The Immorality of Voting

Why Participation in State Elections Is Participation in Aggression

Introduction: The Question Plainly Stated

Modern politics survives on a linguistic sleight of hand. When private people do certain things—take what is not theirs, confine others against their will, threaten dissenters—we call these acts by plain names: theft, kidnapping, extortion. When the state does the same kinds of things, we rename them: taxation, incarceration, enforcement. The moral category appears to change because the vocabulary changes.

Voting is the ceremony that stabilises this transformation. It is the ritual by which coercion is dressed as legitimacy, the method by which a territorial monopoly on force is periodically refreshed and presented as “the will of the people.”

The argument of this essay is structural, not psychological:

Voting in state elections is immoral because it is participation in aggression. The voter selects agents to initiate force—taxation, conscription, imprisonment, regulation—against peaceful people who have not consented. No voter possesses the right to initiate such force; therefore no voter can delegate it. The act of attempting to delegate it is itself a violation of the most basic ethical principle: you may not aggress against those who have not aggressed against you.

This is not a claim about your intentions. Many who vote do so with decent motives. The thesis concerns what voting is in a state context: participation in a mechanism whose output is the imposition of enforceable commands on people who did not consent to be governed by that mechanism, cannot meaningfully opt out of it, and are punished for treating it as nonbinding.

The essay proceeds through the strongest arguments in the philosophical literature—from Lysander Spooner and Robert Paul Wolff to Michael Huemer, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and the voluntaryist tradition—to demonstrate that no theory of democratic legitimacy succeeds in justifying authority over the unwilling, and that voting is therefore participation in an institution that cannot do what it claims to do.

1. Definitions: Voluntary Voting versus State Voting

Clarity matters because “voting” is not one thing.

Voluntary voting occurs when a group forms by consent—a club, cooperative, church, or association. Membership is optional. Exit is real and unpunished. The group votes on internal rules that bind members because members have chosen to belong under those terms. This is morally ordinary.

State voting is categorically different. A territorial institution claims jurisdiction over all persons within a boundary. It selects officials who impose rules backed by coercion—fines, asset seizure, imprisonment, lethal force—on everyone in the territory, including those who explicitly reject the institution. Exit is costly or practically unavailable; refusal is treated as criminal disobedience; dissent does not remove jurisdiction.

Two further terms require precision:

Authority is not mere power but the right to rule—a moral title to command and enforce compliance, generating a correlative duty in others to obey. As Joseph Raz defines it, political authority involves “a right to rule” that entails “a duty to obey on the part of those subject to the authority.”¹

Consent is not a mood, not silence, not a default presumption. It is an explicit voluntary act that authorises what would otherwise be impermissible. Consent must be capable of refusal without punishment. Consent that cannot be refused is coercion wearing a mask.²

A further premise underlies this essay and should be stated openly: self-ownership. Each individual has moral jurisdiction over his own person and justly acquired property, and no collective process—however inclusive or well-intentioned—can override that jurisdiction without consent. This is not an axiom but a substantive philosophical commitment, shared by the natural rights tradition from Locke through Spooner, Rothbard, and Huemer. Critics—notably G.A. Cohen—have challenged self-ownership directly, arguing that it leads to outcomes incompatible with justice. The challenge is serious and deserves engagement on its own terms. But this essay proceeds from the premise because the alternative—that collectives may override individual jurisdiction by procedure—is precisely the claim democratic theory must prove, not presuppose. To deny self-ownership is to assert that others have a prior claim on your body and labour; no democratic vote can establish such a claim without first assuming what it needs to demonstrate.

From self-ownership follows a principle that will recur throughout this essay: the non-aggression principle (NAP). If each person owns himself, then initiating force against a peaceful person—taking his property, constraining his movement, compelling his labour—is a violation of his rights. Defence against aggression is permissible; initiation of aggression is not. This principle is the moral thread connecting every argument that follows. The question the essay poses is not merely whether the state has authority, but whether the act of voting constitutes participation in aggression against peaceful people. If voting selects agents who will seize your earnings, dictate your trade, and cage you for disobedience—and it does—then the voter is attempting to authorise aggression he has no right to commit himself. That is the connection between authority and immorality: the state lacks the first, and voting for it involves the second.

2. The Two-Person Test: Morality Does Not Scale

A fundamental methodological discipline cuts through political rhetoric: reduce the scenario to two people.

Imagine only two adults exist: A and B. What may A do to B? A may persuade, trade, cooperate, refuse association, defend against aggression, and demand restitution for harm. A may not simply decide that B’s labour, property, or movement will be directed by A’s preferences and enforce that decision by threat. This is the non-aggression principle applied to its simplest case.

Now scale up. Does morality change with numbers?

If A may not steal from B, then A + C + D may not vote to steal from B. If A may not imprison B for refusing to fund A’s projects, then A and friends may not form a committee and call imprisonment “enforcement.” Murray Rothbard illustrates this in For a New Liberty:

“If, in a small community, ten people band together to rob and expropriate three others then this is clearly and evidently a case of a group of individuals acting in concert against another group. In this situation, if the ten people presumed to refer to themselves as ‘society’ acting in ‘its’ interest, the rationale would be laughed out of court; even the ten robbers would probably be too shamefaced to use this sort of argument. But let their size increase, and this kind of obfuscation becomes rife and succeeds in duping the public.”³

The democratic claim is precisely the opposite: it treats aggregation as a moral solvent. Enough voters, and the act changes category. Enough ballots, and coercion becomes “law.” The two-person test denies this alchemy. Scale does not transmute coercion into legitimacy.

A candid acknowledgment: this test presupposes moral individualism—the view that only individuals bear moral rights and permissions. Someone who holds that collective institutions possess emergent moral properties not reducible to individual rights will reject the test at the outset. This is a genuine philosophical disagreement, not a mere misunderstanding. But the burden falls squarely on the collectivist to explain what it is about aggregation that transforms an impermissible act into a permissible one. At what number does the transformation occur? Three? Three hundred? Three hundred million? And by what mechanism does adding participants change the moral character of the act? This essay does not claim to have identified what does confer legitimate authority—that is a question worth pursuing honestly. What it does claim is that the mechanisms typically offered—voting, majority rule, constitutional process—have not answered the question. They have assumed the answer. Until a defender of collective authority can specify what it is about aggregation that changes the moral category of an act, the two-person test stands: if you cannot explain why scale transforms coercion into legitimacy, you have not refuted the test but merely declined to engage it.

3. Nemo Dat: You Cannot Delegate What You Do Not Have

The principle is elementary:

Nemo dat quod non habet: No one can give what they do not have.

If you do not own a car, you cannot sell good title to it. If you do not have a right to invade your neighbour’s home, you cannot appoint an agent to invade it on your behalf. Agency cannot exceed the moral permissions of the principal.

Applied to voting, the principle is fatal. What right, precisely, is the voter attempting to delegate? The right to tax—that is, to take property by threat. The right to conscript—to compel labour. The right to imprison—to cage a person for disobedience to rules he never agreed to. The right to regulate—to dictate how a peaceful person conducts his affairs. Each of these is an initiation of force against a non-aggressor. Each violates the non-aggression principle. And no individual voter possesses any of these rights. You may not take your neighbour’s wages, lock him in your basement for growing a plant, or force him to fund your preferred charity. The ballot does not create these rights; it merely obscures the fact that they do not exist.

Lysander Spooner, in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), dismantled this pretence with surgical precision. On the claim that voting constitutes consent:

“In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments.”⁴

The voter’s situation, Spooner argues, is not that of a free agent authorising a representative. It is that of a man coerced into a system and scrambling for leverage within it:

“He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave.”⁵

His case, Spooner concludes, is “analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself”⁶—a description that concedes everything the harm reductionist claims while conceding nothing about legitimacy. Spooner then delivers the damning conclusion about what this means for democratic legitimacy:

“The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that—however bloody—can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.”⁷

And on the periodic renewal of this arrangement, he offers what may be the sharpest single sentence in the anti-voting literature:

“A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.”⁸

If individual citizens do not possess the right to compel peaceful neighbours to fund projects they did not agree to, they cannot delegate that right to an elected representative—still less to a temporary caretaker whose structural incentive, as Section 11 will show, is to extract as much as possible before his term expires.

4. The Boundary Problem: “The People” Is Not a Moral Entity

Democratic rhetoric invokes “the people” as though it were a single agent. But “the people” is not an organism with a unified will; it is a collection of individuals with divergent ends. And before democratic procedures can even begin, a logically prior question must be answered: who counts as “the people”?

This is what political theorists call the boundary problem, and it is devastating for democratic legitimacy.

