A Few Thoughts on Voting

I was once an enthusiastic voter.  I thought that I ought to use any tool I could to help promote liberty and that even given the worst view of government as a gang of thieves and warmongers, voting could be seen as a form of defense.  And even if my vote was insignificant, I saw my ballot as a signal to others of support for liberty.

But after a couple of elections, I did not feel so good about casting a ballot (especially after seeing some of the shenanigans of the Libertarian Party in using direct-marketing techniques to "sell" liberty).  In addition, I saw voting as lending moral support to the system.  If I truly believed government to be evil and wanted to withdraw my consent, wouldn't I be a hypocrite to cast a ballot?  In fact, voting might be seen as a way of trying to use force on others.

I don't really see either of these positions as strictly correct now.  I think the importance of voting (or not voting) has been exaggerated by most who debate the question (ironic that I am now spending such a long post on it).  A trouble with voting is that it does not lend itself well to analogy or abstraction.  "Voting is defense" claims a libertarian; "No, voting is aggression" responds an anarchist.  Who is right? 

The analogy I like best for voting is that of a suggestion box for slaves (hat tip to Free Talk Live).  In this view, a vote for someone like Ron Paul is like stuffing "please stop beating us" in the box.  A vote for most politicians is like stuffing "please beat Jim less and Bob a little more".

I won't fault anyone for hoping a vote will reduce government evil.  Who knows, maybe if enough people suggest it, the slave-masters will stop beating us so much.

I also won't fault anyone for seeing the suggestion box as below the dignity of a free man and refuse to participate in it.  Maybe just asserting our freedom will be the best long-term remedy for reducing the slave-masters.

I tend toward non-voting.  I’ve felt it to be a bit demeaning, and I’d rather not get caught up in rooting for politicians.  Still, I leave myself open to voting if inspired by a particular campaign that I think is of some value in supporting.

I am not inspired often. 

The Trouble with Rights, and Tolstoy's Solution

I used to think in terms of rights and justice. For a libertarian, this means trying to express laws to answer the central question: when is the use of force against others justified? While anyone can debate this question, most libertarians seek to resolve it through application of property rights. That is, you are always justified in using your own property as you wish, so long as you do not aggress upon the equal rights of others to enjoy their property. Moreover, if someone infringes upon your property rights, an initiation of force has occurred and you are justified in defending your property. The libertarian view is that rights determine what actions are justified, and as Rothbard might have said, all rights are property rights.

If only it could be left at that. Now not only do we need to determine where all of those imaginary property lines exist, but also when one person’s actions “cross the line” onto someone else’s lot. There may be entire web forums filled with nothing beyond debates over these questions. What may one do on public property like roads and greens? What constitutes unjustified pollution? Is intellectual property real property? Does a mother have full rights over an unborn fetus?

The real trouble comes when we realize that no two individuals will draw the exact same lines. The universe is not so neatly divided into separate, independent objects, and the result is that even libertarians scarcely agree with each other over where all the lines should be. This would be fine, except that libertarians also advocate the right of property defense; if one person aggresses against another by crossing a property line, the victim is justified in using force to defend the property. (How much force? Again, another line to draw.) Furthermore, the victim’s neighbor would also be justified in coming to the defense of the victim.

The potential here is that every libertarian’s philosophy is in violent conflict with every other libertarian’s. As long as you believe that strict property rights exist and that those rights are defendable with force, then you can justify some government apparatus that performs that enforcement. The most obvious example is with respect to abortion, where different libertarians may make different judgments regarding whether it is justified as a mother’s property right to her own body, or unjustified murder of a person. Those who take the latter position would also hold that a neighbor (or “just” government) may properly restrain the mother from committing such murder. Those taking the former would subsequently advocate that a neighbor (or their idea of a “just” government) could properly defend the mother from those seeking to aggress against her rights. The theoretical outcome is an escalation of force on both sides, and the question is not settled by persuasion but over who can physically subdue the other.

Is there an alternative to this potential conflict? There is, and it was pointed out to me in Leo Tolstoy’s work The Kingdom of God is Within You. I remember reading this passage on page 37 and realizing the error in trying to find the correct laws that may be justifiably enforced.

Meanwhile one would have thought it was necessary to point out at least some kind of solution of the following question, since it is at the root of almost everything that interests us.


The question amounts to this: In what way are we to decide men's disputes, when some men consider evil what others consider good, and vice versa?  And to reply that that is evil which I think evil, in spite of the fact that my opponent thinks it good, is not a solution of the difficulty.  There can only be two solutions: either to find a real unquestionable criterion of what is evil or not to resist evil by force.


The first course has been tried ever since the beginning of historical times, and, as we all know, it has not hitherto led to any successful results.


The second solution - not forcibly to resist what we consider evil until we have found a universal criterion - that is the solution given by Christ.

Tolstoy here speaks to the root question of when force may be justified.  Instead of drawing lines to separate good and evil actions, or justified and unjustified force, he rejects those lines altogether.

Some pro-life libertarians actually take a sort of Tolstoyan position with respect to abortion.  That is, they believe it is wrong but understand that others disagree and as a result do not advocate government force to outlaw abortion.  Why not extend such a position to all issues?

The Moral Hazard of Contract Enforcement

One allegedly necessary function of government is to enforce contracts. For this, some sort of court-and-thug system is necessary; the court to rule on cases brought before it, and the thugs to carry out the court's decisions.

