The Founder of this blog, in a recent post, has given me the impetus to post about something whereupon I had hoped to post some weeks ago. Speaking about property taxes in the USA and comparing them aptly to feudal rents, he noted, “[T]here is the facade of elections covering the taxes.” I would like to write today about the veneer of voting, what the Founder called the “facade of elections.”
I should note the Founder disagrees with some of the following conclusions; these views are not representative of his post. In the end, I shall offer two reasons—the first practical and the second theoretical—voting provides but a veneer of self-rule within an oppressive system.
Throughout the history of human society, there has been a basic morality to undergird people’s interactions. Often this has been codified in a legal system. Proscription of murder and theft—at least insofar as people understood them at the time—have been included in every legal system because these conform to the way all rational people operate, what is called the natural law, specifically the subset thereof called human nature.
As is demonstrable from history, those legal systems that more closely conform to the natural law allow each individual to flourish more than those distanced from the natural law. By the mid-twentieth century, for example, the legal systems that allowed for more liberty had overabundant loaves of bread in a myriad of varieties; in contradistinction, the legal systems that allowed for little liberty resulted in shortages of bread, manifested in “bread lines” wherein people waited and waited for whatever bread was available.
Because human nature and the natural law itself is discovered through human reason, people can come to know it and apply it to their various societies in life. Especially since the Enlightenment, people came to associate a legal system that allows for more liberty—more individual control—with the flourishing of individual people and societies in general. Applying that to the political realm, from the late late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries saw large numbers of people in the West move from autocratic, monarchical systems to more democratic, republican systems. Throwing out, say, a king who rules by divine right in favor of a president voted into office by a meaningful percentage of citizens better conforms to the natural law, which favors each person to organize societies to benefit him- or herself without infringing on anyone else’s right to do the same.
Because choosing a politician, i.e., voting, better conforms to self-rule, which is rooted in the natural law, than accepting rule by the child of a monarch, rational people are more likely and better able to accept, favor, and defend modern liberal democracies than kingdoms. In addition, because liberal democracies allow individuals to thrive more than do kingdoms, rational people are inclined towards them out of self-interest.
Reason the first, or the practical. Though voting itself better conforms to the natural law than what had preceded, the real-world applications have been—without exaggeration—disastrous for individuals and societies. The American Revolution, for example, exchanged a far-off king who claimed absolute dominion over every person and all land within the British Empire but took about 1% in taxes for a nearby president, congress, and judiciary that claimed very little dominion over every person and land within the USA (i.e., constitutionally enumerated powers) but took about 3% in taxes. (I do not question the revolution’s justice; solely I intend to demonstrate one practical result thereof.) That percentage has raised steadily over the centuries even to the modern day, when many middle-class citizens in the USA pay about half their incomes in combined taxes and fees at the national, state, county, and local levels. Certainly it is better for the ruler to claim less right to his or her subjects’ property, but the self-interest of most people would prefer whatever has less impact on their wealth.
Reason the second, or the theoretical. In a monarchical system there is one person to blame ultimately: the king, queen, or emperor. Every ruler has to balance taxation against his or her own mortality, i.e., “Off with her head!” In a republican form of government with elected representatives and voters, the rulers can slough off responsibility to the voters; it is ultimately claimed to be the people’s fault. (Because voting more closely resembles self-rule, this argument persuades and is repeated by a large number of people.) Because not everyone is represented in a republican system, voting itself and its attendant “people’s fault” argument cannot be applied to many voters, including the minority who voted against each representative, the minority or majority who did not vote for any candidate, the minority or majority who voted for each representative because the available alternatives were worse, &c.
Voting offers a veneer of self-rule, self-rule being in accord with human nature. Free, rational people in a system allowing self-rule have and likely would form voluntary societies for mutual defense, mutual insurance, and other societies that can accomplish such ends more efficiently than individually. Because liberal democracies more closely mimic these societies, they are given popular support by rational people who cannot see through the veneer of voting.
