Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

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Voting Is No Longer Viable. Focus On What You Can Control In Your Life, Which Is Primarily Yourself.

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By any measure, 2020 was not a very good year for human freedom. By now everyone is very familiar with the assaults on liberty stemming from measures ostensibly in the name of stopping the spread of covid and the way in which such measures have threatened the very existence of the social order. Beyond such obscene and unprecedented measures, 2020 also demonstrated that the leaders of our society are truly incompetent and bungling. The ineptitude is truly staggering, even for skeptics of the state. When surveying the wreckage of last year one can’t help but feel a sense of dread and apprehension for the long-term health of our civilization.

It is not only the state and its myriad of pathetic politicians and power-mad bureaucrats who are cause for concern. Culturally, the woke madness has been spreading like a malignant cancer throughout the body politic. Churches, universities, large companies, and cultural institutions have increasingly come under the sway of the reality-denying woke ideology. No doubt that a few hundred years in the future some enterprising author will make a fortune humorously documenting all the culturally accepted absurdities of our era, but unfortunately they are not so amusing to those of us forced to endure them.

Now, 2021 has opened with even more chaos and uncertainty as a riotous mob supporting Trump stormed the capital building. This crazed lunacy has only furthered the idea that we are on the decline, not to mention that it will serve as a convenient excuse for any number of further government crackdowns.

In short, disorder reigns.

Looking around at the wreckage and continued decay of our society, it is easy to become discouraged and even to begin to feel desperate. In such desperation, it may seem necessary to redouble our efforts to affect political change and “save the country” from its present disastrous course.

While such a position is easy to understand, I would posit that perhaps trying to roll back the state via electoral victory, which is what friends of liberty have consistently failed to do for decades, is not a viable strategy, and that it is actively contributing to the problem.

While it is popular and accurate to blame our societal elites for being pathetic and inept, the truth is that these leaders, both political and cultural, are reflections of us. Leaders who do not reflect the character of the people they lead will not be leaders for long. In the final accounting, it is not the words written down on the parchment of the Constitution that govern the United States. Rather, the true constitution of a people is the one that is written in their hearts. A badly written constitution will not be an obstacle to a virtuous and ordered people, just as the most brilliantly organized constitution will not save an unvirtuous and disordered people.

Perhaps, in the same way that the central government has sapped more and more of the strength and social power from all other institutions of social life, it has also sapped our attention and energies from where they truly belong. To what extent have efforts to stop the government merely made its job easier by leading us to neglect our families, churches, and communities? To what extent has it made us neglect our very own cultivation of virtue?

In the first chapter of The Art of War, Sun Tzu counsels that if the enemy “is in superior strength, evade him….Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.” Constantly attempting to seize the power of the state in order to reduce it has been attacking the enemy where he is strong and engaging on his terms. In a sense, we have let the central government determine the battlefield. Political power is not the only repository of power in society, yet we have chosen to constantly engage the state in that sphere and have consistently lost. Even supposed victories tend to merely be rearguard-holding actions to delay rather than defeat.

I would suggest that the time has come to consciously turn to an alternative strategy of cultivating social power outside of the state apparatus. Such an effort is likely to lead to much more success, although that is a low bar since the current strategy has led to no success at all. Unlike federal electoral politics, it begins with something entirely and completely under one’s control: oneself.

The key to the cultivation of alternative poles of social power begins with order, specifically the ordering of one’s own life. This is not an idea original to me. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has recently popularized this idea in a secular manner with his refrain of “clean your room.” Less recently, though in a far more sophisticated manner that recognizes man’s spiritual nature, the political theorist Eric Voegelin has written voluminously about modern chaos as stemming from internal disorder that is the result of man’s loss of connection to the engendering experiences that serve to capture the truth of reality, the end result of which is the rise of totalitarian ideologies.

Instead of a more traditional concern with cultivating oneself, with looking after the beam in one’s own eye, modern man has become obsessed with everyone else on the planet. Even friends of human liberty have fallen prey to this tendency, from time to time, in our excessive investment of time and attention to political issues that are far removed from our actual lived existence. In doing so, we have neglected to build up alternative bases of social power in our families and communities.

