Justice and Democracy

Being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just. Pascal I proclaim that might is right, justice the interest of the stronger. Plato All human governments are organizations devised for the purpose of enabling some particular man or group of men to rule, i.e. subjugate and dominate, people by administration of deadly physical force. All politics ultimately revolves around issues of authority to engage in violence. Force is employed as the tool to resolve disputes or solve mans problems in lieu of reliance on reason, communication, respect, dignity, and true 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 people against others is sometimes necessary that mankind subscribes to governments. Ideally, a government must engage in force in ways and for reasons which are exclusively just and necessary, such as upholding justice by enforcing rules which are known and accepted by the people and administered by public servants whose actions are 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 and can effect their conceptions by the mechanics by which they operate; 4. The actions of those in a state can be successfully controlled by the governed (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. Justice 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 includes exercise of free will, without which man would have no capacity to choose, and would be a tropism. The ability to perceive, think, feel, conceive, and engage in abstract thought provides endless multiplicity of options. Man is not an automaton, determined by and limited to singular stimulus-response mechanisms. Being able to make conscious choices makes man existentially and ethically responsible and grants significance to life. Free will makes man uniquely special, capable of both sublimity and depravity. Without free will, mans life would be as irrelevant as leaves blowing one way or another in the vastness of impersonal nature. 1

Victor Frankl survived Auschwitz and wrote of it in Man's Search For Meaning. He perceived 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 and discern 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 us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factorsbe they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoners' reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influence of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances? We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, 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 walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedomsto choose one'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, offered opportunity to make a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate. Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of himmentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp....1 Do not think that these considerations are unworldly and too far removed from real life. It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient 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.

Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with 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 further his life progress: 1) he may be a predator and try to gain at expense of loss to others, or 2) 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 principle of peace. Predatory behavior clearly damages the victim. In a less obvious way it also harms the ostensible victor. An aggressor transgresses against his deeper and more universal nature, injures the external setting of his life, forsakes the good and growth he could have achieved by constructive action, and generates harmful consequences by his wrong actions which are sooner or later visited back upon himself. Gaining by the predatory principle is in the long run self-defeating, since what ultimately results is harm to all parties. It retards the universal purpose of all life to further its well-being and progress 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 will likewise be visited on himself. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. One reaps what he sows (in a just universe he reaps only the cause/effect consequences of what he sows, not eternal damnation). One may think that action/reaction does not pertain 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 the basis of the peaceful or predatory principle. The results will be accordingly. All actions cause corresponding reactions, in mans life as well as elsewhere. The foundation of the free market is the peaceful principlewin/win interactions which benefit 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 towards satisfying them. A Chinese proverb sums up the basis of success in freedom: He who helps others helps himself. In the short run and narrowed confines it may appear that those who cheat, defraud, or use 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 with inviolable 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 and birth, sowing and reaping, does not annul cause and effect. The fact that the mechanics and intervals between sources and consequences can be inscrutable to man does not mean that they do not exist. The wheels of the gods grind slowly but exceedingly fine, as Tennyson wrote. The free market functions spontaneously to further the purpose of man to progress towards his fulfillment. Freedom is the only social arrangement compatible with universal rights. By progressing through benefiting others one learns, grows in content, relates through mutually constructive and voluntary means, acquires understanding and stature, achieves by merit, gains without blame, and increases the general prosperity and well-being of society along with his own.

2 Ibid., pp. 88-89.

In addition to being a set of arrangements based on mutual benefit, a business is a selfdevelopment discipline. One must think, work, gain understanding of self and others and 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 and processes 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 and get paid for it. Economic enterprises also require a certain humility, since one must succeed by serving othersnot dominating themas well as risking time and resources on openended uncertainty. In the Greek polis those who voted in the democracy were male citizens, who had the luxury of developing their bodies, minds, and talents while work and business were carried on by inferiors. Women were for taking care of the household and bearing children. Courtesans were for romantic love. Metics (foreign residents) carried on commerce. Work was done by slaves. The male elitists disdained business since it would have required serving innumerable people whom they regarded as inferior. Greek civilization, as lofty as it became in many respects, was based (like Rome, 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 think they are so superior as to deserve money and power without the genuine service and contribution required to be entitled to it. They dislike the tastes of the masses and would legally impose their own while disparaging the merchant mentality that engages in money-grubbing activities of everyday business. Illusion, hubris, and violence are interconnected. People who live by such inferior attributes often disdain those who succeed by work and self-worth. One European prince recently opposed his daughter's marriage to a wealthy man because the latter was not nobility. Having earned his wealth, rather than inheriting a position as head of an artificial-station, violence-administering organization called a state, made the suitor a commoner. It is easy to be grand if one can dominate others and live off their efforts without having to give value in exchange. Self-reliance requires work, application of thought, and assuming responsibility for one's actions and fate. To default on self-reliance is to forsake dignity and crucial aspects of life 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 and plunder other people, is hubrisnefarious delusion with no ultimate ethical and existential legitimacy. Such megalomania, to varying extents, is the nature of all politicians, since politics means exerting power over the lives of others through an artificial institution specifically designed for that purpose. To rule others by political means, instead of governing by the power of ones being spontaneously influencing the world in life-furthering ways, is exercise of the principle of violence, however disguised. Regardless of whatever lofty pretenses may be proffered, politics inherently involves obtaining rewards without commensurate efforts, abrogating the rights and options of others, bypassing communication, eliminating freedom, supplanting free choice, and in general functioning by force. Citizens who gain by political means default on the courage even to engage in their own theft and violence, relying on a sanitizing (crime laundering) institution to do their dirty work for them. Worse yet, by cloaking predatory 4