Frederick Whelan, in his landmark essay, states the difficulty plainly:

“The boundary problem is one matter of collective decision that cannot be decided democratically… democracy, which is a method for group decision-making or self-governance, cannot be brought to bear on the logically prior matter of the constitution of the group itself, the existence of which it presupposes.”⁹

The circularity is inescapable. You need a democratic decision to define the demos. But you need the demos to make a democratic decision. Whelan concludes that the boundary problem is “insoluble within the framework of democratic theory.”¹⁰

Even Robert Dahl—one of the twentieth century’s foremost defenders of democracy—conceded the point:

“How to decide who legitimately make up ‘the people’ and hence are entitled to govern themselves… is a problem almost totally neglected by all the great political philosophers who wrote about democracy.”¹¹

The implications are corrosive. As Whelan observes, “however impeccable democratic decision-making may be within a given community, the outcomes are in a sense determined by the previous and inescapably undemocratic decisions that defined the community.”¹² Every democratic outcome is downstream of a non-democratic boundary.

Arash Abizadeh extends this into an infinite regress:

“The question of membership ultimately cannot itself be settled by a principle of participation: for we would once again have to ask, whose participation must be sought to answer the question of membership, which in turn raises a second-order membership question, ad infinitum.”¹³

Territorial borders are historically contingent—products of conquest, bargain, partition, bureaucratic decree. A democratic majority within one boundary claims authority, while the dissenters a mile away are treated as foreign and irrelevant. Even within a boundary, many people affected by policies cannot vote: children, noncitizen residents, foreigners subject to war and trade policy. Yet the state’s coercion reaches them all.

Democracy grants decision power to some and imposes decisions on others. That disparity cannot be justified by the very mechanism that presupposes it.

A fair objection: doesn’t the boundary problem apply equally to voluntaryist alternatives? Any voluntary community must still determine who its founding members are, what territory it occupies, and what counts as justly acquired property. Property claims themselves have historically contingent origins.

The objection has force but misses a crucial distinction. The voluntaryist does not claim that the boundary problem is solved—she claims that it is not used to justify coercion over dissenters. A voluntary community that cannot justify its boundaries simply cannot claim jurisdiction over those outside it. That is a limit on its power, not a defect. The state, by contrast, uses historically contingent borders to impose jurisdiction on everyone within them—and then appeals to democratic procedure to legitimise that imposition. The boundary problem is ruinous for the state precisely because the state claims authority over the boundary’s inhabitants. A voluntary association claims authority only over its members, and membership requires consent. The asymmetry is not between two equally arbitrary boundary claims; it is between an institution that uses boundaries to coerce and one that uses boundaries to associate.

5. The Failure of Tacit Consent

No citizen has ever signed a social contract. Explicit consent to state authority does not exist and never has—a point so obvious that even most defenders of political obligation concede it. The fallback is tacit consent: you live here, therefore you consent.

David Hume demolished this argument in 1748:

“Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.”¹⁴

A. John Simmons, in Moral Principles and Political Obligations (1979), provided the most rigorous contemporary analysis of why tacit consent fails. He identifies the conditions genuine consent must meet:

1. The situation must be such that it is clear that consent is appropriate and that the individual is aware of this.
2. There must be a definite period of time during which consent is given.
3. The consequences of consent must be clear.
4. There must be a genuine opportunity to dissent.
5. The way of expressing dissent must be reasonable and not excessively costly.¹⁵

Simmons then applies these conditions to political residence:

“It is hard to see how mere continued residence in a state, in and of itself, can be understood as an act of consent to anything. The state never announces that continued residence will be taken as consent, no period for consent is ever set… and no formal opportunity for expressing dissent is presented.”¹⁶

The state claims jurisdiction first and treats your presence as post hoc ratification. If a protection racket claims your neighbourhood and says “staying means you agree to our terms,” we do not call this consent. We call it extortion.

Spooner adds a further dimension that most theorists overlook: the secret ballot. If voting is supposed to constitute consent, the secrecy of the ballot destroys any legal claim:

“As everybody who supports the Constitution by voting (if there are any such) does so secretly (by secret ballot), and in a way to avoid all personal responsibility for the acts of his agents or representatives, it cannot legally or reasonably be said that anybody at all supports the Constitution by voting.”¹⁷

The conclusion is stark: “The secret ballot makes a secret government; and a secret government is a secret band of robbers and murderers.”¹⁸

And on the state’s own understanding of “consent,” Spooner offers this:

“The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this—that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”¹⁹

6. The Autonomy-Authority Problem

Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism (1970) approaches from a different angle: the fundamental incompatibility between moral autonomy and political authority.

Wolff begins with Kant’s insight that the defining mark of moral agency is autonomy—the capacity and obligation to make one’s own moral judgements:

“The autonomous man, insofar as he is autonomous, is not subject to the will of another. He may do what another tells him, but not because he has been told to do it.”²⁰

Authority, by contrast, claims the right to be obeyed because it commands. But this, Wolff argues, is precisely what a moral agent cannot concede:

“The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, that there can be no resolution of the conflict between autonomy and authority.”²¹

Wolff examines various attempts to reconcile them. Unanimous direct democracy might work—if every single person agrees to every single law. But representative democracy fails: “I did not promise to obey the laws made by a legislature of my fellow citizens.”²² Majority rule fares no better:

“The only grounds for my adopting the majority principle are its efficiency and its peculiar legitimating force of high numbers. But efficiency is not a moral category, and the force of numbers is merely the weight of opinion—it has no moral authority.”²³

The conclusion is anarchism as logical consequence:

“If all men have a continuing obligation to achieve the highest degree of autonomy possible, then there would appear to be no state whose subjects have a moral obligation to obey its commands.”²⁴

Voting does not solve this. If I vote and lose, I am still subject to laws I did not author. If I vote and win, others are subject to laws they did not author. In neither case has the tension between autonomy and authority been resolved.

An objection presses here: if autonomy is incompatible with authority, then it is also incompatible with voluntary associations. Once you join a cooperative and it votes on a rule you disagree with, you face the same tension. If the autonomy argument defeats the state, does it not defeat all governance?

The answer turns on exit. A voluntary association is explicitly opt-in: you join knowing that decisions will be made by agreed procedures. Crucially, you can leave—without punishment, without forfeiture of pre-existing rights, without being treated as a criminal. Your autonomy is preserved not because you agree with every decision but because your continued participation is itself a standing act of consent, revocable at will. The state permits no such thing. You did not opt in; you were born into jurisdiction. You cannot opt out; emigration does not release you from tax obligations during residence, and the state claims authority over you until you leave its territory—and sometimes beyond. Wolff’s argument does not prove that no governance is legitimate; it proves that imposed governance is incompatible with autonomy. The distinction between voluntary and coerced association is the entire point.

7. Huemer: Political Authority as Moral Illusion

Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority (2013) provides the most comprehensive contemporary treatment. His central methodological move is disarmingly simple: compare the state’s claimed rights with the rights of individuals:

“Political authority is the hypothesized moral property in virtue of which governments may coerce people in certain ways not permitted to anyone else, and in virtue of which citizens must obey governments in situations in which they would not be obligated to obey anyone else.”²⁵

Imagine the same actions performed by non-governmental actors. If a vigilante performed the actions the state performs—collecting mandatory payments, imprisoning people for victimless offences, killing foreigners in other lands—would we consider those actions legitimate? Obviously not. What is the difference?

“No one has yet articulated what it is about the government that enables it to do what other agents cannot.”²⁶

On democratic authorisation specifically, Huemer applies the nemo dat principle:

“It is difficult to see how a right to coerce could be transferred through the social contract, since individuals, prior to the establishment of government, do not have a right to coerce one another in the ways that governments typically coerce their citizens.”²⁷

Huemer’s conclusion cuts to the heart of the matter:

“The failure of theories of political authority means that we must apply to the state the same moral standards that we apply to private agents. If a private agent would not be justified in using coercion to achieve a particular goal, then the state is also not justified in using coercion to achieve that goal.”²⁸

Political authority, he argues, is “a moral illusion we’re suffering from.”²⁹

8. The Strongest Remaining Defences

The preceding sections have dismantled social contract theory, tacit consent, and the autonomy-authority reconciliation. These are the traditional defences. But contemporary political philosophy has produced more sophisticated attempts to ground authority. An essay claiming that no theory of democratic legitimacy succeeds must engage the best the opposition offers—and engage it honestly, presenting each theory at its strongest before showing why it fails.

8.1 Rawlsian Hypothetical Consent

The Defence. John Rawls does not claim that citizens have actually consented to political authority. His argument is subtler and more powerful.³⁰ Rawls asks: what principles of justice would rational agents choose if they did not know their position in society—their wealth, their talents, their race, their conception of the good life? Behind this “veil of ignorance,” in what Rawls calls the “original position,” self-interested agents would choose principles that protect the worst-off, because any of them might be the worst-off. The resulting principles—and the institutions that embody them—are legitimate not because anyone actually agreed to them, but because any rational person would agree to them under conditions of fairness. Hypothetical consent, on this view, is not a weaker form of real consent; it is a test of moral reasonableness. Institutions that pass the test deserve obedience because they are the institutions that justice itself requires.