One may respond that it is all well and good to order oneself, but that it is not enough or is even pointless in the face of the wider chaos that is engulfing the rest of society. However, it may be that such self-ordering is in fact the only thing that restores order to the rest of society. Philosopher Irving Babbitt argued that “there may be something after all in the Confucian idea that if a man only sets himself right, the rightness will extend to his family first of all, and finally in widening circles to the whole community.”

If dark and illiberal days truly are ahead, as it seems reasonable to consider at least as a possibility, then these localized bastions of ordered liberty will become more important than ever. Perhaps instead of letting strangers in state schools and who knows what kind of wackos on the internet raise one’s children, now is the time to take the plunge into homeschooling, or at the very least to invest time in their education and moral upbringing. Perhaps now is the time to develop friendly relations with one’s neighbors and to begin attending local township meetings. Perhaps now is the time to begin to invest one’s time and energy in what the sociologist Robert Nisbet called the intermediary groups and associations that serve as a buffer between the state and the solitary and weak individual.

This is not to say that federal politics should be ignored completely; the federal government is impossible to ignore thanks to the immense power it wields. But such engagement must not come at the cost of those areas of life that are truly under one’s control.

Disorder increasingly reigns across the land and with disorder inevitably comes oppression and the curtailment of our traditional rights and liberties. The restoration of order begins with oneself and one’s home. Societal order will not be restored until order is restored in the hearts of those who make up the society. Even if the pessimists are correct and our country is too far advanced down the path of decay and collapse that every other empire has trodden in history, the cultivation of personal order is still imperative for survival in the dark and chaotic days to come.

Democracy Proves To Be The Death Of The Constitution.

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Sadly for the American experiment in liberty, democracy has corrupted the original ideas to the point of destroying them. Our most recent Presidential election has ended in a tie (thus undermining the basic – although hateful – democratic concept of majority rule) because both sides are equally anti-freedom.

Is the U.S. Constitution the biggest roadkill on the 2020 campaign trail? Is faith in “American exceptionalism” blinding people to a death spiral of American democracy?

According to much of the media, this is a single-issue election: “It’s the pandemic, stupid,” as a Politico headline blared. Unfortunately, the media was not smart or honest enough to recognize the real issue this year: “It’s the Constitution, stupid.”

Surging Covid caseloads earlier this year led to a domino-like collapse on restraints on politicians across the land. In April, President Donald Trump proclaimed, “The federal government has absolute power. It has the power. As to whether or not I’ll use that power, we’ll see.” The Justice Department asked Congress for authorization to suspend habeas corpus for the duration of the pandemic but was rebuffed. In September, the Centers for Disease Control somehow acquired the power to suspend tens of millions of rental contracts and prohibit any evictions of tenants who ceased paying rent until after the end of December.

But these decrees could be child’s play compared to what could follow after the election.

The Constitution was intended to place politicians under “house arrest” – to strictly limit their power over private citizens in perpetuity. But in 2020, “house arrest” has been the default decree of many governors, and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he may impose a national lockdown if more people test positive for Covid. Biden says he changed his mind and won’t shut down the economy. But his rhetorical reversal could be as nonbinding as were campaign promises to keep the nation out of war by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, and Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Biden has run one of the most brazen fear-based presidential campaigns in modern memory. He routinely exaggerates Covid death tolls by a hundred- or a thousand-fold and talks as if every American family has lost a member or two from this plague. The more fears that politicians fan, the easier it becomes to seize boundless power.

Covid shutdown advocates flaunt claims of “science and data” like righteous priests invoking God and the Bible to sanctify scourging enemies. In the same way that local health czars felt entitled to shut down all private and public schools if the Covid positivity rate exceeded 0.000008% of the population, so the next president may feel entitled to nullify the Constitution if more than a statistically insignificant number of people nationwide test positive. And it won’t matter that the tests are wildly inaccurate or that WHO overestimated the Covid fatality rate by 50-fold. Bogus Covid test results will be sufficient to euthanize bonafide constitutional rights.

Attorney General William Barr said that imposing a “national lockdown” would be “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history” except for slavery. But the dictatorial issues raised by lockdowns received as much attention from the media as the batting averages for the Amarillo Sod Poodles minor league baseball team.

Trump, to his credit, is now an outspoken opponent of lockdowns. But many Trump opponents are not opposed to dictators per se; they simply want different dictates. The passion for near-absolute power spurs the hostility increasingly shown towards the Constitution by many liberals, leftists, and violent protestors.