behavior in guises of respectability, endless inferior pursuits are legally undertaken which are unlawful and destroy the foundation of justice. To abandon governments and live by freedom is to rely on the peaceful principle. In such climate self-reliance, honoring universal rights, and relating in mutually constructive 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 of violence, overriding honorable means to achieve objectives by force. The inner struggle in man may be between good and evil, but the outer conflict is between the ideas and forces which would enslave, subjugate, and rule man vs. those that would liberate him. Justice and the basis of rights Man's right to exist derives from existence. Life emerges out of, consists of, is a functional 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 expresses the 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 of universal being. The purpose of justice is to optimize the capacity for life development to 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 acquires property 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 his own. Property rightslike life and freedomare universal rights of man. Whenever someone takes from another his freedom, his property, the soundness of his faculties, or his life, the aggressor has over-reached to remove something which rightfully belongs to his victim. In so doing the predator becomes contractually indebted to the one he wrongs. It is protection against and rectification of such transgressions that alone justifies use of force. Man has the right to defend his existence and its outgrowth, property, as well as recoup or attain compensation for what has been unjustly removed from him. Such legitimate uses of force are justified in three basic areas: 1. Arbitration of disputes between people who cannot agree on just rights between 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. Just as no individual can do everything 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 force on one's behalf? How are they chosen? What force can legitimately be used? The usual answer to those questions is governments. It is institution with exclusive right to make and enforce laws, arbitration, rectification, and self-defense. Through presumably have a reliable means to secure protection, 5 assumed that by having an justice will be servedi.e. government, society can consistency, and ordera

foundation upon which men can dependably structure their lives, a stable context in which to enjoy freedom without opposition. Without an official over-arching force/obedience monopoly to make and enforce laws, society would presumably disintegrate. Such sentiments may sound reasonable in abstraction. When thought through or put into practice, however, governments are found to be impossible vehicles for achieving the promulgated basis for their existence. It is impossible for any government to achieve genuine arbitration, rectification, and self-defense. States are the wrong tools for 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. All attempts are self-poisoning, self-falsifying, and self-negating. Political processes always 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 perceive that all are involved ceaselessly in a lifelong war against all States....every State is, 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 system was inherently wrong. That might have saved the world incalculable grief. His methodology, like all forms of statism, consists of designing abstract socio-political systems (including statutory laws) and using state might to make society conform to them. Perceiving the mechanics of governments renders Plato's statement self-evident. Just as everyone's perceptions of life are unique, if force is to be deployed everyone will have different orientations and motivations for using it. Any state, as a force institution functioning out of competing perspectives, is innately in conflict with internal factions of itself, the people it subjugates, with other states, and with existence itself. Stress and discord are innate in all attempts to enforce external biases on life. Such interferences disintegrate societal coherence so that political power deteriorates the base of its own support. By founding a government, a static and abstract contrivance is imposed upon freeflowing, 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-up unfolding of life. The irreconcilable conflict is debilitating, so that over time all empires crumble, 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 the state's rival. Statism assumes that some man or group of men can cognize a superior order to the unfathomable, ever-emerging order of life and free people, has the right to impose it, and can succeed by the means used. Since none of those is true, politics is an invalid means of social organization.

