IS THE POLITICAL CLASS AN IMPEDIMENT TO CIVILIZATION?

I'm only being slightly provocative here.  Dissident former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg recently wrote a column opting out of the (false) binary choice the major political parties are offering.

His major premises are straightforward enough.

It’s too bad that Trump has so many character flaws. Too bad because, as I say, I want to vote for the Republican candidate for president; yet, thanks to Trump, I won’t be voting for him in November.

That I find him so unlikeable, in case you’re wondering, won’t drive me into the arms of the Democrats. Their party has lurched so far to the left that I couldn’t possibly support any of their candidates.

Even the Democrats’ “moderates” are left-wingers. They don’t see the same America I do. Their America is a dark place, where only the super-rich are doing well, where ordinary Americans need two or three jobs to put food on the table, a place where racism is ingrained in the nation’s DNA. For Democrats running for president, the glass is always half empty — if that.

And Democrats were out to impeach Trump from the moment he was elected in 2016. You don’t have to like our president to dislike that. There’s no way I’d vote for any of them.

The kicker is further along.  "Some people have told me that it’s anti-American to boycott an election, that Americans fought and died for my right to vote and that I am disrespecting them by not voting."  That's the kind of thing the political class wants to codify in law: no less an authority than former president Barack Obama wanted to make voting, like eating your peas, compulsory.  That position, Sheldon Richman argues, is internally inconsistent.  "If voting is a right, it can't be a duty, and if it's a duty, it can't a right. Perhaps it's neither."

More to the point, in a division of labor society, one marker of an advanced civilization might be that set of important operations we can perform without thinking of them.  We go about our business, some of us govern, some of us participate in selecting those who govern, why should that delegation be any different from that by which one deposit of iron gets mined rather than another to make our cars and cooking ware?

Moreover, opting out might be the only rational choice, when what the political class is offering is a menu of compulsions, as Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux explains.

From angry old socialist Bernie Sanders on the left to earnest young conservative Oren Cass on the right, America today swarms with people lusting for state power to be amassed and deployed to bring about the paradise that each imagines can be realized if enough ‘right’ people are given enough power to command. Of course, the all-important details of each of these coercion-constructed paradises differ from the details of each of the many other fancied paradises – thus promising destructive conflict down the road.

But what is shared by each of the architects of these coercion-constructed paradises is the conceit that he or she, well-meaning genius that he or she is, has uniquely glimpsed a bright future, knows best how to scheme to bring this future about, and can be trusted – cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die – to use the required coercion selflessly, wisely, and in ways that will – contrary to all historical experience – have no unintended ill-consequence.

Hard pass.  Reason's J. D. Tuccille is even unhappier.

Do presidential debates have you considering likely places to stash your cash? Do political polling results have you contemplating waiting it all out in a mountain retreat? Rest assured that you're not overreacting; you're sensibly responding to a political culture that has turned very welcoming to authoritarian candidates and intrusive policies.

There's a good chance that freedom in the days to come will be most available to those willing to hide from the state, break its laws, and sabotage its efforts.

Perhaps so, although the political class might be offering what it believes the electorate wants, or perhaps what it has persuaded the political class to believe what it wants. Before the political class behaves differently, sufficiently many voters and potential voters will have to opt out in such a way that seekers of high office stop thinking that they must offer More Change and More Action in order to be thought of as Effective Politicians.

For those of us looking not for goodies or political thuggery, but for more breathing room instead, there's little encouragement to be found in the debates and the polls. Instead, we'll have to look for loopholes in laws, exceptions to intrusive policies, and ways to confound tax men and inspectors. Our real votes will be for preferred encryption software, places to hide our money and information, and caches for forbidden goods. If we want to retain or expand our freedom, we'll need to stay under the radar as we ignore the powers-that-be, or else make ourselves more trouble to push around than we're worth.

While Trump's Democratic opponents have spent the years since the last presidential election valorizing themselves as "the resistance," all they have to offer is a competing brand of authoritarianism. The real resistance is made up of those who refuse to be governed by any of the wannabe rulers.

You'd think that the continued failures of the political class to deliver would induce a swelling of the ranks of those resistors. Unfortunately, under the rules of a constitutional republic, somebody has to emerge to induce enough of those people to vote for a person, a platform, a party.  Meanwhile, sufficiently many people are voting as if other people are treating the presidential election as a binary choice, and the equilibrium strategy might well be to choose the lesser of the two major evils.

Dissent with your vote.  Be part of the coalition of the unwilling.