Lunaya Pravda

25 September 2007

On the drawing of battle lines...

PintOfStout over at Murphy's Bye-Laws writes yet another excellent piece:

There are two reasons voting persists even though the choices almost all crawl from the same cesspool. The first reason is to keep those that are being extorted from flat-out stringing them up. This is accomplished by slapping some hooker-red lipstick on this pig and promising the booboisie anything they want, including respecting them in the morning. The second reason to keep up the voting illusion is to roll everyone, participant or not, into culpability for the actions of the few in control.

Precisely. Voting is an illusion... the Blue Pill. Nothing more than a feel-good measure to keep people believing that their input matters. Every single voter out there can recall at least one instance (if not more) when voters have had their say only to watch politicans and other bureaucratic slime do an end-around the voters, usually in a manner so underhanded that the blood boils.

To keep voting fits the definition of insanity--trying the same thing expecting different results. It matters not which mouth-breathing warm body is occupying a given office. Voting for the Other Party won't fix it. But few folks learn this cycle and opt out of it entirely. Even I haven't been able to entirely divest myself of the bad habit of voting. Surely there's a 12-step program for this...

In a means over ends approach of Voluntaryists, proper class struggle will be framed by means (political or productive) and not ends (rich and poor or labor and owner).

Describing politics as the diametric opposition to production is dead-on-balls accurate (it's an industry term). A struggle between the givers and the takers. Between the doers and the leeches.

The older I get, the less I appreciate the automatic bashing of the wealthy solely because of the bottom line on their bank statements. Whenever someone starts to vilify the wealthy in my presence, I feel my attention and respect for them slip away, and unfortunately, hating the rich is trendy, so this happens all too often. Granted, many of the wealthy have racked up laundry lists of reasons to dislike them--supporting government protectionism that drives out their competitors, subsidies, grants, property theft through eminent domain--but wealth alone is NOT sufficient reason to put someone on the other side of the disagreement.

Nice one, Stout.

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