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

Statutory laws enable some group of men to set themselves over and above society and the market, assuming an independent right to govern. This is to make rules that restrict, obligate, expropriate from, and punish innumerable individuals on whom the would-be rulers actually have no just claim whatsoever. Legislators determine the criteria by which everyone should be forced to live, justified on such pretexts that officials are elected, or wiser, or simply because they occupy constructed peckingorder positions of power that provide a context to devote full time to exercising their alleged superiority. To organize society politically makes the state a deity or Super-Parent (parens patriae). 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. People so 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 to life as supreme authority, to succeed or fail by how well he constructively interacts with others and complies with his own conscience and the laws of being, but defaults on thought, work, development, and necessity to discern truth in favor of living by conformity to the dictates of a state. This turns society into an authoritarian, if not totalitarian, nursery school. In such a climate people are not allowed to live and learn truths of life in their own termswhich may be the only way possible to gain genuine understanding and growbut 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 the drive for self-preservation and achievement propels them to shun harmful or wasteful activities. Everyone should take care of his health and affairs because such constructed uses of faculties are an innate right and responsibility of life. Instead, through government, one's course is determined by third parties presupposing right to make his decisions and take care of him. The help government gives to society when people engage in vice or foolish behavior is violenceas though bashing people into submission was superior to true knowledge, dignified caring, and genuine remedy. A just social order would consist of free associations and voluntary contractual agreements based on universal rights and protection of private property. The only way such a situation can be realized is in the total absence of governments. Governments exist by people surrendering rights, falsely presuming they gain through the loss. Stateless freedom is essential to evolve organizations and ways of relating which uphold the integrity of the market and protect universal rights. Having a coercion monopoly overlay the entire social order in an effort to encompass and manage it is perpetual assault, distortion, and oppression. That is the opposite of honoring and liberating life. It disallows life's integrity and self-expression from being able to manifest and prevail. The free/economic and coercive/political are mutually-exclusive. An institution which exists by eliminating freedom cannot be relied on to secure it. The point of a state is to rule, i.e. to exercise power over the lives of others. This is why power, once granted the legitimate foothold of a government, cannot be held in check, regardless of the most sincere and ingenious efforts. Success in terms of those in governments is the degrees to which they can effectively govern, i.e. control peoples behavior. Once individual sovereignty and rights to self-determination are abnegated, they are lost. Whether they can ever be regained is always an open question. The drive towards tyranny is self-perpetuating and has no inner mechanism to be self-correcting. Those in 7

authority inexorably utilize whatever power has been legally established to attain yet more of it. States are often promoted as necessary to express the will of the collective. This is the biggest con in history. Action on such basis is undertaken out of someone's particular idea of the collective. There are an infinite number of such conceptionsevery one of which exists in the mind of some individual. The reality of the collective is the open-ended totality of all individuals and their interrelationships with each other and existence. No abstractionof the collective or anything elseis the reality 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 the actual reality they claim to represent. The fact that man has free will invalidates all forms of collectivism. Nothing can eliminate, compensate for, or override that fundamental aspect of mans being. Each individual has the right of self-ownership, the obligation of self-responsibility, and a unique nature, duty, and life meaning which only he can fulfill. For governments to control society is to negate the supreme right, privilege, and duty of every man to determine 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 force are successful in serving it. Whose version of society is selected to be imposed on an indeterminate number of diverse and otherwise free people? Who can encompass and decide their destinies or has a right to try? What is the ultimate source of the prerogative to annul universal rights in the name of society? Damage and blame result from all efforts to efface someone's real nature and just rights and replace them with external rule. If one adopted what he considered to be the finest possible conception of social organization, utilized the sum total of a nation's resources, employed the most pervasive force to attempt to achieve conformity to it, and proceeded 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 a tool of it, is irrational and unethical. As a derivative abstraction, the collective is an imaginary entity which cannot own anyone. Yet all politics functions on such basis and must, to varying degrees, regard people as objects and state propertyslaves and/or tropisms with at most an amorphous nature and only secondary rights. Politics dishonors individuals as unique, unfathomably complex entities with free will and a spiritual dimension, as though such centrally important aspects of mans nature were either non-existent or irrelevant. Although it is axiomatic that no concocted conquest/plunder organization labeled government can own anyone, every states mechanics of functioning belies the premise. From origin and foundation to the outermost limits of its power, the intrinsic nature of every government is systematic enslavement of the governed. However anyone 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 usurp ownership of living beings, which is violence, aggression, hubris, and slavery. Simply by virtue of existing man has the unalienable right of self-ownership and duty to manage his own life. For a state to coerce people into being tools of any of an infinite number of conceptions of how society should be is to attempt to wrench mans life from its own existence. All such efforts twist life grotesquely askew and cast it into spurious and 8

exhausting realms. Such a course is insane, unjust, and ruinous. If one does not abuse 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 thereby more deeply and pervasively subvert what they allegedly would like to better. They presuppose that people under state rule can and should docilely capitulate, like sheep or cattle, and not think for themselves or consider their own interests more valid. It were as 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 of state. It is a psychological aberration to think that because one perceives existence in some manner, others should experience it the same way. Totalitarian regimes have slaughtered en masse those who have had the temerity to be and express their own natures, or sent them to concentration camps, or indoctrinated them in re-education centers to be re-programmed into the correct way to see reality. Other governments, including representative democracies, enforce the same insanity on more benign scales, 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 is abuse. What is tragic is that good men become seduced by the false allure and sincerely enter politics to attempt betterment by its counterfeit means. No matter how earnestly anyone tries to accomplish beneficial results by political means, it is at bottom wielding force in error and ignorance without valid and verifiable authority. The entire scope of action of politicians is restricted exclusively to expanding a realm which deteriorates the very society whose good is allegedly sought. Even if a politician succeeds, his success is not genuine. His results are fraudsveneers of surface behavior achieved by coercion to create sham appearances and transient configurations. Government has merely bashed, cajoled, and intimidated whatever individuals are thus victimized into outwardly compliant action based on fear, at expense of their own rights, autonomy, and having developed real solutions. When a state rules, society is captured in a virtual prison of invisible statutory walls that can be transformed to real jail cells by any of an inconceivable number of arbitrary considerations of those in power. Those who invent and impose laws are operating in the dark. They have no basis to decide criteria, penalties, and punishments but their own world views, consensus, precedents formed of previous statutory laws, and interpretations of other men, times, and places.4 Police have the right to engage in all manner of physical force to impose the laws of the statewhich pays their salaries and provides them with authority and all their operating 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 mutuallyvoluntary, 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.)

