democratic doctrine, casting a vote does mean you willingly surrender your rights should you lose the election. Clearly the system works so that you will lose your rights whether you vote or not.  To claim that this tyranny is more legitimate if we participate in the process, is to buy into the tyrants' own propaganda. If the whole country were to vote to abolish the federal government, would that process be inconsistent with our anarchist beliefs? It would not, because my vote is consistent with my opposition of the State. When it comes to electing a representative this is still true. As anarchists we believe that some governments and some rulers are worse than others.  A vote for Ron Paul, or other politician, can be consistent with our opposition to the State.

As the ever quotable Murray Rothbard put it

I didn't ask for these institutions, dammit, and so don't consider myself responsible if I am forced to use them. In the same way, if the State, for reasons of its own, allows us a periodic choice between two or more masters, I don't believe we are aggressors if we participate in order to vote ourselves more kindly masters, or to vote in people who will abolish or repeal the oppression. In fact, I think we owe it to our own liberty to use such opportunities to advance the cause. 

Classic liberals, today often called minarchists, often talk about the legitimate functions of governments.  Being libertarians, these people understand the nature of government is violence and coercion. Their various versions boil down to claiming the only legitimate government role is defending us and our property from others. By this they mean the political method is only legitimate when used to distribute protection services. The economic method is trade, the political method is taking. Thus, the only appropriate tax is one spent towards the production of police, military, and legal services.

That the protection industry is the last to be viewed as a legitimate use of the political method is easy to understand. Politics and protection are a natural pairing, as both are built on violence. If violence is justified in the defense of property, then can not further violence be justified to ensure the creation of that defense? Once you have justified violence, you have justified the State. The State, once justified,  faces the slippery slope towards totalitarianism that the American Political System is still on.

In Columnist Charles Reese's recent article No Money in Peace, about the privatization of American war, he correctly assertated that "war, as it is being fought in Iraq, is a highly profitable operation for the war service industry." He clearly understands that war is a racket. But he continues

"Unfortunately, nobody seems to have figured out how to make a dime out of peace. I easily predict that until somebody does, there will always be more war than peace."

Reese fails to see an obvious truth. He, like almost everyone else, makes all his dimes on peace. Every industry, except the war industry, is a peace industry!

Reese's solution for stopping the profit motive from becoming a war motive is borrowing the National Socialist Party's idea of confiscating of war profits:

If we look at war in its proper perspective, as the common defense of the country, then we can plainly see that when it becomes necessary, it becomes the common duty of all citizens. Therefore, no one should profit from it. There is no reason except corporate greed and political corruption why weapons and other materials of war should not be supplied at cost. There is no sane reason why some should become millionaires while others become corpses or mutilated wrecks.

Ignoring that war bond buyers fall into this war profiteer category, the war industry is a racket because it is not based upon mutual consent. This necessitates that it have a winner and loser. War is funded, virtually exclusively, by taxes. If not for the political method of distribution there would be little war, because there is no money in it.

Democracy prevents killing. Wars spread Democracy. Thus, starting wars prevents killing.