If anything, those who DO vote are the ones giving up their rightful prerogative of complaint. They agreed to the process, filled out the paperwork, cast their ballots. They own the outcomes. Non-voters didn’t ask for the process, didn’t participate in the process, and probably either actively dislike — or at most don’t care much about — the outcomes.

I’m personally on and off about voting. After 20 years of religiously schlepping down to the polling place every other November (and at odd times in between) I stopped for four years. I fell off the wagon this year (to vote the Libertarian slate and support medical marijuana in Florida), but looking back I see that had I voted in 2010 or 2012, my vote wouldn’t have shifted the result in so much as a single race. Nor, if it had, would the different follow-on outcomes have likely been substantially different.

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Journalist Mike Barnicle says he’s never seen an election in which the people feel so distant from the government. I wish his diagnosis were right, but I suspect it is not. True, voter turnout likely set no records for a midterm, but this doesn’t indicate alienation as much as disgust with the particular cast of incumbents. Who wouldn’t be disgusted?

Despite what the voters may think, however, this isn’t really about personality and character. It’s about the limits of human nature. No one is qualified to govern us, considering how “govern” is defined today. The national, state, and local governments attempt to manage all aspects of our lives. In various ways, they undertake to “get the economy moving” and keep it “humming.” On top of that, the national government maintains a global empire in the service of which the national-security apparatus presumes to manage foreign societies.

Even if doing these things were morally proper—which it assuredly is not—it would be beyond the capability of human beings. No person or group could possibly possess the knowledge that would be required to manage a society—this one or one in a foreign land. Any “leader” who presents himself as fit for that job is a poser. No one is qualified to do what politicians today aspire to do.

That goes for Republicans as well as Democrats. Republicans talk about shrinking government, but don’t believe it. They certainly have no intention of shrinking the American empire, much less dismantling it. Quite the contrary. And while they talk about freeing the economy, that usually means removing restrictions on privileged economic interests without also eliminating the privileges. Republicans give the free market a bad name, because too often their policies amount to unabashed corporatism. But, then, the Democrats are no different. Both parties have a vested interest in the essential status quo, whatever their differences at the margin.

The election season is when we most often hear hosannas to democracy. Every public figure, including supposedly hardboiled news people, urges us to vote. “Every vote counts,” they say.

Balderdash.

As the late Gordon Tullock explains, “It’s more likely that you’ll get killed driving to the polling booth, than it is that your vote will change the outcome of the election.” Think about the elections you voted in. Not one would have turned out differently had you done something else that day.

Since no one vote is decisive, most people have no incentive to invest time and money acquiring the knowledge necessary to act responsibly on election day. (The responsible thing could be to stay home.) Government at all levels imposes burdens on our economic activities—the so-called economy is just people and their pursuits. How many voters study economics so they can competently judge what candidates promise to do? And how many study moral philosophy to better decide whether existing and promised policies are moral or immoral? The great American social critic H.L. Mencken said, “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” How would we decide if he is right or wrong?

To really become an informed voter, you would have to do nothing but study these and other subjects. But since your one vote won’t be decisive, why would you take time away from your family, friends, work, and voluntary community activities, where your choices are decisive?

You wouldn’t, and you don’t.

Moreover, the costs and benefits associated with electing the candidates you vote for are dispersed among the multitude, so even if your choice wins, your share is minuscule.

Thus your vote has virtually no personal material consequences and no influence on the outcome. So remaining ignorant and voting your biases and feelings turns out to be the rational thing to do.

In other words, voting rewards irresponsibility. That’s just one problem with democracy.

In the end, democratic representation—the opiate of the masses—is just a way to stop us from complaining. The people in Washington aren’t our representatives. They are our rulers.

But fear not. The alternative isn’t dictatorship. It’s individual freedom, responsibility, contract, and voluntary mutual aid.

Question: If I don’t drive around my neighborhood at 3am blasting Metallica out my car window at 140 decibels, am I boorish or hypocritical to complain about those who do?