the combined Federal, State, and municipal legislatures. 200,000 such new laws.

In 1984 there were over

Every new so-called law is merely the means whereby the state creates powers for itself 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 grant ourselves the authority to do so. Can any ordinary citizen have even the remotest idea of what rights to use force lurk in the ever-increasing mountain of self-granted powers governments invent for themselves? Increasing power in government creates ever less ability for people to exercise force on the only basis for which it is legitimate in the first placetheir own self-defense. Laws like gun-control disarm citizens, leaving them at the mercy of criminalsordinary transgressors and the far more powerful and dangerous predators who have political control of law and government. Freedom is an innate aspect of man's true nature. As R. G. Ingersoll put it: What light is 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 properly discover and develop when confined to the familiar, especially the enforced familiar of other men. That deranges the psyche. It suffocates capacity to expand into new domains 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. That stifles the aliveness of life, replaces awe and reverence with obligation to conform to convention and officialdom. Society becomes a herd of humans of which government is master and shepherd. Such a situation is an expression of the assumption that ultimate transcendence is not alive and man is merely matter and therefore fair game. If the ethical, spiritual, and free-will dimensions of man are denied, no reason exists to prevent 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 inherent divinity 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 initiatory force which transgresses against the innocent, unalienable rights of others. By the same logic, man likewise has the right to resist or not acquiesce to any man-made institutions engaging in initiatory force, since such impositions are violations of rights man 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. Every choice is a vote. All thoughts or impulses acted or not acted upon are votes. Every penny spent or not spent is a vote. Such real life votes are genuine. Political voting is to decide which men and policies are to control masses of people through a huge coercion machinery which is unreal, illicit, futile, and destructive ab initio. The U.S. political system exists on the pretext of being validated and determined by majority vote. People have legitimized states through democracy, believing that they can thereby configure government and control the actions of officials. This is a tragic if not fatal error. It is off-the-scale incomprehensibly stupid and unethical. In so doing the populace does not realize that they are surrendering, perhaps irreversibly, their lives, rights, freedom, and destinies. Nor do they comprehend that quantity of opinions does not constitute truth and cannot sanction the intrinsically illicit. There is nothing either sacred, real, ethical, or efficacious in the will of the majority. Because people can hate and kill, or breed like rabbits, or covet their neighbors wealth, is no valid basis for invoking state power. The faults of democracy are systemic and irreparable: Majority vote does not, and cannot, eliminate unwarranted uses of force. It establishes a platform of ersatz authority from which politicians launch an unending array 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 sole institution with right to engage in official violence. All exercises of that force self-validate a government's authority to engage in it, regardless of the pretenses under which actions are undertaken. Every action of state is prima facie affirmation of its alleged right to exist, and serves first and foremost to entrench and reiterate its falsely presumed sovereignty. Democracy purports to grant a preeminent cover of legitimacy, out of which elected governments endlessly wield legal violence. This is ever and always supremely for a state's own sake, but attention from that centrality is deflected by involving the people in interminable schemes that appear to be for their betterment. Improvements necessarily occur, however, by furthering some segments of society at the expense of others and/or all. It is not possible for any government action to occur without causing harm to some segment or aspect of society. Democracy cannot produce justice, advancement, or peace. It permanently establishes contention, power pressures, and discord between individuals and groups, all of whom want government to enforce their priorities. It becomes impossible for society to be either civil or tranquil. Life is forced to be absorbed in disputes over competing uses of legal force. Debates are acrimonious, replete with name-calling and recriminations. Those whose causes or candidates lose elections feel moderately to severely disenfranchised. 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 see put into effect or grant any ethical or lawful authority for resulting officials to implement the issues voted on. What is illicit remains so regardless of quantity of opinions or phony trappings like secret ballots. If 17 people in a town of 20 vote to kill, injure, or plunder the remaining 3, such majority vote does not legitimize the process. Yet all democracies do the same things on mass scales that supposedly makes them right. If everyone uses the law to steal from everybody, is the process ratified because of complexity or quantity? 11