If a national lockdown is imposed, it won’t matter that it fails to keep people safe. So many individuals and agencies will benefit from the boundless power that they will always find a pretext to perpetuate restrictions. Health czars will respond to failure with the same type of ever greater force that characterized floundering socialist economies (brilliantly captured in John Jewkes’ 1948 masterpiece, Ordeal by Planning).

This year’s political developments have illustrated how easily politicians can nullify Americans’ rights merely by promising to play King Canute and magically sweep away a virus. Federal judge William Stickman IV ruled in September, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But the response to the dictatorial governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen

Whitmer and New York’s Andrew Cuomo reveals that tens of millions of Americans will happily sacrifice anything and everything for promises of a risk-free life.

Can Americans read their future in the fetters proliferating in other English-speaking nations? Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced another national lockdown – 30 days of unmitigated misery, shutting down all “nonessential businesses” and confining people to their homes unless they have a few specific reasons to step out into the cold, cruel world. A senior cabinet member said yesterday that Britain’s shutdown may be extended beyond one month because “we will always be driven by what the data shows.” In New Zealand, the government last week announced it was creating “quarantine centers” for anyone who tests positive and refuses to obey government orders. One Twitter wag scoffed, “New Zealand went from gun bans to concentration camps in less than a year.”

If Americans could be confident that either Trump or Biden would be leashed by the law, there would be less dread about who wins. But elections nowadays are becoming simply coronations via vote counts. The president will take an oath of office on Inauguration Day but then can do as he or she pleases. Instead of vox populi, vox dei – “The voice of the people is the voice of God’ – we have “Damned Rascal Democracy.”

No one is entitled to the amount of power that the winner of this presidential election will commandeer over the American people. As Thomas Jefferson warned in 1799, “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Either the Constitution leashes the rulers, or the rulers leash the people. There is no middle way: there is no such thing as provisional legal inferiority to officialdom. If citizens trust rulers who blatantly violate the Constitution, they place themselves on the political chopping block.

Americans need to recognize the profound weaknesses revealed this year in democratic governments at every level. A strict adherence to the Bill of Rights is the surest way to reduce post-Election Day perils. If freedom is to survive, Americans must become far better informed of the dangers from government — regardless of who wins the Presidency.

James Bovard via aier.org.

The Three Major Reasons Why Representative Democracy Will Fail, And The Combined Solution.

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In representative democracies, voters ostensibly control the state through the politicians they vote for. However, most representative democracies fall far short of this goal. Three of the reasons for the trouble are the problems of scale, bundling, and omission. I will explore these three problems below and argue that privatization and decentralization can ameliorate them.

Scale

The viability of meaningful political representation withers as the ratio of representatives to voters decreases. There are 435 members in the House of Representatives in a country of 328 million people. This means that each member “represents” an average of 755,000 people. How exactly does one person represent the federal legislative preferences of 755,000 diverse people? How do two senators embody the will of 600,000 Wyomingites, let alone all the Californians and Texans? Scale alone renders American democracy to a great extent meaningless, and yet this is almost never talked about.

Bundling

The second problem with representative democracy is the issue known as “bundling.” Suppose candidate Smith is running against candidate Jones. Smith has his policies, and Jones has his. But what if you, the voter, like some of Smith’s policies and some of Jones’s? There is no picking and choosing Smith’s position on issue X and Jones’s position on issue Y as there is at a buffet or at the supermarket (market institutions). We’re left with rigid, take-it-or-leave-it, package deals.  Walter Block contrasts the flexibility of the market with ham-fisted democracy:

The dollar vote occurs every day, the ballot box vote only every two or four years. The former may be applied narrowly, to a single product (e.g., the Edsel) while the latter is a “package deal,” an all or none proposition for one candidate or the other. That is, there was no way to register approval of Bush’s policies in areas 1, 3, 5 and 7, and for Clinton in 2, 4, 6, and 8. People were limited to choosing one or the other in the last presidential election.

In society outside the state (the market), no one can force you to pay for something you don’t want, or to go without something you’re willing to pay for. And the free rider problem has been addressed here.

