The Good Intentions Paving Company

[PAF]

Thanks to [MENTION=33486]Voluntarist[/MENTION] for bringing this to my attention.


26 years ago, in a letter addressed to Philip Roth, Saul Bellow wrote that "The Good Intentions Paving Company" has "fucked up again." I cannot think of a better way to describe the flood of libertarians and other well-intentioned folk who will 'do it' in the voting booth today in the belief or hope that casting a ballot will make a difference.

The sad reality is they are correct...but the difference is not one I think they wish to make. By casting a ballot they are reaffirming 'the system' of majority rule; by participating in electoral politics, they personally sanction 'the rules of the game' and, thus, whomever emerges as the victor; by lining up with ID at the ready, as the elites declare is their "civic duty," the good intentioned voters do the opposite of protesting the injustice of one man ruling others. When is it ever in your self-interest to follow the admonitions of the power elite? And, yet, there the 'good' citizens will be. Participating in the one process that provides a patina of legitimacy to the idea that a politician has any right to pass laws restricting the peaceful activity of unconsenting others. (For "unconsenting" read "non-voters" who did not sanction the process through their participation.)

I know those who toil for The Good Intentions Paving Company do mean well. Many of them want lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government... I would be more sympathetic if their good intentions did not result in leading everyone down a path toward hell. I would be more sympathetic were it not for the fact that I am among the unconsenting who must bear the heavy consequences of their support of electoral politics, of their willingness to sanction a system that is inherently oppressive and unjust.

Your vote is not a defensive act. It is an act that facilitates violence committed against people like me who have done you no harm but merely wish to live...and peacefully so. By casting a vote, you tell thugs, opportunists, parasites and worse that they have a right to intrude upon my life with their laws, their taxes and zero-tolerance policies about everything from speech to drugs, from guns to trans-fat. You vote is like ringing a dinner bell for wolves to descend.

Ah, no, you protest! Your vote is against the thugs and thuggery. You wish to usher in decent human beings who are fit to rule us all. Benign and wise power elites who would never, ever abuse their vast power and access to wealth. Reality check:

1) decent human beings do not seek to occupy a position of unjust power over others...and that is inherently what a political office is. The litmus test for decency is whether the person says "no" and walks away.

2) I don't care how good your motives are for facilitating the violation of my rights. This merely makes you less distinguishable from others who wrap themselves in a morality backed up by force.

You must forgive me if I do not forgive your good intentions. Without your sanction, the State could not exist.





http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.3588

 

[CCTelander]

Thanks to [MENTION=33486]Voluntarist[/MENTION] for bringing this to my attention.


26 years ago, in a letter addressed to Philip Roth, Saul Bellow wrote that "The Good Intentions Paving Company" has "fucked up again." I cannot think of a better way to describe the flood of libertarians and other well-intentioned folk who will 'do it' in the voting booth today in the belief or hope that casting a ballot will make a difference.

The sad reality is they are correct...but the difference is not one I think they wish to make. By casting a ballot they are reaffirming 'the system' of majority rule; by participating in electoral politics, they personally sanction 'the rules of the game' and, thus, whomever emerges as the victor; by lining up with ID at the ready, as the elites declare is their "civic duty," the good intentioned voters do the opposite of protesting the injustice of one man ruling others. When is it ever in your self-interest to follow the admonitions of the power elite? And, yet, there the 'good' citizens will be. Participating in the one process that provides a patina of legitimacy to the idea that a politician has any right to pass laws restricting the peaceful activity of unconsenting others. (For "unconsenting" read "non-voters" who did not sanction the process through their participation.)

I know those who toil for The Good Intentions Paving Company do mean well. Many of them want lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government... I would be more sympathetic if their good intentions did not result in leading everyone down a path toward hell. I would be more sympathetic were it not for the fact that I am among the unconsenting who must bear the heavy consequences of their support of electoral politics, of their willingness to sanction a system that is inherently oppressive and unjust.

Your vote is not a defensive act. It is an act that facilitates violence committed against people like me who have done you no harm but merely wish to live...and peacefully so. By casting a vote, you tell thugs, opportunists, parasites and worse that they have a right to intrude upon my life with their laws, their taxes and zero-tolerance policies about everything from speech to drugs, from guns to trans-fat. You vote is like ringing a dinner bell for wolves to descend.

