Stop Paying For It (As If You Could)

Yesterday, I was accused of not understanding the law when I proposed that if I am challenged with providing evidence that elections are not secure and fair, the other side should be expected to provide incontrovertible evidence of their claims that they are.

I was told the accuser needed to bring the receipts.

But what happens with you bring the receipts to a system that is part of the issue and they tell you that you don’t have standing to make a claim or you didn’t follow proper procedure at the proper time and simply dismiss your complaints on procedural grounds?

I remember the 2020 election when the Democrats and the media accused the Trump 1.0 administration and campaign of corrupting the election through every means conceivable—up until they could see that Biden was going to win.

The morning after, the approved narrative that went out that 2020 was, in fact, the most secure election ever held and Biden’s unprecedented (and heretofore unreproduced) vote total of 81 million vote proved it. Their complaints turned to compliments overnight once they saw their guy winning.

What I understand is that what is legal is sometimes not right. We all know of at least one situation where the legality wins out over reason and philosophical correctness. For example, The California Code of Regulations allows, out of other many rationally questionable means of identification/eligibility to register, a health club identification card, and insurance plan identification card; or a public housing identification card.

Since California provides public housing assistance and healthcare to illegal aliens, and some of those aliens are members of gyms, accepting these forms of identification would seem to any rational (cynical) person to be a little on the weak side of prevention of illicit registrations and voting.

So legal, but irrational—unless you plan to capture illegal votes to help your preferred candidate. It is the same with mailing out ballots without verifying to whom they are being sent, ballot harvesting, and allowing early voting while also allowing ballots received up to a week after election day to be counted.

With all the liberalization of voting regulations, one could honestly wonder why all of this is necessary, making my argument one of policy and governing philosophy, not of law. I made the point that any system that counts on honor for credibility fails every time dishonorable people have charge of it.

So, voting is important enough to find legal ways to cheat.

I think most people are focused on the counting of votes as the issue, but that isn’t. The real genius of these various schemes is creating a corrupted population of ballots before they are counted. Any number of counts after that will never be materially different than the first count, which is what the ballot flimflammers use to claim that nothing is wrong.

Voting and secure voting processes are a thing that matters, but they are not the only thing.

Voting might even be the second most important thing.

The most important thing is money—or more pointedly, control of it.

For literally decades, I have voted for candidates who proclaimed they would work for smaller government and would stop uncontrolled spending—a futile effort, largely because it takes a majority to even stop spending around the fringes. So much of our government is legally flying on autopilot (over 80% of spending is mandatory), which is even worse than having a President Autopen.

And even if we could control/cut spending in a meaningful way, the average Joe Citizen has no power to stop the collection of their money in taxes. When all the levies, fees, user charges and taxes upon already taxed earnings, some people are paying an effective 60 plus percent of their earnings to some federal, state or local governmental entity.

And as I noted, you, the average citizen, have no way to stop paying, object to the way your tribute is being used, or delay your contribution until your conditions are met. Try any of that and you will be fined, have a lien put on your assets and eventually you could go to jail.

William Graham Sumner summed this up in an 1888 essay:

“[The forgotten man] works, he votes, generally he prays–but he always pays–yes, above all, he pays.”

No politician is going to come out from behind the legal shield that allows this to go on. Regardless of whether the office holder is your guy or your opponent’s guy, money talks and bullshit walks. It never changes. We are never going to have a majority that is willing to cut their own throat by reducing the amount of public funds they use to grease their own skids.

In 45 years of managing businesses, I know the fastest way to get a wayward manager’s attention is to cut his budget and install yourself in the process as final approval for his expenditures.

We taxpayers are legally unable to exercise our prerogative to insert ourselves into the approval process. You vote for them but they rarely listen (because change is not in their interest). Politicians and the bureaucracy have assured us we have no right or duty to stop their traveling circus. The only thing we get is the bill.

It is legal, but it ain’t right.

Yes, voting is important, but it is not a panacea. It must be coupled with a way to halt the money flow until obvious issues are addressed and corrected. When the consequences are not material, it is insane to expect change—and that is why we have never seen changes.

We already fought one revolution, albeit 250 years ago, about this very thing. It appears we are going to need to do it again.