If anything, those who DO vote are the ones giving up their rightful prerogative of complaint. They agreed to the process, filled out the paperwork, cast their ballots. They own the outcomes. Non-voters didn’t ask for the process, didn’t participate in the process, and probably either actively dislike — or at most don’t care much about — the outcomes.

I’m personally on and off about voting. After 20 years of religiously schlepping down to the polling place every other November (and at odd times in between) I stopped for four years. I fell off the wagon this year (to vote the Libertarian slate and support medical marijuana in Florida), but looking back I see that had I voted in 2010 or 2012, my vote wouldn’t have shifted the result in so much as a single race. Nor, if it had, would the different  follow-on outcomes have likely been substantially different.

Unlike some anarchists and voluntaryists, I don’t morally condemn voting. I’m with Murray Rothbard on “defensive voting.” The system exists, its overseers are elected, and there’s nothing wrong with the individual slaves choosing, since they’re allowed to, masters less enamored of the whip.

On the other hand, the average elected official receives the active consent of fewer than one in four of the constituents he or she purports to “represent.” There’s something to be said for the possibility of organizing non-voters against the whole charade of “consent.”

So I’m still on the fence. One reason I’m comfortable with voting this year is that it’s likely the least consequential election since the turn of the century and probably for some time before. I know the pundits keep telling you otherwise, but think about it:

The big question this year is whether or not the Republican Party will get to 51 seats in the US Senate.

The Republicans have controlled the US House of Representatives since January of 2011. Since then, not a single bill has become law, nor has a single dime been spent by the US government, without Republican approval.

Politically, the last four years were a cooperative Republican/Democrat enterprise. And unless the Republicans win their way to 67 seats in the US Senate and 291 in the US House — neither of which will happen — so that they can override presidential vetoes, that’s the next two years as well.

So go vote. Or stay home and watch reruns of “How I Met Your Mother.” Either way, feel free to complain all you like. I know I will.

“So, what would happen if 99% of us got together and showed up to vote?”

Ha, ha, it’s a trick question. If 99% of us got together and showed up to vote, 73,760,300 of us (= 23.5%) would be told to go to hell because they’re under 18, about 22,500,000 (= 7%) of us would be told to go to hell because they’re non-citizens, about 5,850,000 (~ 1.8%) would be told to go to hell because they’re legally barred from voting due to a felony conviction. Then we’d look around and notice that 2,400,000 of us (~ 0.7%) never showed up, because they were in prison and so couldn’t quite make it to the polling place.

The 77% or so of us that were left over would then go into the polling place, and they would vote for whoever the hell the Republican Party or the Democratic Party happened to nominate for President of the United States. It’s hard to know in advance, but probably the Democrat would win. And we would have 4 more years of the kind of revolutionary social transformation we’ve experienced under the past 6 years of Democratic administrations.

And indeed, he did—all throughout his political career. As president he used executive order to ban the importation of certain shotguns, and later he threw his weight behind the Brady Bill and 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.

As governor of California, Reagan signed the Mulford Act into law in 1967. Written by Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford, the legislation was the most sweeping state edict in all the country, prohibiting the more or less free carrying of firearms in public. It went along with the rest of his heavy-handed entire law-and-order agenda and inspired an avalanche of new gun laws nationwide.

The purpose of the law was to disarm the Black Panthers, a radical leftist group that openly carried firearms, kept an eye out on the police, and even took their rifles to the state Capitol to protest what they decried as racist legislation.

In the late 1960s, the racism of gun control was fresh on many Civil Rights thinkers’ minds. Upholding gun rights for freed slaves was a primary motive behind the Fourteenth Amendment. State-level gun control became instrumental in suppressing blacks.

The history of American gun control is a history of racism and prejudice. In the early 20^th century, the Sullivan Act in New York, banning the carrying of small arms, was likely aimed at Italian Immigrants. But for most of modern history, the major target was blacks.