This is a formidable argument. It does not depend on the fiction that anyone signed a contract. It does not require that citizens be aware of the theory or endorse it. It claims, instead, that the legitimacy of political institutions can be demonstrated by showing that they are justifiable—that no reasonable person could reject them. It is distinct from the tacit consent argument refuted in Section 5, and it requires a distinct response.

The Refutation. The most celebrated critique comes, ironically, from a fellow liberal. Ronald Dworkin delivered what Cynthia Stark calls “the standard indictment”:

“A hypothetical contract is not simply a pale form of an actual contract; it is no contract at all.”³¹

If I would have agreed to sell you my house under certain imaginary conditions, you do not thereby own my house. The moral power of a contract lies in the act of agreeing, not in the reasonableness of the terms. A. John Simmons reinforces this in Moral Principles and Political Obligations: hypothetical consent can reveal what is reasonable, but it cannot bind.³² As Simmons writes, to show that a person “would have consented” to an arrangement is merely to show that it would have been reasonable for him to consent—it does not “give us the actual consent which is all that can ground political obligation.”

David Enoch formalises a deeper structural problem.³³ Hypothetical consent, he argues, faces a dilemma. Either it is morally relevant because it tracks the will of the agent, or because it tracks the reasons that apply to her. If the former, Dworkin’s objection is fatal: a hypothetical agreement does not engage actual will, because the actual agent never performed the act of agreeing. If the latter, the underlying reasons themselves do all the normative work, and the hypothetical consent is merely a “by-product”—it becomes, in Enoch’s term, “explanatorily redundant.” Consider his medical analogy: the fact that an unconscious patient would consent to a blood transfusion is not what makes the transfusion permissible; what makes it permissible is that she wants to live and faces mortal danger. The hypothetical consent drops out of the picture entirely. The same applies to Rawls: if principles of justice are justified by their content, the hypothetical agreement adds nothing; if they are justified by the agreement, the agreement must be actual.

Michael Huemer extends the assault on the argument’s internal coherence.²⁷ Rawls’s original position can produce unanimous agreement only if every party behind the veil is “reasonable” in a specific Rawlsian sense. But anarchist thinkers, as Huemer observes, “do not, as a rule, appear particularly less rational, informed, or reasonable than partisans of other political views.” Unless the theory simply defines dissenters out of the class of reasonable persons—which begs the question—the hypothetical agreement cannot be unanimous. Rawls himself, in Political Liberalism (1993), acknowledged that reasonable people will disagree about comprehensive doctrines; yet the original position is designed to yield a single set of principles. The veil does not eliminate disagreement; it conceals it.

My Response. To these scholarly critiques I add two observations. First, the most direct response is the simplest: I do not consent now. Whatever I might have agreed to behind a veil of ignorance is irrelevant, because I am not behind a veil of ignorance. I am here, in full possession of my faculties, my values, and my judgement—and I do not consent. If hypothetical consent could override actual refusal, then any arrangement could be imposed on anyone by simply constructing a hypothetical scenario in which they would have agreed. This is not a theory of legitimacy; it is a technique for manufacturing consent that does not exist. The original position does not ask what people do consent to; it tells them what they should have consented to. That is not social contract theory—it is moral paternalism dressed in contractarian language.

Second, even if everyone would agree, the mere unreasonableness of rejecting an arrangement does not render it permissible to coerce someone into accepting it. I may think your refusal to join my cooperative is unreasonable; that does not entitle me to conscript you. The gap between “you would have agreed” and “I may force you” is the entire width of the non-aggression principle.

8.2 Natural Duty of Justice

The Defence. Christopher Heath Wellman offers the most ambitious attempt to ground political obligation without any appeal to consent.³⁴ His argument begins with a premise most people accept: every person has a natural moral duty to rescue others from serious peril when the cost of doing so is not excessive. This is the samaritan duty—the duty that explains why you ought to pull a drowning child from a pond.

Wellman extends this. In the absence of political institutions, human beings face the perils of the state of nature: violence, predation, the inability to coordinate for mutual protection. Political society, Wellman argues, is “the only vehicle with which people can escape” these perils. The state rescues its subjects from lawlessness as surely as a bystander rescues a drowning child. Therefore, each citizen has a moral duty to obey the law as his or her “fair share of the communal samaritan chore.” This duty is natural—it arises from the moral situation itself, not from any act of consent. It binds everyone within the territory, including those who never agreed to be governed, because the peril is real, the rescue is effective, and the duty to contribute one’s share is universal.

The power of this argument lies in its independence from consent. If it succeeds, it renders the entire voluntaryist critique irrelevant: your consent is not required because the duty to help exists whether you acknowledge it or not.

The Refutation. Simmons’s most famous contribution to this debate is the “particularity requirement.”³⁵ Any adequate account of political obligation must explain why you owe obedience to your state rather than to some other, potentially more just, state. Natural duties are by definition universal—the duty to rescue applies equally everywhere. How, then, does a universal duty yield a particular obligation? As Simmons asks: the duty to rescue a drowning stranger binds me regardless of which stranger is drowning and regardless of where I am standing. Why does this universal duty suddenly attach me to one specific political authority, namely the one that happens to claim the territory in which I reside?

Simmons provides a vivid illustration of the gap.³⁶ Imagine, he writes, “an enormously expanded and impossibly efficient Oxfam”—an unqualified force for good in the world. Would there exist a moral duty to donate to this organisation? If samaritanism grounds political obligation, it should also ground an obligation to contribute to any sufficiently beneficial institution. But almost no one accepts that. As Simmons concludes, “no government—no matter how well-intentioned or good—has the moral right to” command obedience merely because it provides benefits. The samaritan duty explains why you should help a drowning child; it does not explain why you are bound to help only through a specific organisation of the drowning-child-savers’ choosing, on terms they unilaterally dictate.

Huemer presses the content-independence problem.³⁷ Political obligation, to be meaningful, must be comprehensive: you must obey whatever the state commands, not merely laws that plausibly serve rescue functions. Wellman’s samaritan duty cannot bridge this gap. As Huemer argues, a duty to bail water on a sinking lifeboat does not entail a duty to obey whatever the loudest person on the boat commands about everything else—including marijuana prohibition, immigration restrictions, minimum wage laws, and occupational licensing. Jiafeng Zhu formalises this as the “content-independence objection”: natural-duty theories cannot explain why subjects should not simply disobey those laws that do not contribute to the rescue function while obeying those that do—which “collapses the theory into a case-by-case moral assessment rather than a general obligation.”

Massimo Renzo exposes a reciprocity gap.³⁸ Even if Wellman explains why Italians should obey Italy—because that is how they rescue their neighbours from domestic lawlessness—he cannot explain why Italy should give special attention to Italians rather than to famine-stricken populations elsewhere. The samaritan duty is universal: as Renzo writes, “Italy’s capacity to rescue people from famine and disease is not limited in the same way” as its capacity to prevent lawlessness within its territory. Taken seriously, the samaritan theory would require every state to redirect its redistributive policies toward the global poor rather than its own citizens—a conclusion Wellman would reject but cannot avoid.

My Response. To these scholarly critiques I add the argument that cuts deepest against the essay’s central concern. If the duty is to support just institutions, then it logically entails an equal duty to withdraw support from unjust ones. And since every existing state engages in activities that violate the very rights it claims to protect—conscription, victimless crime prosecution, warrantless surveillance, asset forfeiture, aggressive war—the natural duty argument, taken seriously, is as much a case for disobedience as for obedience. The duty to support justice and the duty to oppose injustice are the same duty viewed from opposite ends. If the state becomes unjust—and the historical record suggests this is the norm rather than the exception—then the natural duty of justice demands not participation but withdrawal. It demands, specifically, that one not vote, because voting in an unjust system lends it the appearance of legitimacy it does not possess.

The samaritan duty demands help; it does not demand obedience. The drowning child requires a rescuer, not a subject.

8.3 Epistemic Proceduralism

The Defence. David Estlund offers perhaps the most sophisticated contemporary defence of democratic authority.³⁹ He concedes that democracy is not infallible. He does not claim that majorities are always right, or that democratic procedures produce perfect justice. His argument is deliberately modest—and therefore harder to dislodge.

Estlund argues that democratic procedures are legitimate because they satisfy two conditions simultaneously. First, they have epistemic value: democracy tends to produce laws that are just more often than a random procedure would. Deliberation, the aggregation of diverse perspectives, and the discipline of public justification give democratic outcomes a better-than-chance track record on questions of justice. Second, democratic procedures pass what Estlund calls the “qualified acceptability requirement” (QAR): they can be justified from all qualified points of view—that is, from every perspective that is not disqualified by demonstrable irrationality or bigotry. Epistocracy (rule by the wise) might produce even better outcomes, but it fails the QAR because reasonable people can disagree about who the wise are. Democracy, Estlund argues, is the epistemically best procedure that is also acceptable to all reasonable citizens. Its modest epistemic merit, combined with its procedural fairness, generates a duty to obey even its mistaken outcomes—just as a patient has reason to follow a doctor’s advice even when the doctor is occasionally wrong.