Omission

The third problem can be called “omission.” Presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional elections typically revolve around only a handful of issues. But the state intervenes in nearly every aspect of our lives. If candidate Smith and candidate Jones spend their campaigns battling it out over, say, the income tax rate, environmental regulation, and school vouchers, who will “represent” the voters who care about the central bank, the welfare state, foreign policy, the debt, etc.?

Whenever the candidates agree on or simply ignore issues, as is necessarily the case for the vast majority of issues at stake in any given election, voting is largely useless in affecting these issues. At best, the citizen can vote for the candidate they hope will better address the ignored topic (in the event that it is addressed at all).

The problem of omission doesn’t just apply to controversial policies shunned by the bipartisan establishment. It applies to topics simply not interesting enough to be prominent on the campaign trail: volumes of arcane regulation, obscure federal agencies, military bases people don’t know exist in countries they’ve never heard of, etc.

What Is to Be Done? Privatization.

Notice how none of the above critiques mention lobbying, fraud, or corruption. Even if representative democracy were squeaky clean, it would be a mess. Then, what is to be done?

The first solution is privatization. Functions, resources, and perceived moral authority currently held by the state can instead be distributed among its competing institutions: the nuclear family, the extended family, the church, businesses, fraternal organizations, private schools and universities, clubs, charities, etc.

The critical difference is that adults only participate in these institutions voluntarily and to the extent that they choose to, in contrast to their interactions with the state (i.e., taxation, conscription). This freedom of association encourages detailed responsiveness on the part of these organizations toward the people who finance and sustain them.

Decentralization

Additionally, decentralization can ameliorate the unresponsiveness of the state by increasing accountability. The smaller (both in terms of geographic area and population) and more numerous the political units, the greater extent to which the rulers and the ruled are in the same boat.

If the political and bureaucratic decisions of Springfield are made by people living in DC, the decision-makers don’t need to live with the consequences of their own decisions to the same extent. But if all of Springfield’s political decisions are made in Springfield, the politicians and bureaucrats will have to lie in whatever bed they make. To a greater extent, if the rulers want to live well, their subjects have to live well.

Decentralization doesn’t just increase accountability. When a political unit is geographically smaller and less populous, the people within it are more likely to have similar worldviews, cultures, religions, languages, etc.

Where there are mosaics of many tiny states, each state can be closely tailored to the particular preferences of each locality without forcing distant and different peoples to live under the same rule. In contrast, enormous political units, by their sheer expansiveness, are more likely to encompass various bitterly opposed camps who will vie for zero-sum control of the same state apparatus.

Privatization and decentralization offer liberty, accountability, and harmony where the state offers phony representation and compulsion.

Gor Mkrtchian is a research assistant at the Free Market Institute and a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. This article first appeared at mises.org.

Unlike Democratic Voting, Markets Give You A Genuine Say.

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Peter Earle eloquently exploded the notion that voting in political elections is an exalted means of self-expression. Few myths are more lethal to liberty than that which equates freedom with majoritarian democracy – and no fallacy does more to fuel this myth than that which declares the essence of freedom to be the right to vote.

In reality, voting is an extraordinarily skimpy and muted means of giving voice to your individual values, hopes, concerns, and preferences. And the right to vote is certainly no great bulwark to protect your liberty.

Bondage by the Majority is Bondage Nevertheless

Nearly all people, regardless of their political and ideological stripes, vigorously reject this conclusion about voting. Even you, dear reader, likely resist it. Yet its truth cannot seriously be contested. In what meaningful way is your freedom protected if, as a result of an election in which you vote, 51 percent of your fellow citizens cast their ballots for a candidate who promises to raise your taxes against your will, to forcibly obstruct your ability to buy imports, and to prevent your teenaged daughter from competing for a summer job by offering to work at an hourly wage below the state-imposed minimum?

The fact that you were among the thousands or millions who cast a ballot in this election does nothing to make you more free than you would be had you not voted or had these impositions been foisted on you by a monarch.

The typical response to my observation goes something like this: “But at least each voter had a say!” To which I reply “Say what? What say?”

A Say that’s Virtually Silent

It’s true that you cast a ballot and that your vote was counted. But your vote – your “say” – was only the faintest of muffled whispers. If you voted for the losing candidate, your request for government not to intrude into your life in the ways promised by the victorious candidate is ignored. You must obey the commands that will now issue from the state. And these commands silence the very real say that you and your family would otherwise have had in the market.