At what number does the practice magically become virtuous? A hundred people? A thousand? A million? An entire country? The world? If the majority and elected officials are fools or knaves, and transform the law into tools of their own purposes, is that 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 could transmute otherwise false and wrong principles into institutions, processes, and practices that are true, good, ethical, and efficacious. In reality, all that happens is that the error, blame, and deceit are disbursed throughout society. Numbers or ruses cannot transform the innately wrong into the genuinely just. Majority vote cannot justify overruling the rights of anyone, let alone everyone. Involving people in government through democracy does not ennoble government; it drags down both society and politics into a mutual morass. Is anyone authorized to send a bill to anybody he wishes as is implied in all political wealth re-distribution programs. By such logic one is entitled to confront anyone at random and say: I have needs I can't pay for, so I'll send my bills to you and you can pay 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 that would get me in trouble. So, to get around that I'll send my bills to 'government' and politicians can transform law into an instrument of plunder to steal from you at legal gunpoint to pay for what I need. H. L. Mencken wrote: [Politicians] have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principle device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten, that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction 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 the fact that there is an institution that can be used to seek their fulfillment through coercion instead 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 would be somewhat more legitimacy for the practice. An election would be confined to those choosing to be subject to the results. As it is, democracy is just another scheme to eliminate freedom and stake legal claim on the lives of others. It is a way to submerge individual 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 that some ideology may exist somewhere that purports to condone the exercise of violence to steal and subjugate because it is law. Nor, of course, does brute force vindicate the lawmaking process itself. Real law is the laws of being. The very idea that men can make 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 of such disastrous hubris. Is it sane to think that one must engage in political voting to fulfill his life? Must one relinquish his life to the machinations of politics to better it? Does not fulfilling one's unique nature, duty, and responsibilities require ones full effort and devotion? Dilettantes and half-hearted, non-single-minded people rarely succeed in life. Do people have the time and energy to divert to maintaining control over a government instead of their own lives? Do people not have the right to maintain as much of their resources and control of their destinies as possible without being forced to give up what is justly theirs to leaders who would replace their life meaning with government determination and control? Trying to rule anyone other than oneself is unethical and aberrant. Trying to rule masses of people is insane. Everyone has his hands full with his own life. One is fortunate indeed to fulfill his life, attain self-sufficiency, and eradicate weaknesses and wrongs in himself without trying to transform and control other people by the innately impossible, injurious, and blameworthy means of government. Voting is an extremely sloppy process. It occurs in a quasi-vacuum with no actual connection to the people and issues upon which it allegedly bears. One goes into a booth and marks an X for who knows what reason or with what knowledge. There is no contract formed, no agency agreement established, no designation of responsibility on either side, no connection between the one who votes and the elected officials who are then beyond direct control of the voter in uses of political power. Does voting change anything? What is the right for the change to be made, by whom, at whose expense, by what mechanics, and with what legitimacy and soundness? Can anybody take unsigned pieces of paper such as ballots into court and claim they are lawfully binding on anyone? What kind of direct, valid, and lawfully enforceable contract can ever be formed by and between a voter and a politician? A voter could form a contractual agreement for mutual exchange of goods, services, valuable consideration, including forming an agency authorization to perform certain specific and legitimate duties bearing on his own life, rights, and property, but such a course would be purely contractual, with each party acting in an individual capacity, and no politics or government would be part of the equation. No one short of a larcenous mental incompetent would sign away generalized powers of attorney to someone (especially a stranger) to engage in open-ended acts of violence against himself and others. That is giving ones life away and committing criminal acts against oneself and ones neighbors. One may be entitled to self-enslavement, but has absolutely no right to contract with someone else to harm, dominate, or steal from third parties. Yet that is what the inconceivably specious and absurd process of voting presumes to validate. If something is illicit when purportedly authorized by mutually agreed express contract, it is preposterous to think that it is rendered magically legitimate by the unutterable farce and non-contract of voting. Just as a murder contract is not valid for absence of lawful object, the implied or constructed contracts purporting to authorize politicians the right to engage in violent and illegitimate acts on behalf of the state are likewise contractually and lawfully nugatory. No one has a right to dominate anyone other than himself. Politicians cannot derive legitimate authority to rule others from conjured-up fabrications of the mind such as voting or democracy. Voting is a chimera, a non-contract on the basis of which politicians purport to be authorized to exercise illicit force on behalf of figments. 13