The Refutation. David Copp dismantles the QAR with a dilemma.⁴⁰ The requirement demands that the justification of coercion be “acceptable to all possible qualified points of view.” But, Copp asks, what counts as “qualified”? If the term is defined narrowly—excluding views that are racist, sexist, or otherwise objectionable—it encodes Estlund’s preferred liberal values into the acceptability condition. The argument becomes circular: democracy is justified because all qualified views accept it, and qualified views are defined as those that accept the legitimacy of democratic authority. If, on the other hand, “qualified” is defined broadly enough to include all sincere, non-pathological views, then it will include principled anarchists, libertarians, and others who reject democratic authority on reasoned grounds—and the QAR fails. As Copp concludes, the requirement “is undermined by Rawlsian arguments” about reasonable pluralism and is ultimately untenable.

Gerald Gaus raises what might be called the dissenter’s dilemma.⁴¹ As William Rehg frames it: “A democratic procedure’s tendency to get the right answer cannot be seen as a reason for complying with it by someone who believes it has failed in this case.” Gaus presses further: Estlund’s “qualified epistemic claim”—that democracy tends to be right—is “vague enough to be irrefutable but too vague to generate binding obligations.” The theory demands that a dissenting citizen submit to a law she knows to be unjust on the ground that the procedure that produced it has a modest overall track record. This is procedural fetishism: it elevates the process over the substance and asks citizens to obey laws they know to be wrong because the machine that produced them has a better-than-coin-flip accuracy rate.

Jason Brennan and Bryan Caplan assault the epistemic premise on empirical grounds.⁴² Brennan classifies most citizens as “hobbits”—apathetic and ignorant of basic political facts—or “hooligans”—irrational partisans whose reasoning is driven by tribal loyalty rather than evidence. The picture, Brennan argues, is not a minor embarrassment for epistemic democracy; it is a fundamental challenge: “the empirical evidence suggests that the median voter is not merely uninformed but systematically biased.” Caplan identifies four such biases in democratic electorates—anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, make-work bias, and pessimistic bias—and argues that voters are not merely occasionally wrong but systematically wrong in predictable directions. If the electorate systematically favours protectionism and anti-market policies, democratic procedures may be worse than random on economic questions. The “better than random” claim that grounds Estlund’s entire theory is thus an empirical proposition that may simply be false.

My Response. These scholarly objections frame the theory’s fatal weaknesses. To them I add my own emphasis on two points. First, the “better than random” standard is extraordinarily weak. A coin flip is random. Estlund needs democracy to be merely better than a coin flip at producing just outcomes—but this modest epistemic value is asked to justify comprehensive coercion over dissenters. A procedure that produces just outcomes fifty-one per cent of the time and unjust outcomes forty-nine per cent of the time clears the bar. The gap between “slightly better than chance” and “entitled to imprison you” is vast, and Estlund does not bridge it. To say that democracy is “better than a coin flip” is to concede that it is barely distinguishable from one—and yet Estlund asks citizens to surrender their moral autonomy to an institution that clears only this lowest of bars.

Second, and decisively: even if democratic procedures have genuine epistemic value, epistemic value does not generate a right to coerce. A panel of medical experts may have better-than-random accuracy in diagnosing disease; this does not entitle them to force treatment on unwilling patients. Knowledge does not manufacture jurisdiction.

8.4 Associative Obligations

The Defence. Ronald Dworkin argues that political obligations arise not from consent but from membership in a political community, analogous to the obligations one has toward family.⁴³ The argument is intuitive and draws on moral convictions most people already hold. You owe duties to your parents, your siblings, your childhood friends—not because you signed a contract with them, but because you stand in a certain relationship to them. These obligations are real, they are binding, and they arise from the social practice of belonging rather than from any act of will.

Dworkin extends this to the political community. Just as you owe obligations to your siblings by virtue of the relationship rather than any contract, you owe obligations to your fellow citizens by virtue of belonging to a shared political community. The key condition is what Dworkin calls “integrity”: the community must display a principled commitment to treating all its members with equal concern. A community that meets this standard—one committed to “law as integrity”—is a “true community” that generates genuine political obligations. These obligations do not require consent; they arise from the nature of the bond itself.

This is the most psychologically compelling of the four defences. It appeals to something deep in human experience: the sense that we owe something to the people among whom we live, that shared membership creates real moral claims, and that obligations can arise from relationships we did not choose.

The Refutation. Simmons and Stephen Perry attack the analogy at its foundation.⁴⁴ As Perry writes, “citizenship is not sufficiently similar to the intimate and very personal relationships of friendship and family to sustain the argument based on analogy.” Families are small, intimate, face-to-face relationships characterised by love, trust, and deep personal knowledge. The political community is a vast, impersonal, coercive apparatus comprising millions of strangers. Moreover—and this point is frequently overlooked—the obligations of friendship and family are typically obligations to assist, trust, and respect, not obligations to obey. Even within families, there is no general obligation of obedience. Children outgrow parental authority; siblings do not obey one another; friends do not obey one another. So even if the analogy held, it would not generate the kind of content-independent obedience that political obligation requires.

Simmons identifies three lines of argument for associative obligations and finds all three wanting.⁴⁴ First, the conceptual argument: that one just is a member of a political community, so obligations follow analytically. But this confuses description with prescription—being born in a jurisdiction does not generate moral obligations any more than being born into a caste generates caste-specific duties. Second, the nonvoluntarist contract argument: that we can be bound by practices we did not choose. But this simply asserts the conclusion. The question is why unchosen membership creates binding obligations, and Dworkin’s answer—because the community displays “integrity”—adds a normative condition that either does the real work (in which case the obligation derives from justice, not from membership) or does not (in which case there is no obligation). Third, the communitarian identity thesis: that our identities are constituted by our communities, so we cannot coherently reject their claims. But as Simmons objects, even if community shapes identity, it does not follow that every norm of one’s community is binding. Members of oppressive communities are not obligated to uphold oppressive norms merely because those norms partially constitute their social identity.

Andrei Marmor raises the problem of exit.⁴⁵ Dworkin insists that associative obligations “can be genuine and binding even if one had no choice in joining the association.” Marmor objects that this is only plausible if one retains the ability to leave the association without unreasonable cost. Friendship generates obligations partly because either party can walk away. But political communities make exit extremely costly—emigration requires learning new languages, abandoning property, leaving family, and finding a state that will accept you. Without a genuine exit option, unchosen “membership” begins to look less like a voluntary association and more like captivity—and captivity does not generate obligations to the captor.

Dworkin’s integrity condition is itself unstable. If it requires already-just communities, then most of the normative work is done by the justice condition rather than associative bonds, and we are back to something resembling a natural duty of justice—with all its attendant problems as catalogued above. If the condition is watered down to accommodate actual, imperfect states, then it sanctions obligations to communities with serious injustices, which undermines the moral force of the theory entirely. As Marmor observes, the “equality condition” within Dworkin’s framework “seems somewhat ad hoc.” The threshold either excludes every real state or excuses every real injustice.

My Response. To these objections I add the point that exposes the analogy most starkly. You do not vote for your family. No one holds an election to determine who your mother is. Family relationships are organic, personal, and grounded in genuine bonds of affection, shared history, and mutual dependence. Political membership is none of these. It is an accident of geography, enforced by a bureaucratic apparatus that claims jurisdiction over you because you happened to be born within lines drawn on a map by people you never met.

More importantly, you can find other families. When family relationships become abusive or intolerable, we recognise a right to sever them entirely—to leave, to build new bonds, to form chosen families that better serve your wellbeing. The state permits no such freedom. You cannot disown your government; you can only move to a different one making identical claims, and even emigration does not release you from obligations incurred during residence. A family that imprisons members for leaving is not a family; it is a cult. By Dworkin’s own analogy, the state resembles an abusive household more than a loving one. To be born within a jurisdiction is not to join a community; it is to be claimed by a power. Dworkin’s theory mistakes geography for fellowship and coercion for fraternity.

8.5 The Common Failure

These four theories represent the strongest contemporary attempts to ground political authority without relying on actual consent. Each fails at the same point: bridging the gap between a philosophical claim about what people should accept and a moral licence to coerce those who do not accept it.

A cross-cutting deficiency unites all four. Political obligation, to be meaningful, must be content-independent—one must obey because the state commands, not because the content of the command is independently justified. But none of these theories generates genuinely content-independent obligations. Each smuggles in conditions—justice, rescue, epistemic accuracy, integrity—that make the obligation content-dependent in disguise, collapsing political obligation into ordinary moral reasoning about each law’s merits. And each assumes, without defending, that the state is the only vehicle for justice, rescue, or community—an empirical claim, not a philosophical one, and one that anarchist political economy has extensively challenged.

Each theory also sets a justice threshold that is either too high or too low. Rawls requires “reasonably just” institutions; Wellman requires a state that rescues from the perils of nature; Estlund requires “better than random”; Dworkin requires “integrity.” Each threshold is vague enough to be manipulated in either direction—excluding all actual states if applied rigorously, or sanctioning deeply unjust ones if applied loosely.

