[ExI] Conscientious objections

[James Clement]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 6:00 PM, Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> >> I changed my mind. Voting legitimizes the state. I will have no
> >> voluntary involvement in that.
> >
> > You choose to remain within the geographic boundaries the
> > state has sovereignty over.  That is your voluntary involvement.
>
> It's not voluntary at all -- no more than, say, if you hand over your
> money to an armed robber you are voluntarily consenting to the exchange. In
> fact, in political terms, consent really should be -- if it's to be
> consistent and make sense -- express consent where someone openly expresses
> her or his consent for a specific action, condition, or policy. Otherwise,
> I can state that your lack of active resistance in something is consent.
> Thus, the Jews who didn't actively resist being hauled off to death camps,
> consented by that standard.
>
> > If you truly wish to have no such involvement, then leave.  Your
> > presence legitimizes the state by proxy, no matter how much
> > you wish things were otherwise.
>
> I think that's also not so. He doesn't want to, in my understanding,
> legitimize the state via participating in voting. Simply living inside a
> region a state happens to control is not consent and doesn't legitimize it
> as such -- any more than in my previous example: going along with the armed
> robber doesn't legitimize her or his claim to your money.
>
> > Want to put it to the test?  Try refusing to act in accordance
> > with the state's laws - in particular, refusing to pay income tax.
> > Quite a few people legitimize the state by winding up in its
> > prisons that way.
>
> This seems rather silly. People can withhold moral support for something
> by not pretending to go along with the forms and rituals of that thing. Not
> voting and actually telling people about this is actually a good means to
> start up a conversation about state legitimacy (or lack thereof). Yes, it's
> likely many if not most people will disagree and respond with the knee jerk
> "if you didn't vote, you can't complain" line, but a few might listen.
>
> Simply participating in voting doesn't do much. One vote out of thousand
> or millions doesn't count unless there's a really close race. And
> participating is likely to persuade people you go along with the whole
> sham. Let's say Rafal did vote. Who would he vote for? Let's say he voted
> for the LP candidate -- though, IIRC, Rafal is an anarchist like me, so why
> the LP? Did the LP candidate even get enough votes to do anything? Is
> either national party in fear that the LP (or any other third party) is
> stealing votes from them? Are the analysts even looking at the LP? It seems
> like he might just as well have voted for anyone at random and had the
> exact same impact: which is no impact.
>
> (On this, see also Bryan Caplan's _The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why
> Democracies Choose Bad Policies_. Caplan has some good observations on how
> the cost and impact of voting and of supporting political positions in
> general is negligible such that this allows people to hold all kinds of
> ridiculous and wrong views. He focuses on bad economic views -- in fact,
> the same economic fallacies that have been time and again refuted since
> David Hume's time -- are easy to hold because each individual vote doesn't
> count, so the cost of the bad position doesn't really matter all that much.
> By the way, that the same fallacies keep cropping up, over and over, to me
> hints that there might be some room for an evolutionary psychology
> explanation here. A systematic bias across generations and cultures for the
> same kind of wrong ideas seems to show that humans are somehow evolved to
> hold the wrong ideas -- not exactly that the ideas are innate, but that
> humans brains seem to easily fall into the fallacies.*)
>
> Regards,
>
> Dan
>
> * See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter for a
> summary of the four biases Caplan deals with in his book. Regardless of
> one's political philosophy, at least two of his biases seem
> uncontroversial: pessimistic bias and anti-foreign bias. The former seems
> to happen regardless of how well things turn out. People just assume things
> are always getting worse and worse, even when their fortunes are actually
> doing better. For instance, with the recent financial crisis, yes, things
> are bad, but are they really bad as the 1970s or the 1930s? Doubtful.
>


Very well said, Dan.

As an Anarcho-Capitalist <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism>/
Agorist <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agorism>, I concur that it's
unreasonable to insist that living in a geographical location is automatic
consent to the governance of that location by a State. A State is a legal
fiction we substitute for the people who claim power over other people's
lives, usually at the point of a gun. If these people lose their control
over a location, including by way of the passive disobedience of residents
of that location, then the fiction of the State will become far more
obvious.

Thanks,
James

>
>
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