If you vote, you’re my real enemy — no matter who gets your vote

By David McElroy · September 20, 2016

If you don’t vote for the Crips, that just gives the Bloods more power. So you must vote for the Crips.

If you’re part of a gang, other gangs are your enemy. If you’re a Crip, the Bloods are the enemy. And vice versa. You can’t understand that all gangs are the enemies of peaceful people.

If you’re part of a crime family, the competing crime families are your enemy. You don’t understand that all criminals are the real enemy of decent people.

If you’re emotionally committed to being a Republican, you see Democrats as the enemy. For Democrats, it’s the other way around. You might see faults in the politicians on your side — mostly because they don’t agree with you about everything — but you believe they’re infinitely better than the politicians on the other side.

So if you’re on either side of that political divide — hating Team Red or hating Team Blue — you can’t understand that the entire political system, which is based on deciding which politicians get to control organized violence in order to rule everyone — is the enemy of all people who wish to be free.

And if you participate in that — in a system that enslaves me and those I care about — you make yourself my political enemy. Every time you give support to that system by voting or teaching others to do the same, you are strengthening a system which is evil.

Some people make the mistake of believing the political system is evil only because of what it does and because of the evil people who end up in charge. They believe that “good people” can change things by taking control. But that misses the moral point.

The problem isn’t which policies politicians pursue — as distasteful as those can be — but rather the problem is that any group of politicians has the power to decide anything about your life.

Anything.

It doesn’t matter how you justify what you want to do to me.

You might claim you support freedom because you simply want to “return to the Constitution.” I’ve argued before that the U.S. Constitution is a dead document with no meaning other than what nine politicians in robes claim it has. But this isn’t a recent development. From very early on, insightful thinkers such as Lysander Spooner realized that the Constitution had failed.

“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist,” Spooner wrote in 1867 in “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.”

The same is true today. Even if you once believed in the fantasy of “limited government” — which is an oxymoron sort of like “limited rape” — what we have today is a leviathan that has absolutely no limits to its authority when politicians decide to invent new reasons to extend their power.

Did the Constitution authorize what we have today? Or was it merely powerless to prevent it? Either way, what good does it do to depend on the piece of paper that has produced the monster which has been growing around us for a couple of centuries?

Many of those who honestly want to make the world a better place — those who truly want fairness, morality and justice — believe they can do so by having politicians pass regulations to bring about what they want. But they miss the point that by creating and supporting a government with the power to enforce their views on others, they have made the world they want impossible.

You cannot legislate your way to a world of fairness, morality and justice. The best you can do is to be fair, moral and just in your own life — and teach others to voluntarily choose the same values and choices. A world in which you forcibly impose your standards on otherwise-peaceful people is inherently unfair, immoral and unjust.

There are a few people today who say they’re not part of the dominant system and simply want to take over government to make it smaller. (I have the Libertarian Party in mind, of course.) Even when they admit they have no chance of winning elections, they say they want to “educate” people. But what message are they sending?

Libertarians in the political system are not educating people to seek freedom. They’re telling those who have realized they are unfree that they can become free if they’ll simply vote for the right new ruler.

Do they believe coercive government is acceptable as long as it’s not as bad as what Democrats and Republicans have given them? Do they believe they would be free if their preferred candidates were elected?

So to everyone who believes that his political hero would bring freedom to Americans — whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian or even a Green — I have some questions for you.

What happens if I disobey your “enlightened” politician?

What happens when I decline to give him my money?

What happens when I refuse to obey the rules he gives me about how I’m allowed to interact with others?

What happens when I refuse to recognize that he has any authority over me?

If I can ignore your chosen politician and his rules — if I can decide how I want to voluntarily interact with others as we please — then I don’t mind if you have elections and wave your political signs. But if your political hero claims the right to force me to obey him, he is my enemy.

If you help to give him power — if you vote or encourage people to vote, which props up the system that gives him power — you become my political enemy. I will still love you and I will still like many of you. You’ll still be my personal friends.

But if you are doing that, what you are doing is immoral. You are the problem, because you are helping to perpetuate an evil system which can never be moral, fair or just — a system which can never bring about the world free people deserve.

I am an abolitionist. If you vote, you are simply trying to loosen or tighten the chains a bit — and you’re legitimizing the right of the overseer to control all of us.

My not voting isn’t going to fix anything right now. Your not voting also isn’t going to fix anything right now. If you believe in individual freedom, the only thing that will fix things is teaching people that the system has no legitimacy, no matter who wins. Until enough people reject the legitimacy of their chains to reach a critical mass of the public, nothing will change.

If you vote, you are giving legitimacy to your chains.

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I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

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