David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito explained the general dynamic in their book Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 103–4:

As black assertiveness [in Mississippi] increased, whites came forward with proposals for tougher gun control. The sponsors did not hide the centrality of race in their concerns. White concerns about gun control for blacks was not new. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several southern states had enacted gun control laws that restricted access of cheap handguns to blacks. The term ‘Saturday night special’ may have originated during that period as a racial slur. In early 1954 an editorial in the Clarion-Ledger had stressed the dangers posed by .22 caliber pistols and rifles. Focusing on the example of an ‘allegedly “crazed” Negro’ who killed three white men, it lamented that these ‘weapons are easily obtained and ammunition for them can be bought anywhere.’ If this problem persisted, the editorial continued, laws should be enacted [for] ‘control of the sale of weapons and ammunition or the keeping of records on all such sales.’

In September 1954, a more ambitious proposal “to require registration of all firearms and records on all sales of ammunition” came close to becoming law. The backers explicitly promoted the bill as part of a package of “segregation-supporting” legislation and linked it to the crackdown on civil rights.

After racists bombed his home, Martin Luther King, Jr., generally an advocate for non-violence, procured weapons and attempted to get a concealed carry permit, but was rejected. The first major gun confiscations targeted blacks, who couldn’t rely on the police to protect them because the police were their enemies. Groups like the Deacons for Justice and Defense fought off the Klan and protected innocent blacks in the Jim Crow South.

Elaine Brown, head of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s, recently explained:

The position of the Black Panther Party was that black people live in communities occupied by police forces that are armed and dangerous and represent the frontline of forces keeping us oppressed. We did not promote guns, but rather, the right to defend ourselves against a state that was oppressing us — with guns. There were innumerable incidents in which police agents kicked in our doors or shot our brothers and sisters in what we called red-light trials, where the policeman was the judge, the jury and the executioner. We called for an immediate end to this brutality, and advocated for our right to self-defense. Today, the brutal police murders of Sean Bell in New York and Oscar Grant in Oakland are just two examples of how little has changed. The gun-control discussion could result in policies that further criminalize and target black people.

Conservatives, at their most radical, have made this connection: Condoleezza Rice and Ann Coulter have also argued that blacks should arm themselves if they want to protect themselves against racial violence. But not only rightwingers hone in on this: Ice-T argues that the right to keep and bear arms is to resist tyranny and “to protect yourself from the police.”

When Reagan and Nixon and the other Republicans in the 1960s advanced gun control, they were at least in part pandering to law-and-order conservatives who wanted police to have yet more power to protect them from minorities and the poor. If racism was not in the intent, it was definitely part of the effect.

Even today, gun laws are much like drug laws in that they are disproportionately used against minorities. Gun control is the chief impetus behind New York City’s Stop-and-Frisk program, which in 2011 ensnared young black men more times than there are young black men in the city, and targets minorities by a ratio of nine to one. Conservatives who defend this program are defending gun control at its most invasive—the wholesale profiling and searching of people in the attempt to procure guns, which conservatives claim people have a natural and constitutional right to carry in the first place. Liberals opposed to this program should recognize that to violate gun rights, government must violate other rights.

In the federal prison system, almost half of those convicted for gun control violations are black and a quarter are Hispanic. Because of mandatory minimums for gun violation, the average convicted gun offender—usually someone who never hurt anyone with the weapon—rots in prison for longer than the average convicted rapist.

Some on the left have begun rediscovering the racist roots of gun control. Adam Winkler’s Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America—reviewed here by Thaddeus Russell—tells the story of gun confiscations committed by racist police working with the KKK. Adam Winkler’s Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America also gives a perspective unusual among modern liberals. Craig Whitney discovers the intractable culture war in the debate in Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment. Don Kates’s Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out is a compilation from years ago. Yet the anti-gun control scholarship on the left remains thin.

There are left-friendly arguments for gun rights, but unfortunately we rarely hear them. Gun control is like the drug war, in that it empowers the police with a possession crime, which necessarily means violations of privacy rights, using snitches and dubious informants, and disproportionately high prison sentences for the non-violent act of illegal gun ownership. According to the Department of Justice, the average federal conviction for weapons violations resulted in 87 months in prison compared to 82 months for drug offenses and 28 months for property crimes.

It is impossible to keep criminals, of all people, from getting firearms—and if this wasn’t true ten years go, it will be in the age of 3-D printing. But in the quest to disarm the rabble, the police state can flex its power over the most vulnerable and marginalized people in society.