Ah, no, you protest! Your vote is against the thugs and thuggery. You wish to usher in decent human beings who are fit to rule us all. Benign and wise power elites who would never, ever abuse their vast power and access to wealth. Reality check:

1) decent human beings do not seek to occupy a position of unjust power over others...and that is inherently what a political office is. The litmus test for decency is whether the person says "no" and walks away.

2) I don't care how good your motives are for facilitating the violation of my rights. This merely makes you less distinguishable from others who wrap themselves in a morality backed up by force.

You must forgive me if I do not forgive your good intentions. Without your sanction, the State could not exist.





http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.3588

"You must spread some Reputation around..."

 

[Voluntarist]

Per registered decision, member has been banned for violating community standards as interpreted by TheTexan (respect his authoritah) as authorized by Brian4Liberty Ruling

May God have mercy on his atheist, police-hating, non-voting, anarchist soul.

 

[PAF]

"Men are the sport of circumstances when it seems circumstances are the sport of men."
Lord Byron

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

= = = = =

He looked at the ballot in his hand and tossed his trench coat over the side of the voting station – this was going to be a long one. Those words, not from any campaign, but haunting nonetheless:

“ … We are all just victims of circumstance … “

They had been simple words, scrawled in Sharpie ink upon the side of the polling station, as plain as black and white TV; not that 24-hour-a-day, hi-def cable $#@!. Hopelessly and completely given over to the urges of yesterday; he was full of memory and empty of soul. It had been too long. The day breaks into an infinite series of political soundbites, each having neither mass nor dimension but somehow coalescing to form the elements of misbegotten political platforms.

Each and every one of us, the liberty seekers and other wharf rats of the universe, is trapped into an existence of our own making, and yet has no choice but to muddle on. It’s a strange kind of wakefulness that confronts us each day; the lights from your eyes can burn the skies out … errrr … maybe that wasn’t the way the song lyric went.

He stared again at the candidates and measures on the ballot. The static buzzing of voters in line at six foot intervals drones on forever out into the ether, not noticed but incessant just the same. It is a space of N dimensions, but we seem to exist in only N minus one. Lost, like a scalar with no identity, a vector with no duality, non-linear operators trapped within a trapezoidal operation on a linear progression on the 70 westbound from St. Louis (or was that on the 5 southbound from LA; so hard to tell sometimes).

Trapped; he was a victim of circumstance …

We are all just victims of circumstance …

Etched plainly had been those words.

Returning to the graffiti in the voting station, he took the Sharpie the pollmasters had given him, his quill of the liberty revolution, and struck a blow for those who either would not or could not:

“ … We are all UNjust victims of circumstance …”

He removed his coat from the station wall, still hopelessly puzzled by the source of the runes that had been left on that wall. “Could it be the code of some long lost social order, or the ranting of some tortured social misfit”, he thought silently to himself, “or perhaps something majikal scribed by the breath of a wizard.”

He pondered the point as he, beginning to grasp the futility of the process, dumped his unmarked ballot into the ballot box.

Bump

 

[Voluntarist]

I've been watching this theme of "The Voting system has been corrupted by the other party" for some time now. The Democrats have their take on it - evidently believing that there are external players (the Russians, social media, etc.) that are using Jedi mind tricks to sway the judgment of weak-minded voters. And the Republicans are convinced that the Democrats are just pumping tens if not hundreds of thousands of fake votes into the system. And I keep wondering why these people, if they are truly convinced of these things, still bother to vote.

Beyond that, though, I’m thinking that there are probably some common stages that most people go through with respect to voting (akin to the Kübler-Ross model of grief) – and that individuals have to recognize them before they can address the underlying personal problem of why they put any credence in the voting process.