Hypothetical agreement is not agreement. Asserted duty is not demonstrated duty. Epistemic merit is not jurisdiction. Associative membership is not submission. The common deficiency is that none provides what the non-aggression principle demands before coercion can be justified: the actual, revocable consent of the person being coerced.

9. Voting as Presumptive Violence

The preceding sections have established that the state lacks legitimate authority, that no theory of consent or duty rescues it, and that the rights voters claim to delegate do not exist. The voluntaryist tradition draws the explicit moral conclusion: if the rights do not exist, then attempting to exercise them through the ballot is not a neutral act but an act of aggression—indirect, mediated by institutions, but aggression nonetheless. Voting is participation in violence.

The term “presumptive” here is precise: the violence is inherent in the presumption of authority. Each voter presumes the right to appoint rulers over others—a right that, as the preceding sections have shown, does not exist. The violence is not speculative or metaphorical but structural: it is the coercion that necessarily follows from the exercise of the presumed authority.

Carl Watner, editor of The Voluntaryist, states the argument plainly:

“Voting is an act of presumptive violence because each voter assumes the right to appoint a political guardian over other human beings. No individual voter or even a majority of voters have such a right.”⁴⁶

The chain of moral responsibility runs from ballot box to prison cell. By voting, Watner argues, “each voter is saying: It is right and proper for some people, acting in the name of the State, to pass laws and to use violence to compel obedience to those laws.” Voters, office holders, and other participants “have ‘aided and abetted’ the police, soldiers, and jailers who actually commit the physical aggression required in order to bring about submission.”⁴⁷

George H. Smith, in his landmark essay “The Ethics of Voting” (1982), extends this into a theory of vicarious liability. He challenges the claim that voting is inherently non-aggressive:

“The libertarian who seriously believes that voting is always nonaggressive… is led by his own logic to conclude that voting for any candidate is permissible by libertarian standards, regardless of what the aspiring politician promises to do while in office.”⁴⁸

Smith argues that consistent anti-statism requires opposing not merely bad officeholders but the offices themselves:

“Libertarians should oppose, not this or that Senator, but the office of ‘Senator’ itself.”⁴⁹

There is, Smith concludes, “a presumption against political office-holding and therefore a presumption against voting for political office.”⁵⁰ The burden falls on those who would vote to demonstrate why their participation does not constitute complicity in aggression.

10. Institutional Legitimation: La Boétie, McElroy, and the Psychology of Servitude

Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (c. 1553) identified a deeper function of political participation: the psychological maintenance of rule.

“It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”⁵¹

La Boétie understood that tyranny persists not primarily through force but through habit and belief:

“Tyrants would distribute largesse, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King!’ The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.”⁵²

Wendy McElroy, writing in the individualist anarchist tradition, applies La Boétie’s insight directly to elections. In her essay “Why I Would Not Vote Against Hitler,” she argues that the institution is the problem, not the officeholder:

“The essential problem is not Hitler, but the institutional framework that allows a Hitler to grasp a monopoly on power.”⁵³

The deeper point is not merely that bad men abuse the state. It is that the act of voting—even against a monster—”strengthens the institutional framework that produced unjust laws in the first place: it strengthens the structure of state power by accepting its authority as a tool of change.”⁵⁴ Each election cycle renews the premise that this mechanism has the right to produce rulers. The voter who pulls the lever against one tyrant simultaneously endorses the machine that manufactures tyrants. McElroy’s conclusion is uncompromising:

“No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another. A consistent libertarian can never authorize one human being to tax and control peaceful activities.”⁵⁵

11. Democracy as Exploitation: The Time-Preference Problem

Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed (2001) adds an economic dimension to the moral critique. Even if democracy were legitimate in principle—which the preceding arguments deny—its structural incentives would make it systematically predatory.

Hoppe’s central insight is the distinction between government “owners” and government “caretakers.” A hereditary monarch, whatever his other vices, owns the state’s capital value and can pass it to his heirs. He therefore has an incentive to preserve long-term productivity—exploiting moderately rather than killing the host. A democratic ruler holds only temporary use rights:

“He does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his protégés’ advantage. He owns its current use but not its capital stock.”⁵⁶

Because “what he does not consume now, he may never be able to consume,”⁵⁷ the democratic ruler faces systematic pressure toward short-term exploitation. The result is that democracy “promotes an increase in the social rate of time preference (present-orientation) or the ‘infantilization’ of society,” producing “continually increased spending and taxes, paper money and paper money inflation, an unending flood of legislation, and a steadily growing ‘public’ debt.”⁵⁸

Worse, the selection mechanism itself ensures that decent people are filtered out. The competitive process of democratic politics:

“makes it essentially impossible for a harmless or decent person to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position as a result of their efficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues.”⁵⁹

As Hoppe summarises: “Competition in the production of goods is a good thing. Competition in the production of bads is not good; in fact, it is sheer evil.”⁶⁰

Majority rule, on this analysis, is not a method of discovering the common good but a mechanism for rotating exploitation. It “allows for A and B to band together to rip off C, C and A in turn joining to rip off B, and then B and C conspiring against A.” This, Hoppe concludes, is “not justice but a moral outrage.”⁶¹

When you vote, you are not merely selecting a representative. You are participating in a system whose structural logic produces ever-increasing extraction, ever-shorter time horizons, and the systematic selection of the morally worst for positions of power.

12. The State as Rational Predator

Anthony de Jasay’s The State (1985) complements Hoppe by inverting the usual assumption. Most political theory treats the state as a tool—of the people, of the ruling class, of some faction. De Jasay asks: what if the state is itself a rational actor, competing with its subjects for resources?

“The state is competing with its subjects for the use of the scarce resources that is the liberty and property of each. It restrains them in what they may or not do and forces them to devote part of their efforts and goods to the state’s purposes rather than to their own.”⁶²

On the supposed safety of democratic sovereignty versus monarchic sovereignty, de Jasay is blunt:

“The threat to people’s liberty and property can just as well come from the sovereign people as from the sovereign king. The danger, then, lies in sovereign power and not in the character of the tenant who holds it.”⁶³

De Jasay redefines legitimacy as “the propensity of its subjects to obey its commands in the absence of either punishments or rewards”⁶⁴—making it a state of mind of subjects, not an attribute of the state itself. Elections are one mechanism for producing this state of mind: they create the illusion that the ruler’s commands are the people’s own decisions.

On state expansion through democratic redistribution: “Majorities must be paid for out of minority money; this condition leaves the state little choice about the redistributive pattern to impose.”⁶⁵ Democracy compels the state to buy electoral coalitions with other people’s resources—a structural imperative, not a contingent corruption.

Even constitutional limits cannot restrain this dynamic. De Jasay argues that constitutional prohibitions on redistribution would simply be circumvented: “If there is no way round it, perhaps by taming the guardian of the constitution, it must be amended, brought up to date, adjusted to changing circumstances.”⁶⁶

The trajectory is not accidental but rational. A “higher kind of rationality” would lead the state “to seek to emancipate itself from the constraints of consent and electoral competition.”⁶⁷ De Jasay’s thesis: “a built-in totalitarian bias should be taken as a symptom of their rationality.”⁶⁸

Voting, on this analysis, is not a check on state power. It is a mechanism by which the state purchases the compliance it needs to continue expanding.

13. Majority Rule and the Transmutation Fallacy

The core democratic doctrine is that majority rule is legitimate. But legitimacy is not a number. Numbers measure preferences and distributions; they do not measure moral title.

A majority can be wrong. More importantly, a majority can be wrong in the specific way that matters here: it can prefer to violate rights. If fifty-one per cent vote to confiscate the property of the other forty-nine, the procedural correctness of the election does not make confiscation legitimate. If ninety-nine per cent vote to enslave the remaining one per cent, the landslide does not make slavery just. The wrongness of the act is entirely independent of how many people endorsed it.

This is not an exotic hypothetical. Democratic majorities have voted for slavery, segregation, forced sterilisation, religious persecution, and aggressive war. In each case, the democratic pedigree of the decision added exactly nothing to its moral standing. The procedural form was impeccable; the substance was monstrous.

Herbert Spencer saw this clearly in “The Right to Ignore the State” (1851):

“If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying towards its support. It is self-evident that in so behaving he in no way trenches upon the liberty of others.”⁶⁹

If you accept that rights exist at all—if you accept even one right that cannot be overridden by vote—then majority rule is necessarily limited. It is, at best, a coordination rule for people who have already agreed to be coordinated and who retain exit and refusal.

State voting, however, is not limited in that way. It is used to justify coercion over dissenters. When it does, it treats majority will as an authorising principle. Call this the transmutation fallacy: the belief that a sufficient count of hands transforms an act from impermissible to permissible—that procedure can launder coercion into legitimacy. Stated in terms of the non-aggression principle: if one person initiating force against a peaceful neighbour is aggression, then a million people voting to initiate force against a peaceful neighbour is still aggression. The vote is a counting mechanism, not a moral transformer.

