Is Voting Voluntary?

[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Amelia Morris]

"No action can be virtuous unless
it is freely chosen" ~ Murray Rothbard.

The U.S. government is fantastic at tricking we, the people, into believing everything that connects us with them is a voluntary action, because technically, it is. You can choose to not pay your taxes and go to prison instead. You can choose not to join the armed forces and deal with the possibility of being drafted at some point in your life. You can even choose to disconnect from the State completely and pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so.

When I complain about the state of the government, one thing I hear quite a bit is "You don't vote so you don't have a right to complain." It is true that we may choose who to vote for, or whether or not to vote at all, but say I did vote for a presidential candidate and they were not elected. Would I still not have a right to complain, then, because I voted "wrong?" Every person who votes believes they are voting for the candidate who will do the most good for the country. The problem is, no two people think exactly alike. What one person believes is a government service, for the good of all, could be detrimental to all in another's mind. Therein, if a person votes "wrong," they still voted for who they believed to be the better, more capable, more competent candidate. Do they deserve every detrimental thing they have coming to them from the other side?

We are led to believe that voting is a virtuous action because we are supposedly taking an active role in the future of the country. We get to experience a scrap of what politicians experience every day, decision making on a grandeur scale. After casting our ballots, we then hand the country's "collective" issues off to someone else, and if you were unlucky enough to pick the candidate with the minority of votes, that's just too bad.

From what I understand, less people seem to vote as presidential elections continue. Theoretically, say less than half of the country's population votes in the next election, whether out of protest or disinterest, I assume the government would just take into account the votes that were cast. What if only a third of the country voted, or not one single person, even? Here is where the government would arrive at a crossroads. They could pass a mandate which would make voting mandatory, or the highest ranking officials could vote amongst themselves. Either one of these would utterly destroy any voluntary aspect of the system, regarding the people as a whole. In short, I do not view voting as a voluntary or virtuous action because whether or not I choose to vote, I am still denied the choice not to be ruled.

As I mentioned above how no two people think alike, this means that value is subjective, and such is necessarily a prime case against the idea of "public goods."

If I may end with a Rothbard quote:

"..if there exists but one anarchist
in any society, the very existence of
the State coercively supplying a
collective good constitutes a great
psychic harm to that anarchist.
The anarchist, therefore, receives
not a collective service but an
individual harm from the
operations of the State. It
follows therefore that the good
or service cannot be truly
collective; its "service" is separable,
and distinctly negative, to the
anarchists. Hence, the good can
neither be truly collective
(indivisible, and positive) nor
can it be voluntary."