However, such a system necessarily poses a moral hazard problem, for now the participants in a contract do not have to bear the costs of enforcement. "If he doesn't follow through," one thinks, "I'll just take him to court." The fact that there is a government backstopping all contracts results in people participating in more risky behavior. They don't perform due diligence on the people with whom they are transacting, or they do not structure a deal to maximize incentives for a deal's completion.

The typical anarcho-capitalist solution for government courts is to replace them with private courts (or for a libertarian, a court that enforces only "just law" and only funds itself through "just means"). Many anarcho-capitalists argue that a court-and-thug system could be provided by the "free market", and there might even be competing systems. However, while such courts may largely address the moral hazard problem (depending on how they were structured), I believe that such arguments are just a way to slip a government in through the back door. Enforcement of laws is, in my opinion, the primary characteristic of government.

There is an alternative to the dubious solution of restructuring existing court systems. This solution is to reframe how we think about contracts. Rather than thinking of them as a metaphysical transfer of property, think of them as an investment.

In an investment, you recognize that there is risk. The risk is that the investment fails, and you recognize going in that you would have no recourse in such an event. An investment is ultimately a claim on future events, and the future is inherently uncertain. It is this claim on future events that also characterizes contracts. One or both parties could be promising future cash flows, repayment, or labor.

No claim on a future event can truly be guaranteed. In one sense, then, a system designed to enforce contracts is a revolt against this "unfairness" of nature. Isn't it better then to recognize that any contract carries risk and treat it as an unenforceable investment, than to pretend there is no risk because you can always appeal to Daddy Government to bail out your poor decisions?

Why Pacifism

What “I am” depends largely on who is asking me and the context of the conversation. Sometimes I am an anarchist, sometimes a pacifist, sometimes a libertarian, and sometimes a Tolstoyan Christian. Sometimes I am even a Ron Paul Republican. These may seem highly disparate labels, but I hope there is one common thread in each: advocacy of peace and non-violence; opposition to war and government.

The exact term I use in any particular conversation would depend on the topic and who I am talking to. To most pro-government people debating national policy, Ron Paul’s position of ending foreign wars and dismantling most of the federal government might as well be one of an anarchist, so there is no point in bringing up subtleties of position at the risk of visceral reactions. On the other hand, a debate among libertarians would tend to focus on what laws are just or what the maximum scope of government should be, and then there may be more to gain from distinguishing between a libertarian and an anarchist. In general, if I want to effectively communicate my attachment to non-violence, I must put it forward in a position that meets people where they are. The important seed to plant in all cases is this: perhaps I should not seek to solve problems through use of force.

The label that jumps right to this conclusion is “pacifist”. Unfortunately, this label may be even more loaded than “anarchist”. It seems that “pacifist” is used almost overwhelmingly as a pejorative term, when one wants to accuse another of appeasing some evil-doer. Another problem I have with the term is that for most people it emphasizes the least important positions or scale of positions. On one hand, mention of being a pacifist seems to invite a cascade of what-would-you-do questions, like: what if someone attacks you? Or: what if someone is raping your wife? On the other hand, some people don’t interpret pacifism on such a personal level but instead on the opposite scale of human interaction, government relations. To them, pacifism means nothing more than the foreign policy of Switzerland. Their challenges would be more like: what about Hitler?

Labels are abstractions, and as a result they must leave out details and can never be perfect. Given the challenges of the term, however, I still suppose “pacifist” to be the best abstraction of my beliefs. This term means for me a radically different approach to moral and ethical issues than is otherwise common, even by most anarchists and libertarians. It seems to me that the misguided approach is to seek to divide all possible actions into hard categories: “good” or “bad” for moral questions, and “proper” or “improper” for ethical questions. We try to derive the “just” outcome for any scenario, as if any interaction can be approached dispassionately and judged according to some objective laws that have been formerly derived.

I disagree with this approach. I believe the alternative approach, embodied by pacifism, is this:

Do not seek justice but rather love and compassion.

This statement forms the core of my beliefs, though I would not be so attached to these particular words or sequence thereof to say it is the best statement or not open to semantic quibbling (as all statements must be).

I also do not wish to make this statement some sort of axiom from which to derive correct actions or subsequent moral laws. That would be to miss the point entirely, which is to say that the whole approach of deriving just laws is flawed and that instead we might rely on more spiritual, personal, and religious guidance in deciding what we are to do.

The desire to replace justice with love means that one builds voluntary relationships based on cooperation and mutual benefit, rather than relationships based on coercion and force. It means that one tries to serve others without demanding anything in return and without ever feeling that one is owed anything. It means that one does not seek to build great material wealth, and that one should not prepare to violently defend the wealth one possesses.

The desire to replace justice with love also means rejecting, through non-cooperation and non-violent resistance, all human institutions of government and law that enforce their decrees through violence. It means rejecting any institution that would systematize the use of force.

In any case, this is what being a pacifist means to me and are some of the ideals I strive toward.

I am far from perfect with practicing pacifism. I become angry and have bad thoughts. I pay an uncomfortable amount of tax money to governments. I can wish ill upon my enemies. I am sure there are situations where I might be moved to act violently. However, I view practicing pacifism as a process of self-improvement. For me, this requires constant meditation and self-awareness. I might not always know the way, but sometimes I at least see the next step.