With more of your income taxed away and with customs agents blocking your access to imports, you have less of a say in how your earnings are spent. With your daughter unable to offer to work for a wage below the state-imposed minimum, she has less of a say in choosing the kind of job she holds and in the specific terms of her employment.

Notice that the say that you have in the market is always real and effective. Unlike in political elections, if you prefer to dine this evening at a Japanese restaurant rather than at an Italian restaurant, you will dine at a Japanese restaurant. No one overrides or ignores your choice. And you don’t have to spend precious time and energy convincing a majority of your fellow citizens to expressly give you permission to dine at the restaurant of your choice.

Notice also that your say in the market is more articulate than is your say in political elections. By voluntarily spending your money on the spicy-roll combo, the signal that you send is precise and clear: this evening you want the spicy-roll combo and not any of the many other menu items. In contrast, by voting for candidate Smith rather than candidate Jones, the signal that you send is cloudy. Did you vote for Smith because of her opposition to tariffs or in spite of her opposition to tariffs? No one other than you – and certainly not Smith – knows.

Or perhaps you voted not so much for Smith as against Jones, whose promise to raise the minimum wage intensely frightens you. But if Smith wins, you and other voters get not only her opposition to raising the minimum wage – a policy position that you favor – you also get Smith’s policy positions on countless other issues, not all of which you support. Voting at best allows you to express your opinion about which candidate you prefer; it does not allow you to express your opinion on each of the many different individual issues that are at stake.

Preference-intensity Is Real and Important

Nor does voting allow you to express your preferences’ intensities. If you vote for Smith rather than Jones, you tell the world only that you prefer Smith to Jones. Your vote says nothing about how much you prefer Smith to Jones. Your preference for Smith over Jones might be intense or it might be tiny. Whatever it is, your vote doesn’t say.

The failure of voting to give voice to the intensity of each voter’s preferences is significant. Suppose that Smith wins 51 percent of the votes to Jones’s 49 percent. Suppose also that nearly everyone who voted for Smith has only a slight preference for Smith, but that nearly everyone who voted for Jones intensely prefers Jones to Smith. Is it then the case that Smith is the people’s preferred candidate? The correct answer isn’t obvious.

In your everyday life you of course experience the rank-ordering of your preferences – for example, you prefer to drive an SUV rather than a sedan. But you also experience the intensity with which you hold your preferences – your preference for an SUV over a sedan can range from enormous to negligible. And in everyday life you can express the intensity with which you hold your preferences – say, by willingly paying a much higher price for the SUV if your preference for that vehicle over the sedan is high.

In our one-person-one-vote system, you have no comparable ability to express the intensity of your preference for candidate Smith over candidate Jones. Your vote is mute about the intensity of your preferences.

Your Say in Markets Is Taken Much More Seriously than Is Your Say in Elections

My argument here is not that you should not vote. Rather, my argument is that you should not be duped into believing that voting is either the essential exercise of freedom or that the ‘voice’ you have at the polling place is remotely as clear, as loud, or as effective as is the ‘voice’ you have in the market and in other private spheres. If more people understood this reality, surely there would be less enthusiasm among those of us who live in democracies for giving to the state ever more power over our lives.

In Politics, Your Choice Is Worthless. In Economics, Your Choice Is Definitive.

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In nearly 40 years of teaching, I’ve learned that students predictably react with hostility if told that none of their individual votes in political elections will ever determine the outcome of any election.

When discussing public-choice economics, I’m careful never to say that an individual’s vote “doesn’t matter.” Of course it matters, at least to each individual who votes — a reality proven by the fact that each individual who votes chooses to spend time and effort to do so. I’m also careful to preface my remarks with the assurance that nothing that I say should be interpreted as a plea, or even as an excuse, for people not to vote.

No Individual Vote Determines Electoral Outcomes

But I nevertheless do insist on driving home the correct understanding that in any majority-rule election with more than a small handful of voters, the probability of any one vote determining the outcome is virtually zero. I conclude by stating frankly to my students this verity: “Your vote will never make the outcome of any election other than what that outcome will be if you vote differently or if you don’t vote at all.”

