Kyle Bennett has a message for his elected "representatives"

This isn't all of it. Read the whole thing at his Human Advancement blog.

You do not represent me. Your values are overtly hostile to mine, and you will work almost entirely in direct opposition to all that I value. The few cases in which that is not true will be mere coincidence. But I will continue to pursue my values in the hopes that I can accumulate them more rapidly than you can destroy them - even as you turn a portion of what I create against me.

I'm confident that I will be able to do so, and today I am free - more free than I have been in as long as I can remember. My peace of mind, my hopes for the future, and my vision of the values I wish to create are no longer influenced by the results of your election processes. I have today, in my abstinence from any voluntary involvement with you, in my refusal to grant you any sanction whatsoever, acheived a moral clarity that is more valuable than any effect that could have been acheived by a misplaced and futile attempt to use the ballot as a means of self-defense.

I've realized today, not just abstractly as I have for some time now, but as a concrete fact directly perceivable, that I don't need you; yet you need me. You may claim to represent me, you may claim to rule with my consent and through a delegation of powers, but your claims cannot make it true. These are things that cannot be taken, they can only be offered voluntarily. Neither wishing, pleading, cajoling, nor threatening can change this simple fact. And though you think you can pretend otherwise, the truth is that they are vital to your purpose.

I mentioned that The Mises Institute was having a book sale a couple weeks ago. I bought Rothbard's For a New Liberty, even though it's available online. Theirs is a work I wish to support. Let me quote a paragraph or two:

In the United States, the classical liberal party had long been the Democratic party, known in the latter nineteenth century as "the party of personal liberty." Basically, it had been the party not only of personal but also of economic liberty; the stalwart opponent of Prohibition, of Sunday blue laws, and of compulsory education; the devoted champion of free trade, hard money (absence of governmental inflation), separation of banking from the State, and the absolute minimum of government. It construed state power to be negligible and federal power to be virtually nonexistent. On foreign policy, the Democratic party, though less rigor­ously, tended to be the party of peace, antimilitarism, and anti-imperial­ism. But personal and economic libertarianism were both abandoned with the capture of the Democratic party by the Bryan forces in 1896, and the foreign policy of nonintervention was then rudely abandoned by Woodrow Wilson two decades later. It was an intervention and a war that were to usher in a century of death and devastation, of wars and new despotisms, and also a century in all warring countries of the new corporatist statism—of a welfare-warfare State run by an alli­ance of Big Government, big business, unions, and intellectuals—that we have mentioned above.

The last gasp, indeed, of the old laissez-faire liberalism in America was the doughty and aging libertarians who banded together to form the Anti-Imperialist League at the turn of the century, to combat the American war against Spain and the subsequent imperialist American war to crush the Filipinos who were striving for national independence from both Spain and the United States. To current eyes, the idea of an anti-imperialist who is not a Marxist may seem strange, but opposition to imperialism began with laissez-faire liberals such as Cobden and Bright in England, and Eugen Richter in Prussia. In fact, the Anti-­Imperialist League, headed by Boston industrialist and economist Edward Atkinson (and including [William Graham] Sumner) consisted largely of laissez-faire radi­cals who had fought the good fight for the abolition of slavery, and had then championed free trade, hard money, and minimal government. To them, their final battle against the new American imperialism was simply part and parcel of their lifelong battle against coercion, statism and injustice—against Big Government in every area of life, both domes­tic and foreign.

Sorry that took so long. It's difficult to stop reading Rothbard once you start. This passage doesn't necessarily back up Kyle, I guess, though I bet there's something in the book that would.

As far as Kyle's recommendation not to vote - I believe the argument is that voting makes the statists think you're legitimizing them - I'm afraid I still don't get that. I think you've got to throw everything you can at them. Voting's just one weapon.

Make sure you stop and "ooh!" at Kyle's Falling Waters pic. I always do.

Oh, and it looks like I've got to take back the nice things I said about the Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammed Yunus.