The fallacy cannot be rescued by “everyone had a chance to vote.” Fairness of participation does not excuse injustice of outcomes. A fair lottery to determine who gets to steal is still theft. A perfectly inclusive vote to enslave is still slavery. The opportunity to participate in wrongdoing does not convert wrongdoing into justice.

The practice of democratic states reveals a deeper incoherence. Non-participation is treated not as objection but as complicity—or, more conveniently, as irrelevance. When a majority of eligible voters do not vote, the state does not resign. It does not interpret abstention as withdrawal of consent. It simply proceeds as though the votes that were cast represent the will of the whole. Ten people voting on behalf of ten million does not confer authority on the ten—yet this is precisely how democratic legitimacy operates in practice. Organised spoil-vote campaigns expose the flaw starkly: even when citizens explicitly signal that none of the options is acceptable, the system records their participation as validation of the process itself. The ballot has no box for “I reject your authority.”

This means the democratic system requires belief in order to function—a critical mass of citizens who accept that the ritual confers legitimacy. But in practice, that belief is not universal, and the system does not wait for it. Where participation is low, the state does not scale back its claims. Where turnout drops below half, no government dissolves itself. The result is that a minority of voters—sometimes a small one—imposes its choice on a majority that either dissented or declined to participate. The mechanism that is supposed to derive authority from numbers routinely operates against numbers. It is imposition by the few upon the many, wearing the costume of popular sovereignty.

14. Benefits Do Not Create Obligations

A common defence of voting and obedience is moral reciprocity: you benefit from public goods and institutions, therefore you owe participation and compliance. Voting is part of paying your moral dues.

Robert Nozick dismantled this in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) with a thought experiment. Imagine your neighbours create a public entertainment system and assign each resident a day to broadcast programming. You occasionally hear and enjoy the broadcasts. When your assigned day arrives, are you obligated to take a turn?

Nozick argues the answer is clearly no. The fair play principle, if accepted, “would allow others to place us under an obligation to them simply by conferring benefits on us.”⁷⁰ Unsolicited benefits do not create binding obligations.

A. John Simmons strengthens this by distinguishing between accepting and merely receiving benefits. Fair-play obligations arise only when one accepts benefits “in full awareness that the benefits are provided by a cooperative scheme” and takes them “to be worth the price they pay for them.”⁷¹

Most political “benefits” fail this test. As Simmons observes:

“Even in democratic political communities, these benefits are commonly regarded as purchased (with taxes) from a central authority, rather than as accepted from the cooperative efforts of our fellow citizens.”⁷²

This distinction is fatal to the reciprocity argument. In ordinary moral life, you cannot impose a benefit on someone and then demand payment. If I mow your lawn without asking, I cannot send you a bill and threaten you if you refuse. The state imposes services and then demands payment, while insisting that the demand is legitimate because you “benefited.” But benefit is not consent. It is not contract.

Many state “benefits” are also inseparable from the coercion: roads with surveillance and policing; courts with victimless crimes; “security” with war and border violence; welfare with bureaucratic control. Even if a state provides some genuine goods, the moral question remains: did you consent to the package? Were you offered a real choice? Could you refuse without penalty?

The fairness argument tries to retroactively convert subjection into contract. It fails because contract requires voluntary agreement, not mere receipt of unavoidable outputs from a territorial monopoly.

15. The Public Goods Refuge and the Limits of Necessity

When the moral case for authority fails, defenders often retreat to necessity: without the state, public goods would be underprovided; without coercion, free riders would ruin cooperation; without monopoly enforcement, chaos would prevail.

Even if these concerns were entirely correct as empirical predictions, they would not establish a moral right to rule non-consenters. Necessity can explain why people might want coercive institutions. It does not prove they are entitled to impose them on those who refuse.

In ordinary life, necessity does not create general rights over others. If you need money, you do not gain a right to rob your neighbour. If you need labour, you do not gain a right to conscript your neighbour. If you fear danger, you do not gain a right to cage peaceful people because it would “make you safer.”

David Friedman, in The Machinery of Freedom (1973; 3rd ed. 2014), turns the public goods argument against the state by showing that “market failure” logic applies more forcefully to political markets:

“Individual actors usually receive most of the benefit and pay most of the cost of their actions, making market failure the exception, not the rule. On the political market individual actors—voters, politicians, lobbyists, judges, policemen—almost never bear much of the cost of their actions or receive much of the benefit.”⁷³

His conclusion inverts the standard defence of government:

“The existence of market failure is, on net, an argument against government, not for it.”⁷⁴

On the fantasy that government corrects market imperfections through benevolent expertise, Friedman is characteristically dry:

“In the real world, the alternative to laissez-faire is not rule by a benevolent and supremely competent dictator, it is having decisions made on the political market instead of the private market.”⁷⁵

And on force as a resource-allocation mechanism: “The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.”⁷⁶

The state’s appeal to public goods is frequently a disguised claim: “we are allowed to violate rights because we promise benefits.” But rights are not conditional on others’ plans. A society can coordinate through contracts, mutual aid, insurance, arbitration, private standards, and community governance by consent. None of these is perfect; perfection is not the standard. The standard is moral title. And elections do not solve the moral problem; they only decide how coercion will be distributed.

16. The Harm Reduction Objection and Its Limits

If there is a respectable defence of voting, it is harm reduction.

The argument: the state exists and will impose outcomes regardless. There is no immediate exit. Elections determine who will wield coercive power. Therefore it may be rational and morally permissible to vote for the least harmful option, as a form of self-defence.

This is the most serious pro-voting argument because it does not rely on the fantasy that voting creates moral authority. A mature critique should grant what can be granted:

• It may be psychologically and prudentially understandable to vote in order to mitigate damage.
• People trapped within coercive systems often take the least bad options available.
• Moral blame is mitigated when choices are made under duress.

But note the distinction:

• Excuse: your act may be understandable under coercion, and your culpability may be reduced.
• Justification: your act is morally right and the institution it supports is legitimate.

Harm reduction can at most offer excuse; it cannot supply justification. It never answers the legitimacy question. It only says: given that the state will coerce anyway, you may choose the less harmful coercer. That is not democracy’s boast; it is democracy’s confession.

Jason Brennan, in The Ethics of Voting (2011), takes the harm reduction argument seriously but reaches a sobering conclusion: citizens who vote have an obligation to vote well, and it may be better to abstain than to vote badly—yet most citizens, he argues, have good grounds for thinking they will vote badly.⁷⁷

Even on harm reduction grounds, voting is often counterproductive. Most voters are rationally ignorant—they have no incentive to acquire accurate political knowledge since their individual vote has negligible effect.

Wendy McElroy pushes the harm reduction argument to its logical limit with her “Hitler test.” When asked if she would cast the deciding ballot against Hitler, she replied: “No, but I would have no moral objection to putting a bullet through his skull.”⁷⁸ The distinction is precise: a bullet targets a specific aggressor; a ballot places another human being in a position of political power over innocent third parties who must endure the consequences. Violence against a tyrant is self-defence; voting against a tyrant still operates through the very institution that produces tyrants.

Even a vote against the worst imaginable candidate is a vote for the institutional framework that produced him. Without the state, Hitler would have been a street thug, not a genocidal dictator. As McElroy argues (Section 10), the institution that concentrates power is the problem, not the particular officeholder who wields it.

Harm reduction has a hidden cost: participation strengthens the legitimacy narrative that keeps the coercive structure stable. You may reduce one harm while reinforcing the institution that produces many harms over time. A vote is not only a tactical input; it is a symbolic endorsement that this mechanism is the proper way to manage human beings.

The harm reduction argument also proves too much. Applied consistently, it would justify participating in any coercive system. A collaborator under military occupation who works with the occupiers to “reduce harm” may be psychologically understandable—but we do not usually call collaboration a moral programme. A functionary in a corrupt bureaucracy who “works within the system” to soften its worst excesses may be excused, but the system’s existence is not thereby justified.

At some point, the consequentialist calculus must reckon with the cost of endorsement itself. Every participant who lends the institution credibility extends its lifespan, and every election cycle that produces “acceptable” turnout is cited as proof that the system works. The harm reductionist who votes to limit damage is simultaneously providing the evidence the state uses to claim that its authority is accepted. The collective action problem runs in both directions: if enough people withdrew participation, the system would lose its claim to represent anyone at all. The harm reductionist asks “what happens if I don’t vote?” but never asks “what happens if none of us do?”—and the answer to the second question is precisely what the institution fears most.

17. The Partisan Test: Your Candidate, Their Aggression

The harm reduction argument treats the vote as a defensive act within a system one does not endorse. But most voters are not reluctant participants minimising damage. They have a party. They have a candidate. They believe their side is better. This belief deserves scrutiny, because it is precisely where the moral argument becomes most uncomfortable—and most revealing.