1. You believe in the story you’ve been fed about the system; you enthusiastically research the candidates’ positions; you discuss and debate those positions with friends and relatives; then you vote for whom you decide is the best candidate to fill the position.
2. You see that government is “not working” and blame the people currently holding positions in it. You look over the electoral options available and vote for the non-incumbents you determine are best suited to fill the position. A follow-on iteration to this is that you search for the non-incumbent candidates who have never held office.
3. You say to yourself, “if only a wise and benevolent individual of high moral fiber and character could be convinced to run for office”; and you eventually recognize “the one we’ve all been waiting for”; and you contribute to, and campaign for this individual as though he or she were the physical manifestation of all that could be considered “the way”.
4. You come to the conclusion that the two party system is only half as bad as a one party system like communism – and you strike a blow for liberty by casting a ballot for a third party.
5. You return to the two party fold – realizing that the only way change can be invoked will be by working within that existing system. In this stage you’ve actually convinced yourself that there is only one party that stands a chance of being converted to good.
6. You’re not happy with any of the available candidates; but go to the polls to cast a ballot for the lesser of the two evils that are likely to win.
7. You notice how out of control the government becomes when one of the two major parties controls both the legislative and executive branches concurrently. In response, you vote for gridlock by splitting your ticket, hoping to award the legislative branch to one party and the executive branch to another.
8. You submit an empty ballot – hoping that others will join you and that, somehow, someone will notice.
9. You stay home on election day and do something worthwhile with your time.

 

[osan]

Thanks to @Voluntarist for bringing this to my attention.


26 years ago, in a letter addressed to Philip Roth, Saul Bellow wrote that "The Good Intentions Paving Company" has "fucked up again." I cannot think of a better way to describe the flood of libertarians and other well-intentioned folk who will 'do it' in the voting booth today in the belief or hope that casting a ballot will make a difference.

The sad reality is they are correct...but the difference is not one I think they wish to make. By casting a ballot they are reaffirming 'the system' of majority rule; by participating in electoral politics, they personally sanction 'the rules of the game' and, thus, whomever emerges as the victor; by lining up with ID at the ready, as the elites declare is their "civic duty," the good intentioned voters do the opposite of protesting the injustice of one man ruling others. When is it ever in your self-interest to follow the admonitions of the power elite? And, yet, there the 'good' citizens will be. Participating in the one process that provides a patina of legitimacy to the idea that a politician has any right to pass laws restricting the peaceful activity of unconsenting others. (For "unconsenting" read "non-voters" who did not sanction the process through their participation.)

I know those who toil for The Good Intentions Paving Company do mean well. Many of them want lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government... I would be more sympathetic if their good intentions did not result in leading everyone down a path toward hell. I would be more sympathetic were it not for the fact that I am among the unconsenting who must bear the heavy consequences of their support of electoral politics, of their willingness to sanction a system that is inherently oppressive and unjust.

Your vote is not a defensive act. It is an act that facilitates violence committed against people like me who have done you no harm but merely wish to live...and peacefully so. By casting a vote, you tell thugs, opportunists, parasites and worse that they have a right to intrude upon my life with their laws, their taxes and zero-tolerance policies about everything from speech to drugs, from guns to trans-fat. You vote is like ringing a dinner bell for wolves to descend.

Ah, no, you protest! Your vote is against the thugs and thuggery. You wish to usher in decent human beings who are fit to rule us all. Benign and wise power elites who would never, ever abuse their vast power and access to wealth. Reality check:

1) decent human beings do not seek to occupy a position of unjust power over others...and that is inherently what a political office is. The litmus test for decency is whether the person says "no" and walks away.

2) I don't care how good your motives are for facilitating the violation of my rights. This merely makes you less distinguishable from others who wrap themselves in a morality backed up by force.

You must forgive me if I do not forgive your good intentions. Without your sanction, the State could not exist.





http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.3588

In a purely normative vein, almost everything you wrote makes all good sense and is truthful. Sadly however, the normative track isn't even on the same planet with the positive reality that we must face every day.

As to "almost",

1) decent human beings do not seek to occupy a position of unjust power over others...and that is inherently what a political office is. The litmus test for decency is whether the person says "no" and walks away.

Not all pursuers of political office seek as you assert in too broad a stroke. Take Ron Paul. He spent his years trying to decrease those powers over you, while doing what he could to stave off the vampires. Seems Rand is doing much the same, even if he is playing the DC game more than did his father. Massie, pretty much the same, so that's three examples counter to your claim.