No one can go to court with unsigned papers and claim they are contracts binding on anyone. If contracts as supposedly form the basis of legitimacy for democratic governments to act were adjudicated between individuals, any legitimate court would declare them utterly void in conveying any right, power, or obligation. Yet the state passes laws, collects taxes, obligates, imprisons, and kills on mass scales with no authority 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 someone does little if anything to identify policies to be effected. One may vote for a politician on some overriding issue, e.g. abortion, while being adversely affected by policies the politician advocates on other issues, e.g. taxes and spending. Moreover, there is no guarantee that what a politician says expresses his real sentiments, or that he will not change his mind once elected, or that the elected man will not bow to greater pressures or 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 as having no right whatsoever to grant anyone power over other peoples lives). No ones existence 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 of uniqueness and depth. Does one vote for some particular politician because he has good TV ads, a nice smileor because his opponent is worse and one must engage in a bizarre attempt to defend himself from people and policies he may consider more hostile 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 votes are choices involving voluntary exchanges of mutual benefit. Political votes are for what other 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's control. Political votes are combination pool shots in the dark, trying to guess who will be best at using a massive coercion machinery which is illegitimate to begin with. With economic votes, if one votes no, he simply keeps his money. With political votes, if one 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 the locus of sovereignty and platform from which coercion may be exercised. That is far removed from justice, freedom, universal rights, being in unity/harmony with existence, or fulfilling one's life through genuine accomplishments and self-actualization. Trying to achieve conditions externally through contrivance and coercion that have not been attained internally and existentially, i.e. genuinely, is trying to make the imaginary real through unremitting exercises of organized force. That is considerably worse than futility. 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 is ruled 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 even superficially alleged to inhere in their alleged collective decisions? As John Dryden wrote: The most may err as grossly as the few. 8 Sherman put it more tersely: Vox populi, vox humbug.9 Better to let folly remain in individual and localized realms than transform 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, who knowsexcept that everyone lives, chooses, and acts, and a new configuration emerges every instant anew from the sum total of an unfathomable immensity of natures, thoughts, actions, and interactions of countless spiritually autonomous, free-will people with each other and existence. Trying to supersede and determine that by voting lends color of legitimacy to the con men in power to wield a huge coercion machinery by which the very masses who voted are enslaved, exploited, plundered, and ultimately destroyed. Ultimate disintegration is guaranteed by the cause/effect operational mechanics by which every government functions. Without functioning by coercion 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 and unredeemably fraudulent, self-destructive, and unethical nature and consequences of power nevertheless underlie and imbue all governmental processes. Whether one is fined, imprisoned, or killed for good reasons or otherwise renders one nonetheless poorer, incarcerated, or dead. God protect us all from good people attempting to achieve 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 each individual uniquely perceives it. Voting will neither substitute for personal choice and action, nor can it transform something imaginary and wrong into reality and virtue. Conversely, how much knowledge and right does any alleged leader have to decide matters 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 the reality of ones life-situations, and attain to fulfillment of their own unique natures via following the path unique to each individual? Everyone, including a leader, sees life from his own unique perspectives, and cannot be expected to see it from another's vantage point. Nor can a politician, having only deadly force as his tool to attempt to achieve results in conformity with his perspectives, do anything genuinely constructive about fulfilling other people's lives even if he were able to fully and accurately experience their subjective experience. Even if acting selflessly, a public servant can function only on behalf of his own conceptions of the country, the public, or other generalizations as he abstractly (and cosmically inadequately) conceives of them. That will necessarily be different than the conditions and needs of the particular individuals over whom the criteria are imposed. Even if voting were unanimous, which in the public domain it never is, there is no actual 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 sanction the violation. The governed is a collectivist fantasy. It is also a cruel one, since people are browbeaten by guilt into submitting to some alleged social or national betterment 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 and styles of our subjugation, maintaining the illusion that we are exerting some control over what is actually going on, and call the whole thing liberty. It is a sort of invent your own Moloch. What more secure basis can a tyranny have than the illusion of enslaved people that they are free? Majority vote does not guarantee elimination or change in 98% of a government. The mass of government employees and career bureaucrats remain regardless of an election. To these people, elected officials are looked upon as temporary residents. McMaster wrote: At the federal level today, for every elected official there are 5,500 unelected bureaucrats. 10 Nor is the small elected fraction prevented from exercising the error, waste, and abuse inherent in the nature of government and potential in the discretionary powers attained. Voting guarantees one only an indeterminate influence in changing the particular persons who subjugate and plunder him. Players change; the game remains. Democracy grants only an illusion that people are deciding their leaders and the policies of their government. Although the party line is that elected officials can be turned out of office by the people through voting, with votes tabulated by computer it may be impossible to know if results of an election are true or fixed. Even if any electoral process were accurate, however, the potentiality to be voted out of office merely means that politicians must be even more deceptive and prevaricating than if the pretense of democracy did not exist and despotismthe honest truth of the situationruled naked and undisguised. Moreover, the clever and powerful appoint as candidates for elected offices only men carefully selected and groomed as puppets whereby the would-be rulers of the world ensure that only their own agents can be elected. No matter for which straw-dog one votes, state power increases and social power declines. For the state, 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 and illegitimacy with no recourse but going to prison. Tax money is squandered on a cosmic scale, draining the economy to give endlessly to those who have not earned it, and used to regulate people who have an inherent right to be free of such suppression. Few Americans seem to understand that the IRS is a private intelligence-gathering, revenuecollecting agency of the world banking Cartel that has placed the US in Chapter 11 bankruptcy via the paper-money banking swindle of lending bookkeeping credits and charging interest thereon until the victimized government is rendered hopelessly insolvent. 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, and even 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 shopowners 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 American people's earnings to be thrown away in foreign aid where the plundered wealth goes to corrupt officials' Swiss accounts, support their lavish life-styles, build up armaments, finance endless wars and rumors of wars, and strengthen capacity for the receiving governments to keep their people more pervasively subjugated. Citizens are forced to be 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 strongarmed by foreign policy. No American can know how much of his life, rights, and resources the Government has forfeited without his consent, and Americans are despised and endangered all over the world because of the actions of their government over which the hapless American people have no control. The United States is a statist, indeed Fascist, nation.12 Everything is either overtly structured or at least regulated by government. Roads, schools, courts, law enforcement, public services, armed services, space program, and so on ad nauseam are functions of fiat/force and not freedom. All have structured in them the negative byproducts, unavoidable weaknesses, artificiality, and degenerate consequences of the means used to effect them. Society is imbued with the influences and people cannot localize the source of their malaise. Economically, people may want to cut government spending in general but rarely anything specific, and certainly not benefits to themselves. When masses of citizens try to receive back more than they pay out the result is collective bankruptcy. This is exacerbated by the treachery of trying to disguise the process through making benefits concentrated and costs diffuse. Society becomes pervaded with a deep frustration born of an impossibility to discern who is responsible for or deserves what. The result is a trashing of clarity and sound values along with an ever-increasing centralization of power. Tytler's oft-quoted observation bears repeating: A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasurywith the result that democracy collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by dictatorship. Statism, democratized or otherwise, weaves dishonest principles and overtly false economic, legal, and existential ones into the fabric of life. The influences are pervasive and inescapable, like pouring ink into water. Some of the fatally treacherous criteria which 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 world view;