Not one of the thousands upon thousands of students who have taken my classes over the decades has ever denied outright that the outcome of any election is extraordinarily unlikely ever to be determined by a single vote. When explained straightforwardly, the “non-determinativeness” of a single vote is simply too obvious to deny.

Yet intellectual awareness of this reality seems, strangely, to fuel in many students a need to venerate voting — to describe voting as being not only a sacred secular act, but as the most precious right that an individual can possibly possess.

And what’s true of students is true of the public at large. Majoritarian democracy is widely (if mistakenly) regarded as being synonymous with freedom, and the right to vote is held to be a priceless privilege that gives to each person who exercises it remarkable power to determine how he or she fares within society by giving each person a loud voice in determining the course of society.

Very few people are willing to accede to the reality that voting gives no individual any influence whatsoever over the manner in which he or she is treated, or how he or she fares, in society. The widespread romantic belief is not only that the person who votes has a meaningful say in the affairs of society, but also that the “say” that a person has through voting is more powerful and important than any other “say” that a person can have in society.

As a simple matter of arithmetic, however, this belief is a complete fairytale. Yet it persists.

Contrast this myth of the power of voting with another myth, one almost diametrically its opposite — namely, the myth that in markets every ordinary person is powerless, with his or her puny individual choices swamped and made insignificant both by those of “powerful” others and by faceless market forces.

Decision-Making Power Within Markets

A prominent version of the “people are powerless in markets” myth is the notion that, because each of us in markets is highly dependent upon the efforts of others, we as individuals are not really responsible for that which we produce.

Barack Obama alluded to this myth when, during the 2012 presidential campaign, he reminded his audience that businesses that use infrastructure such as roads and bridges to transport their goods to market “didn’t build that.” Nor do businesspeople typically provide for the education of their workers. The insinuation is that any profit that businesses earn could not have been earned without these state-supplied goods and services. And — the insinuation continues — because the state made possible these profits, the state is entitled to a large chunk of them.

Others have exposed the factual and logical errors that infect the insinuations drawn from Obama’s “you didn’t build that” declaration. What’s relevant here is the stark difference between the presumptions at the root of the “you didn’t build that” myth and those at the root of “voting gives each individual a real say” myth.

While of course it’s true that each individual in the modern market economy is highly and daily dependent upon literally billions of strangers for his or her existence — with most of these strangers, by the way, not being operatives of the state — it is emphatically untrue that each individual in market economies has no significant personal influence over his or her economic well-being.

Of course roads, bridges, communications networks, and all other manner of infrastructure make possible nearly every productive effort of people in modern economies. But to be necessary is not to be sufficient. The most extensive network of highways by itself produces no economic value. Ditto for the most excellent schooling of the population, and for the most efficient judiciary. Actual economic value arises only if and when entrepreneurs create goods and services to be made available on markets.

Without the creativity, risk-taking, and efforts of individual entrepreneurs, no economic value would be produced. This reality is made not one whit less certain because successful entrepreneurs rely upon infrastructure as well as upon the productive efforts of countless strangers in the market.

If, for example, Steve Jobs had lazed about all day gazing at his navel, we would not today have as many and as high-quality smartphones and other electronic marvels as we have. And if you retort that had Jobs been nothing but a lazy navel-gazer then some other entrepreneur would have done pretty much what the real Jobs actually did, I will note that we would then still be beholden to that other entrepreneur for his or her individual creativity, risk-taking, and effort. In no case does infrastructure itself create valuable goods and services, however beneficial, or even necessary, it might be for the creation of valuable goods and services.

And what’s true for successful, famous entrepreneurs is true for each ordinary person.

The market gives to the plumber, the pipefitter, and the political-science professor each a real and meaningful say in how his or her life proceeds. The young man who chooses to pursue a career as a physician need not persuade 51 percent of his fellow citizens to endorse his choice; that choice is his and his alone. Likewise for the woman who chooses to delay having children in order to work full-time as an attorney: the decision is hers, and it’s a decisive one.

Unlike in politics, each person’s individual decisions outside of politics are typically decisive. Each of us, individually, chooses what to eat, what to wear, where to live, whether or not to attend college, whether or not to have a pet hamster, with whom we have sex and how often, how many tattoos and piercings adorn our bodies. This list is practically endless.