Suppose you vote for the party you consider best—call it Party A. I do not need to speculate about whether Party A will stop taxation, revoke the state’s monopoly on force, or recognise the right of individuals to withdraw from its jurisdiction. No serious person claims any major party will do any of these things. Party A will continue to tax you and your neighbours. It will continue to regulate, to prosecute victimless crimes, to enforce compliance with laws that peaceful people never agreed to. It may allocate the proceeds of taxation differently from Party B. It may aggress in slightly different directions and perhaps to a slightly lesser degree. But the initiation of force—the foundational violation of the non-aggression principle—remains identical. The machinery of coercion does not change; only the hand on the lever changes.

This is not a peripheral observation. It strikes at the core of the “lesser evil” defence. If you cannot say that your preferred party will cease aggression—that it will stop initiating force against peaceful people—then on what moral ground do you call it “better”? Not on the ground of the NAP, because the NAP is violated equally by every party that claims the right to tax, conscript, and imprison without individual consent. The difference between parties, on this analysis, is not a difference in moral kind but a difference in administrative style: a disagreement about how the stolen money should be spent, not about whether stealing it is permissible.

Consider now the moral implications of your vote succeeding. Your party wins. It forms a government. It now exercises coercive authority over every person within the territory—including every person who voted against it, every person who refused to vote, and every person who explicitly rejected the legitimacy of the entire system. Your vote was one of the authorising acts that placed this apparatus in power. You cannot claim the benefits of that authority—your preferred policies enacted, your preferred direction of governance pursued—while disclaiming the costs. The authority is indivisible. You authorised the institution, not merely the policies you happen to favour.

So ask yourself the hard question. If your party, once in power, commits an act you find unconscionable—starts a war, enables a catastrophe, orders an atrocity—would you accept moral co-responsibility? Would you stand trial as one of the people who granted that authority? If your answer is no—if you believe that your vote carries no moral weight when the outcomes are bad—then you must explain why it carries moral weight when the outcomes are good. You cannot claim credit for the policies you like and disclaim responsibility for the policies you do not. The vote that authorised the education budget is the same vote that authorised the war. The ballot does not come with a menu of consequences from which you may select only the palatable ones.

This leads to the inversion that most voters refuse to confront. When you vote, you are not merely “expressing a preference” or “having your say.” You are asking for your worldview to be imposed, by the coercive apparatus of the state, on every person within the jurisdiction who sees the world differently. The dissenter who did not vote for your party—who may have explicitly refused the entire system—will be taxed according to your party’s budget, regulated according to your party’s rules, and imprisoned if he resists your party’s laws. He did not consent. He was not consulted. He may have loudly and clearly refused. But because your side won the count, the force of the state descends upon him as surely as it would under any regime he opposed.

This is what voting is, stripped of its democratic mystique: it is the act of requesting that the state aggress on your behalf against those who disagree with you. Every vote for every party in every election carries this structure. The voter who pulls the lever for his preferred candidate is saying, in moral substance: “I want the laws I prefer to be imposed on people who do not prefer them, and I want those people punished if they refuse to comply.” That this request is made through a ritual called “democracy” does not alter its character. That millions of others make the same request simultaneously does not dilute it. That the request is sincere, well-intentioned, and directed at outcomes the voter genuinely believes are good does not change what is being requested: the initiation of force against peaceful people who have not consented.

To legitimise this—to treat this request as not merely understandable but morally proper—is to abandon the non-aggression principle entirely. It is to declare that your convictions about how others should live are sufficient grounds for compelling them to live that way. It is to say that the depth of your belief in a policy justifies the force used to impose it. And that is precisely the principle that, if universalised, justifies every tyranny in history—because every tyrant believed, with equal sincerity, that his vision of the good society warranted the coercion required to achieve it.

18. Self-Government as Rhetorical Illusion

Democracy sells itself as self-government: “you rule yourself because you voted.”

The phrase is a category error. In genuine self-government, the “self” who governs and the “self” who is governed are the same person. When I decide what to eat, where to live, or how to spend my time, I am governing myself. Democracy does not offer this. It offers rule by others—selected by a process in which you participate as one voice among millions—and then calls the result “self-government” because a collective pronoun has been substituted for an individual one. “We” decided, therefore “you” are self-governing. The trick is entirely linguistic.

Examine the structure concretely:

If you vote and lose, the winners still rule you. If you vote and win, the winners rule dissenters. If you do not vote, the winners rule you. If you explicitly refuse the system, the winners still rule you. In no case does your individual self retain final authority over your own life. The outcome is identical in every scenario: someone other than you decides how you may act, and enforces that decision with violence.

Wolff puts it plainly: the autonomous person “insofar as he is autonomous, is not subject to the will of another. He may do what another tells him, but not because he has been told to do it.” To obey the state because it commands—to accept its laws as binding simply because they are its laws—is to forfeit autonomy entirely. As Wolff concludes, “by accepting as final the commands of the others, he forfeits his autonomy.”⁷⁹

Genuine self-government would mean: you are bound only by rules you have individually consented to, or by rules necessary to prevent aggression, enforced through mechanisms you have voluntarily accepted. The state offers no such thing. It offers rule by others, with a participation ritual that allows the ruled to call the rulers “us.”

The ritual matters. It is the mechanism by which domination is psychologically converted into cooperation. The voter who says “we passed this law” typically had no role in drafting it, may not have voted for the legislators who wrote it, and would face imprisonment for disobeying it. Yet the pronoun “we” does its work: it makes subjection feel like agency.

19. Voter Culpability: The Act and the Agent

If voting is immoral, what does that imply about voters? Two things at once, and the distinction matters.

The act is wrong in principle. Participating in a rights-manufacturing procedure—one that claims authority over non-consenters—is wrong as an act-type, because it involves attempting to authorise what you do not own the right to authorise. The voter is selecting an agent to initiate force against peaceful people: to confiscate their earnings, restrict their movement, and imprison them for non-compliance with rules they never accepted. This is not metaphorical aggression. The chain from ballot to enforcement runs through legislation, regulation, policing, prosecution, and imprisonment—each link backed by the threat of violence against those who refuse. The non-aggression principle is violated not at some abstract institutional level but at the point of origin: the vote that set the chain in motion.

The blameworthiness of individuals varies. Moral blame is sensitive to context. Some people vote under social pressure, fear, or the belief that abstention will directly harm others. Some vote with minimal reflection because voting is treated as civic virtue from childhood. Some vote because they are trapped in a system and seeking the least bad outcome.

These facts can mitigate culpability. But mitigation is not vindication. A coerced or misled participant may be less blameworthy; the institutional act remains immoral. The analogy is not to murder but to participation in a system one did not design and only partially understands. The person who pays a protection racket under threat is not morally equivalent to the racketeer—but the protection racket is still a protection racket.

The most common objection is consequentialist: “If good people don’t vote, worse outcomes result.” This may sometimes be true as a prediction. But it does not address the moral argument. A hostage who cooperates with captors to minimise casualties is understandable; his cooperation does not legitimise hostage-taking. The relevant question is not “what happens if I don’t participate?” but “does my participation constitute endorsement of an institution that claims unjust authority?” The answer to the second question does not depend on the answer to the first.

Carl Watner frames the alternative with precision:

“Not voting in government elections is one way of refusing to participate; of refusing to consent to government rule over your life. Non-voting may be seen as an act of personal secession, of exposing the myth behind ‘government by consent.'”⁸⁰

20. What Would Make Voting Moral?

Voting can be morally legitimate under conditions that track real consent.

A decision procedure is legitimate when:

1. Membership is voluntary: no one is forced into the association.
2. Exit is real: leaving does not incur coercive punishment; you are not treated as subject after withdrawal.
3. Terms are disclosed: the scope of authority is explicit and bounded.
4. No external jurisdiction: the association does not claim authority over non-members.
5. Enforcement is consensual and limited: remedies are restitution-oriented and derived from contract or defence.

Under these conditions, voting becomes what it should be: a method of coordinating consenting participants about shared projects. This is not utopian speculation. Cooperatives, mutual aid societies, homeowners’ associations (at their best), professional guilds, religious congregations, and open-source software communities already govern themselves through voluntary decision-making. The model exists; what does not exist is a justification for imposing it on the unwilling.

Notice what disappears: territorial monopoly, compulsory funding, imposed jurisdiction. These are not bugs; they are the essence of the state. This is why “fixing democracy” so it becomes moral would require transforming the state into something non-statist: voluntary governance rather than imposed rule.

21. Conclusion: The Clean Thesis

The immorality of voting is structural, not psychological. It is not a matter of cynicism but of property in one’s own life. The moral thread running through every argument in this essay is the non-aggression principle: the prohibition on initiating force against peaceful people. Voting in state elections is immoral because it is participation in aggression.

The chain is direct. The voter selects an agent. The agent claims authority to tax, regulate, conscript, and imprison. The targets of these actions are overwhelmingly peaceful people who have aggressed against no one. The enforcement mechanism is violence: fines backed by seizure, seizure backed by arrest, arrest backed by armed force. Every link in this chain traces back to the ballot. The voter may not pull the trigger, but he selects the man who gives the order.