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 selfresponsible by dependency on government.

If both governments and people using them may stake legal claim on the lives and resources of others, on what basis are freedom and property ownership even meaningful 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 ultimate arbiters of the matter? Democracy and self-government Any kind of government implies that people have neither the right nor ability to rule themselves, 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 this deficiency which allegedly necessitates being externally ruled one is nevertheless supposed to know how to vote for other men who would govern him. If people are so inept or corrupt as to be unable to manage their own lives, and thus require being governed, it is absurd to expect them at the same time to be so wise as to know how to vote 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 for charlatans to remove matters from his province of control than he is in stateless freedom where all votes are free choices, express true self-governing, and count for real life. If people are unable to manage the direct/self-responsible/free/economic, will acting on the farce of voting to attempt (hopelessly) to control use of the (illegitimate and destructive) inaccessible/coercive/political save them? The process is self-evident travesty. No external system, including any variants of democracy, is actual self-government. Self-government is governing oneself, autonomously acting on one's judgment and conscience. 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 regardless of all labels and trappings to the contrary. As soon as one submits to the authority of an external government, grants it the right to decide matters of his life, he has abandoned self-government. He no longer makes crucial 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 an external organization is to forfeit self-determination. There is at that juncture a loss of control that is at best difficultif not to impossibleto retrieve. The momentum and inertia increasingly amass to tidal-wave proportions. One cannot live by selfgovernment 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 serve two masters. If people are not self-governing, neither they nor anyone else can fabricate a selfgovernment, i.e. a democracy, that can compensate for or accomplish what they could not be and do when left with their full freedom, options, and resources. All such efforts are not only absurd but enormous losses. No one who is deficient becomes sounder, fuller, and richer by surrendering his life, rights, and property to the control of other men. People who live foolishly cannot be saved by relying on an external 18

government. They merely depend for security, order, and progress on charlatans wielding endless destructive force. Abdicating control of life to governments is a kind of spiritual suicide. It projects content and centrality from where it actually resides onto an artificial seat of power in the form of a 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 ceaselessly churning mix of compulsion, violence, and artificiality. Democracy is supposed to transmute and salvage this nonsense because the people are the government. By voting, people purportedly keep their sovereignty, hold the government 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 in government does and direct control over all of their actions. That is of course impossible. No one in government can be responsible to individual members of the public, or he would be the explicit agent of a private party. Then there would be no government. There would be only direct contracts between autonomous peoplewhich is the right way anyway. Politics functions on a far different basis. A myriad of people with diverse and everchanging natures, needs, and priorities are lumped together into groups, e.g. nation, society, or various sub-classifications like races, industries, ages, needs, etc. A state wields discretionary power on behalf of abstractions. Its perspectives and priorities are entirely different from those of individuals. When the two domains interface it is always at the supremacy of the state, and directly or indirectly a loss to the citizenry. People either suffer the naked might of the state's legalized violence or receive benefits consisting of the return of some small fraction of their state-expropriated rights or resources. In short, the existence of the state and all actions 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 democracy the people are the government is sophistry. To equate democracy with freedom is sheer silliness. Government officials are not controlled by the public but by powerful Elite and monetary interests. The vast majority of Americans have no idea whatsoever as 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 for unearned financial largess and legal control over others. The truly major benefits accrue first of all to the hidden power at the core and secondarily to powerful, wellorganized groups at expense of real or potential competition and the less well-organized general public, i.e. taxpayers who pay all the bills. The people pay through the teeth for financing their own subjugation. Mencken wrote of the fallacy of democracy: The light began to dawn, I believe, at the precise moment when the prohibitionists ceased arguing that prohibition would cure all the sorrows of the world, and began arguing that it ought to be submitted to simply because it was the lawin other words, at the moment when they introduced the doctrine of law enforcement. That doctrine, it soon became obvious, had little foundation in logic; it was almost purely mystical. What it amounted to was a denial that the citizens of a free state had any natural and inalienable rights at all. If, by whatever chicanery, a law was passed ordering them to cut off their children's 19