In short, popular mythology insists that matters are exactly the reverse of what they are in reality. We are told that we have meaningful voice when we don’t, and that we don’t when we do.

The danger is this: as the state comes to superintend ever more aspects of life, the say of each individual in how his or her life plays out diminishes. Yet the naïve, stubborn popular belief that the most powerful “say” that each person has in democratic society is through the vote will mask this loss of personal say. People will be herded down the road to serfdom, all the while with each person mistakenly supposing that, because he or she votes, he or she chooses to make this ominous journey.

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Blockchain Is Now Protecting Voters from Fraud and Corruption

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The world may be filled with many prophets of doom and gloom as of late. But when we actually take a look at the state of our civilization, we find that things are actually getting better. Not only are people enjoying more wealth today than they have in previous eras of history, but technology is also empowering the individual in ways we have never seen before. The latest example of this comes from Sierra Leone, where blockchain technology is being incorporated with voting, to verify electoral votes.

A History of Corruption

Sierra Leone has had its fair share of troubles. In addition to a deadly mudslide and an outbreak of Ebola that killed thousands, the nation is still trying to recover from the deadly civil war that claimed the lives of 50,000 Sierra Leoneans. You can see, then, why so much was at stake during the elections that took place in early March.

While previous elections had been peaceful, there were acts of violence committed at political rallies leading up to the March elections, resulting in at least one death. Sierra Leone only gained its independence five years ago. And since its early years have been plagued by misfortune, its leaders were eager to find alternative solutions to traditional voting methods in order to guard against political unrest. 

In the wake of President Ernest Bai Koroma stepping down after serving two five-year terms, the country is hoping for a peaceful transition of power. But Koroma’s legacy has been marked by allegations of corruption. In fact, during the Ebola outbreak, when 4,000 people lost their lives, it was discovered that $14 million of the funds allocated towards eradicating the virus had gone mysteriously missing. This obviously did not sit well with voters who had watched the virus claim the lives of loved ones.  

To make matters worse, the government was also accused of ignoring certain warnings given about the possibility of mudslides. Specifically, human rights organizations claim that Koroma was warned to limit housing on eroding hillsides.  Of course, these warnings were ignored and lives were lost, which did not reflect well on the President. 

But due to the preexisting claims of corruption and a bloody civil war, the country tried something new this time around. To ensure that the voting, and the tallying of the votes, went as smoothly as possible, Sierra Leone became the first country to utilize blockchain technology to help verify votes and avoid fraud. 

Blockchain Empowering the Individual Voter

Agora is a new Swiss company that promises to “bring voting systems into the digital age.” On its site, it describes itself as:

“Agora is a blockchain-based voting ecosystem allowing anyone anywhere to vote online from a digital device in a fully secure, easy and certain way.

Our end-to-end verifiable voting technology eradicates fraud and corruption by creating an immutable and publicly-viewable record of the election on a custom blockchain.”

And by utilizing blockchain technology, Agora helps to make elections tamper-proof, transparent, and private in geographic areas where peaceful elections do not always occur. This, in turn, helps to ensure that contentious elections operate as smoothly as possible.

In March, Agora’s services were provided at 280 polling locations within Sierra Leone’s Western District. Typically, the country’s National Electoral Commission is responsible for giving the final numbers. But this year, that responsibility was delegated to Agora. After the votes were in, each was read out loud and then stored on a joint, which is essentially a private blockchain network that can only be accessed by designated Agora employees. The votes were validated in real time and then posted on Agora’s site for the whole world to see. 

This solves the age-old problem of voter fraud and manipulation by reducing human error, whether intentional or not. 

Agora’s CEO, Leonardo Grammar stated:

“I strongly believe that this election is the beginning of a much larger blockchain voting movement.”

And while voting might not be the end all be all when it comes to safeguarding individual freedom, inhibiting big governments from meddling in elections serves to give further power to the individual by ensuring their unique vote is properly accounted for.

This is just the beginning of blockchain being utilized in elections, but in geographical areas where elections are synonymous with corruption, Agora offers a viable and affordable solution. Just imagine what would have occurred if this technology had been available during the Iranian elections in 2008? Agora is once again proving that through blockchain, individuals are empowered and governments are restrained.

Write for CFI