(EXCERPT) ~ Non-voting | Strike-The-Root: A Journal Of Liberty
In his On The Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849), Henry David Thoreau asked:
How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it . . . . What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
Readers of Strike The Root recognize that there are two principal demands that their governments make upon them: pay your taxes and vote. (Of course, there are many other “demands,” such as military service, send your children to school, have a drivers license, etc., but many of these are ancillary to the primary means of government survival, which is the collection of taxes.)
Now, of these two principal demands, taxation carries criminal sanctions: Pay your money or we imprison your body and/or confiscate your property. However, as yet in most nations of the world, failure to vote in government elections carries no penalty.
Governments, like all other hierarchical institutions, depend upon the cooperation and, at least, the tacit consent of those over whom they exercise power. In other words, government soldiers and police can force people to do things they don’t want to do, but in the long run–in the face of adamant opposition–such coercion is either too expensive or too futile to accomplish its goals of subjugating entire populations.
It is far simpler to motivate people to do what you want them to do, rather than forcing them to do it by pointing guns at them all the time. As Boris Yeltsin supposedly said, “You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can’t sit on it long.”
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