ears, then they were bound to obey. If, by the same chicanery, a law was passed 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 was simply 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. Above him stood an occult something called the government, a force distinct from the people and superior to them. Did the people, under democracy, create it and give it the breath of life? Then, once created, it was nevertheless distinct from them and superior to them. They were forbidden to resist it. By the more extreme prohibitionists they were forbidden even to denounce it. ...The plain people suddenly began to see that a vast machine for oppressing them had been fabricated, and that once it got into full working order they would have a dreadful time escaping from it. More, they began to look behind the machine to the force operating itthat is, to the potent and inscrutable power called the government. And what they saw was simply a gang of menmen exactly like themselvesmen, in many cases, inferior to themselves.13 To democratize illusion, wishful thinking, hubris, avarice, weakness, enslavement, and predatory 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 mean that an organized coercion machinery should exist to gratify his propensities or enforce them over everyone else. In freedom, the consequences of all natures and actions reveal themselvesin physical and mental health, spiritual well-being, social relationships, economic success or failure. Those affected by decisions should be as much 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 facing themselves and truths of life, and fend off consequences of actions. That is not only cowardly, spiritually false, and intellectually sloppy, but delusional and absurd, since no one can abnegate his own free will (what he is), and natural law ensures that everyone experiences the exact consequences of his actions. No external forces can negate the law of karma, including the most gargantuan governments operating through the most massive and pervasive exercises of force possible to muster. Any belief that one is not self-responsible and can escape the consequences of his own thoughts and actions by reliance on the actions of a government is self-delusion deifying a man-made institution attempting to effect the existentially impossible. Clarity, integrity, and justice are dissociated, lost in a dazzling smear of political complexity and immensity. Such distraction provides no shelter. It does not fool natural law. It is a siren call luring one away from truth and self-realization into a mirage the pursuit of which results in certain exhaustion 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 to presuppose individual autonomy and free will. Otherwise there could be no basis of validity for the voting. Who could vote if not someone with authority to do so? Of what significance would the results be? Only one's autonomy can grant him the right to abnegate it. Autonomy likewise gives one the right to keep it. No numbers or consensus can justly remove freedom, sovereignty, and rights from anyone. Yet If people preserved their autonomy, democracy in particulargovernments in generalwould disappear. No one can confer on anyone a right to use force for any purpose other than his own self-defense. No one is entitled to exercise, or delegate to others to exercise, any rights or powers other than those which he himself possesses. No one has any such right in the first place. All proposed pretexts purporting to grant third parties the right to use the political machinery to enslave, rob, meddle, and kill are utterly nugatory. Granting generalized power of attorney to other men to exercise power over oneself is default on one's existence, giving away rights, surrendering control over life, throwing away capacity to become master of one's destiny. Perhaps one has such a right with respect 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 anyone other than oneself is patently unethical and unlawful. All the consensus and convention in the universe cannot grant an ethical right where none exists. Votingputting an X in a boxforms no contract, grants no rights, establishes no agency agreement, validates no policies, conveys no authority for anyone to act in any manner, let alone over other living beings on whom one has no claim. Democracy is a disgusting farce. It is embarrassing that the mass of mankind, including otherwise seemingly intelligent people, lend credence to a sham any third grade child should be able to see through. Freedom does not require justification: coercion does. The burden of validating force falls on the user. Since only self-defense and rectitude can legitimize force, and only each 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 voluntary interchanges between free people. Compulsion structures tension and defects into the fabric of social and economic relationships. One-to-one interactions between individuals are real, direct, and primal. The only ethical and existentially valid way for people to relate, and hence for civilization to emerge and subsist, is for everyone to give value for value on a one-to-one basis. There are genuine and honorable ways to deal with poverty, injustice, and predatory behavior. It is neither sane nor just to rely on an organization that not only engages in the abuses against which it claims to protect but employs 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.

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