Doesn't matter who you vote for you. Your vote won't be counted. As with everything else in this election, whether it be our candidate, our ideas, or our delegates, your vote will be swept aside and promptly discarded.
The government at all levels is corrupt and lawless. The president and the politicians commit heinous crimes against the constitution on a regular basis. So much so, that such behavior is considered normal, and accepted.
Up is down. Wrong is right. Unconstitutional is constitutional. Tyranny is freedom. War is peace. This country is so incredibly far gone it is beyond repair.
By voting, the only message that sends, is that you still believe in the "system." You still believe that the system works. You still believe that if only we can vote enough liberty people into the system, that we'll be able to vote our freedom back. The problem is, they barely even let us vote at all. Because it is a criminal organization. It is far, far too late to turn it around by working within that system. They have an iron grasp on it. Anything that even remotely threatens their grip, is dealt with efficiently and expediently.
Do not vote. Withdraw your consent. Make it clear to yourself, and anyone who will listen, that this system and these people are criminals and they have no rightful authority.
Okay, so the voting machines are rigged. Okay, so Romney's team compromised the central tabulator this time around. However, they can only cheat so much; otherwise, Ron Paul would have lost his Congressional seat long ago, and none of us would have heard of him, and a lot of people here would still be neocons or progressives. Therefore, the voters in the 14th district of Texas HAVE made a huge demonstrable difference. Just because there are setbacks, and just because it's an uphill battle, is not a valid argument for saying it's totally futile. We've barely even begun to try, and I'm constantly hearing crap about how we should simply give up.
What, do you think the government is going to go away on its own? It won't! So long as the government has enough of an appearance of legitimacy, it can still collect tax money and rape and pillage. What about agorism? Agorism only affects trade, not the large-scale production of most economic goods. We need capital goods and factories and fields that cannot be hidden forever from the IRS to actually produce stuff, which means that there will ALWAYS be enough above-board business for the IRS to tax and fund government with. Education alone means nothing as long as the government is getting its money, and most people have very different personalities from you and me: They cannot be educated by rational argumentation until they're emotionally ready, and they need to hear arguments from "winners" before that happens. Tax revolt? People aren't ready for that kind of sacrifice and risk to fight the establishment, considering they're not even ready to stop voting for the "lesser of two evils." Armed revolt? LOL. What about non-voters? The vast majority haven't "withdrawn consent;" they're simply apathetic, and that is exactly the message that not voting sends outside of a tiny libertarian circlejerk. They have it in their power to actually make third parties WIN if they did vote (see above about the 14th district in Texas)...but they just don't care enough to lift a finger, let alone organize.
I understand you're probably just riding this out and waiting for collapse, but what then? People WILL beg for another government, and likely a more fundamentally compromised one than this. We're not immediately going to go into some voluntaryist paradise from here; that's a lot way off, after the population becomes comfortable enough with years and years of stable minarchy to slowly and methodically dismantle it. Instead, a collapse will bring another state, probably a worse one with "positive rights" codified in its Constitution, unless WE get involved and exert every bit of our influence on its Constitutional Convention. What does that take? Oh, yeah...political action. Whether you wait for collapse or not, political action is literally unavoidable at some point for us to ever actually get anything done...but it just might be considerably more difficult after collapse, depending on the circumstances involved.
In short, please, PLEASE stop pushing such a destructive notion as "withdrawing consent" by washing your hands of literally anything that might have the power to peacefully reduce or dissolve government. Whether before or after collapse, political action is ultimately the ONLY thing that will allow us to push back enough to restrain government; other approaches like agorism help grease the wheels a bit, but as I argued above, literally no other avenue is sufficient without political action, so we'd all better hope it's less futile than you indicate. Quietly disengage if you like, but for all of our sake, please stop trying to convince others to do the same. Or, participate and simply declare that your desire to influence the outcome in no way implies your consent to be ruled by it (unless it's complete voluntaryism). The only people who will even hear your thoughts on consent - or care - are your libertarian friends anyway.
The massive gains of the Ron Paul movement have been thanks to Ron Paul and his grassroots support (us).