Each section of this essay has demonstrated a different facet of why no theory rescues this act from its moral character:

1. The non-aggression principle is violated at the point of delegation. No individual possesses the right to initiate force against a peaceful neighbour; no collection of individuals possesses it; no procedure can manufacture it. The right being “delegated” through the ballot does not exist (nemo dat: Spooner, Huemer, Rothbard).

1. No theory of consent legitimises the aggression. Tacit consent fails every serious philosophical test. Hypothetical consent is not consent. The system binds you whether you vote or not (Hume, Simmons, Rawls).

1. Non-consent theories fare no better. Natural duty, epistemic merit, and associative membership all attempt to ground authority without actual consent—and all fail at the same point: none provides what the non-aggression principle demands before coercion can be justified. Asserted duty is not demonstrated duty; epistemic value is not jurisdiction; membership is not submission (Wellman, Estlund, Dworkin).

1. Authority cannot override the principle. The defining mark of moral agency is the refusal to surrender one’s judgement to another. Authority demands this surrender—and enforces it with violence (Wolff).

1. The demos itself is constituted by aggression. Democracy cannot democratically constitute its own boundary. The territory is claimed by force; jurisdiction is imposed, not consented to. The NAP is violated before the first vote is cast (Whelan, Dahl, Abizadeh).

1. Democratic structures incentivise aggression. Temporary rulers extract as much as possible before their term expires. The system selects for those most willing to initiate force and most skilled at disguising it (Hoppe, de Jasay).

1. Voting launders aggression into legitimacy. Participation sustains the narrative that makes coercion palatable. It transforms domination into “democracy” and rulers into “representatives.” Each vote is both a tactical input and a symbolic endorsement that this mechanism is the proper way to manage human beings (La Boétie, McElroy, Watner).

1. Every vote is a request for aggression against dissenters. The voter who supports his preferred party is asking for that party’s programme to be imposed on every person who disagrees, by force. If the voter cannot say his party will cease initiating force, the moral character of his vote is identical regardless of which party he supports. He bears co-responsibility for every act his authorised agents commit—not only the policies he favours but the atrocities he did not foresee.

1. The voter bears moral responsibility for the aggression he authorises. The chain from ballot to enforcement is not metaphorical. Voters share responsibility for the coercion exercised in their name, regardless of the marginal causal impact of any single vote (Smith, Watner).

Spooner’s comparison of the government to a highwayman remains the sharpest summary. The highwayman “takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit.” Having taken your money, the highwayman “leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful ‘sovereign,’ on account of the ‘protection’ he affords you.”⁸¹

The government, by contrast, does not merely rob but attempts “to make you either his dupe or his slave.”⁸²

Voting is not consent to this robbery. It is participation in deciding who will conduct it—and the act of deciding who will aggress against your neighbours is itself a violation of the principle that forbids aggression against your neighbours. That participation may be understandable, but it cannot be justified. And those who understand its nature may choose—as a matter of conscience—to withdraw from the ritual entirely.

Footnotes

1. Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), chapters 1-3. ↩
2. On the conditions for valid consent, see A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 75-100. ↩
3. Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, rev. ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006), chapter 2. ↩
4. Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (Boston: 1870), §II. ↩
5. Spooner, No Treason No. VI, §II. ↩
6. Spooner, No Treason No. VI, §II. ↩
7. Spooner, No Treason No. I (1867), §VII. ↩
8. Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), 24. ↩
9. Frederick G. Whelan, “Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,” in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds., Nomos XXV: Liberal Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 22, 40. ↩
10. Whelan, “Boundary Problem,” 16. ↩
11. Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 60. ↩
12. Whelan, “Boundary Problem,” 41. ↩
13. Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion,” Political Theory 36 (2008): 45-46. ↩
14. David Hume, “Of the Original Contract” (1748), in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 475. ↩
15. Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, 80. ↩
16. Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, 99. ↩
17. Spooner, No Treason No. VI, §II. ↩
18. Spooner, No Treason No. VI, §VIII. ↩
19. Spooner, No Treason No. VI, §VIII. ↩
20. Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 14. ↩
21. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, 18. ↩
22. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, 42. ↩
23. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, 44. ↩
24. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, 19. ↩
25. Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5. ↩
26. Huemer, Problem of Political Authority, 20. ↩
27. Huemer, Problem of Political Authority, 44. ↩
28. Huemer, Problem of Political Authority, 178. ↩
29. Huemer, summary of argument at Cato Unbound symposium on The Problem of Political Authority, March 2013. ↩
30. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), §§3-4, 24. ↩
31. Ronald Dworkin, “The Original Position,” in Reading Rawls, ed. Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 16-52, esp. 17-21. Cynthia Stark dubs this objection so ubiquitous as to constitute “the standard indictment”: “Hypothetical Consent and Justification,” Journal of Philosophy 97, no. 6 (2000): 313-34. ↩
32. Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, 57-95. ↩
33. David Enoch, “Hypothetical Consent and the Value(s) of Autonomy,” Ethics 128, no. 1 (2017): 6-36. ↩
34. Christopher Heath Wellman, “Liberalism, Samaritanism, and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 25, no. 3 (1996): 211-237. See also Wellman and Simmons, Is There a Duty to Obey the Law?, part I. ↩
35. Simmons, “The Particularity Problem,” APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Law 7, no. 1 (2007): 19-27. ↩
36. Simmons, in Wellman and Simmons, Is There a Duty to Obey the Law?, part II. ↩
37. Huemer, Problem of Political Authority, ch. 5. See also Jiafeng Zhu, “Content-Independence and Natural-Duty Theories of Political Obligation,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 44, no. 5 (2018): 495-517. ↩
38. Massimo Renzo, “Duties of Samaritanism and Political Obligation,” Legal Theory 14, no. 3 (2008): 193-217. ↩
39. David Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), chapters 1-3. ↩
40. David Copp, “Reasonable Acceptability and Democratic Legitimacy: Estlund’s Qualified Acceptability Requirement,” Ethics 121, no. 2 (2011): 270-300. See also Elizabeth Anderson, “An Epistemic Defense of Democracy: David Estlund’s Democratic Authority,” Episteme 5 (2008): 129-39. ↩
41. Gerald Gaus, “On Seeking the Truth through Democracy: Estlund’s Case for the Qualified Epistemic Claim,” Ethics 121, no. 2 (2011). ↩
42. Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), chs. 2-3. Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), chs. 1-5. ↩
43. Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), chapters 6-7. ↩
44. Simmons, “Associative Political Obligations,” Ethics & International Affairs 10 (1996), reprinted in Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Stephen Perry, “Political Authority and Political Obligation,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩
45. Andrei Marmor, “Integrity in Law’s Empire,” lecture, NYU Conference on Dworkin’s Later Work, September 2019. ↩
46. Carl Watner, “Is Voting an Act of Violence?” The Voluntaryist, April 2000. ↩
47. Watner, “Is Voting an Act of Violence?” ↩
48. George H. Smith, “The Ethics of Voting,” The Voluntaryist No. 1 (1982). Reprinted in Carl Watner, ed., Neither Bullets Nor Ballots: Essays on Voluntaryism (1983). ↩
49. Smith, “Ethics of Voting.” ↩
50. Smith, “Ethics of Voting.” ↩
51. Étienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 50. ↩
52. La Boétie, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, 68. ↩
53. Wendy McElroy, “Why I Would Not Vote Against Hitler,” Liberty, 1996. ↩
54. McElroy, “Why I Would Not Vote Against Hitler.” ↩
55. McElroy, “Why I Would Not Vote Against Hitler.” ↩
56. Hoppe, Democracy, 44. ↩
57. Hoppe, Democracy, 46. ↩
58. Hoppe, Democracy, Introduction. ↩
59. Hoppe, Democracy, 88. ↩
60. Hoppe, Democracy, 45-46. ↩
61. Hoppe, Democracy, 104. ↩
62. Anthony de Jasay, The State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985; reprinted Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 73. ↩
63. De Jasay, The State, 73. ↩
64. De Jasay, The State, 73ff. ↩
65. De Jasay, The State, chapter 4. ↩
66. De Jasay, The State, chapter 4. ↩
67. De Jasay, The State, 195-196. ↩
68. De Jasay, The State, 196. ↩
69. Herbert Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State” (1851), in Social Statics (London: John Chapman, 1851), chapter 19. ↩
70. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 95. ↩
71. Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, 132. ↩
72. Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, 139. ↩
73. David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 2014), chapter 53. ↩
74. Friedman, Machinery of Freedom, chapter 53. ↩
75. Friedman, Machinery of Freedom, chapter 53. ↩
76. Friedman, Machinery of Freedom, chapter 1. ↩
77. Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 68. ↩
78. McElroy, “Why I Would Not Vote Against Hitler.” ↩
79. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, 14, 41. ↩
80. Carl Watner, “Non-Voting,” voluntaryist.com. ↩
81. Spooner, No Treason No. VI, §VI. ↩
82. Spooner, No Treason No. VI, §VI. ↩

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