Understanding Freedom

If you want more police brutality, corruption, government waste, higher taxes, more invasions of your privacy, and more restrictions on your civil liberties then go ahead and vote for someone to rule you. Otherwise stop participating in the system that creates this by voting, and join me in resisting government — all government.

We hear the words “freedom and democracy” together all the time, as if they go hand in hand, but democracy is not freedom. On a fundamental level democracy is antithetical to freedom. Democracy is the authority of the majority to vote away the freedom of the minority. In a purely democratic system, the majority could vote away freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

Democracy and freedom are really two opposing sides in a three-way tug-of-war, of which the third side is dictatorship. Anarchists oppose both democracy and dictatorship and stand firmly on the side of freedom. They would oppose majority rule in principle, even if it were truly possible, but all too often democracy allows a small minority to violate the freedom of the majority.

We are told that we need government to create law, and presented with a vision in which without some sort of legislature or centralized law-giving authority there is lawlessness. In fact, this is not where all law comes from. The most essential portion of our code of law was not passed by legislatures, or even created by government at all. The common law, which defines basic offenses such as burglary, murder, and rape, property rights, and liability rules, originated in its most basic form from a process entirely outside of government.

Direct action and abstention from voting form the cornerstones of a strategy in which we can, over time, as our numbers grow, weaken the government’s power and reduce its importance in society. As we reduce the importance of the political process, gradually special-interest groups will stop going through it to get their favors. This is something we could never achieve working within the system. No matter how many laws we repeal, as long as we continue working within the system, the political process will retain its importance.