In the daily world where statistical reality reigns, where humans are wildly corrupt in general, where time is now short, and where bringing the Meaner over to the light in anything better than trivial numbers would require more time than that which is available, playing the game by voting is the one thing remaining to us (and even tisis now very questionable) to slow Themme down even a tiny bit.

Doing nothing, while perhaps noble in terms of the rightful principles behind all this, only serves to further damage us precisely because of the statistical reality that we face. It is miserably sad, but at this time there is vanishingly small reason to expect anything better to come of the general circumstance. If right-minded men simply let go now, that means the only people with a say are those who are our sworn enemies, seeking to destroy everything we claim to hold dear.

One of the truly great problems of the so-called "liberty" movement, regardless of flavor, is the unrealistic viewd of the adherents, thinking that the nation could survive being set free from one moment to the next. The human race is nowhere ready for freedom. They don't even know what it is, and when placed before them, they recoil in horror because they have been taught from an early age to see pretty slavery as freedom. The dark side of liberty, embodied as the risks of being free and the fatigues of maintaining that state of being, drives the average man into a state of panic-fueled rage. I'm dead serious about this. If you doubt me, try convincing your favorite lefty that being truly free is what they really want. But you have to include in your description items beyond the ability for them to put their willies into the rectums of anyone they choose and to call themselves a girl when in fact they are, at least genetically, boys. Teach them about the scary risks of others carrying all manner of deadly weapons wherever and whenever they want; of the same people not paying taxes for social programs; of no safety nets; of meanies being able to say hurtful things with no risk of a SWAT team descending on them; of starving to death if they perchance are unable to find gainful work, and so on down the list that comprises the other side of the coin that is all bunnies, light, and spooge. I will bet money I don't have that they will want to stove in your head with an iron bar while shrieking at you like an air raid siren every obscenity known to mankind, and a few theretofore unknown.

The world isn't ready. Period.

Therefore, the best thing to do is precisely what a prisoner intent on escape does: he steals a spoon from the mess hall and starts scraping away at the concrete wall under the sink in his cell. It takes years, but in the meanwhile as you dismantle each individual element of tyranny with the one hand, the other is educating the mob away from their states of rank and putrescent corruption, toward the light of normative liberty. This job is likely to take generations even under the best of circumstances, so the more quickly one begins, the sooner comes the blessèd day. Barking for insta-free America (or wherever) is a fool's errand. it will never happen. As has been pointed out more than once in the past, the slaves will fight to the death to defend the system that has reduced them to subhuman status. That's 99.99% of all the human beings walking the earth at this time. They would kill you and all your kin a billion times over before so much as even opening up enough to consider the possibility of maybe taking it under preliminary and ever-so-tentative advisement to maybe give it a whirl to perhaps, however remotely, even hear the basic argument for the liberty they so utterly revile and wish banished from the universe for all eternity. THAT is what you face right here, right now.

Did I mention that the world isn't ready?

So in the meanwhile, you adopt a strategic view of the situation and act with the best intelligence for the circumstance by using the system Theye created again Themme. You do precisely what Theye have been doing for at least 200 years: the piecemeal dismantling of everything for which Theye have so tirelessly labored up to this point. We could go to hot war - God knows it could be very rightly justified, but that may be what Theye want. Rather, I say begin turning the table on them using the very system they created to defeat you. You will not live to see the fruit, but if you really care about liberty and your posterity, that should not matter. It must be enough to know that you have set something in motion and hope that thoe who come after you will have the fortitude and integrity to stay the course as piecemeal they raze the walls the tyrant so painstakingly erected. This is really the only way left to us that doesn't entail vast material destruction of both life and other property. Patience is a virtue, and in no place is it more true than in the fight to gain and keep one's liberty, especially when we speak in terms of an entire nation recovering itself from the bonds of tyranny.

It took us nearly 250 years to get to this point of degeneration. We will count ourselves lucky if ever we regain ourselves, trebly so if we can do it in three to five generations. The succession of American generations are to blame for all this. We the people have fucked up most egregiously. Repair will be costly and time consuming, so I suggest we get to it.

In that spirit, how would someone go about trying to gin up interest in sponsoring a Consitutional Amendment? Asking for a friend.