Obama wants us to be forced to vote

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I've heard people in Belgium claim that compulsory voting is one of the reasons for the rise of Vlaams Belang, a bunch of reactionaries shunned by all the other parties. People will just do a "f**k you" vote if you force them to vote.

We don't need any more unqualified uninterested voters, if anything it should be harder to vote. I think a civics test should have to be passed, you should have basic knowledge of our government and constitution and how it works.

The lack of such is how we got Obama in the first place. Too many people voted based on his race.

How long of a prison term can I look forward to? Or will you just be executing principled non-voters?

Yeah, yeah, blacks and race guilty whites only voted for Obama for his race, or for the free government goodies he promised to give them. Funny how you conservatives have to rationalize why you lost the last two presidential elections. Did you ever consider that people voted for Obama because they thought he was the better candidate?

Are you pretending that I am an anarchist? All laws are backed by force. But there is a fundamental difference between laws which protect individual rights and laws which violate them. It's the difference between a policeman who arrests the mugger who's been beating people up and taking their money, and a policeman who comes round in order to beat you up and take your money himself.

If my neighbor physically attacks me, steals my car, defrauds me, tells everybody that I sell meth to schoolkids - my rights have been violated. In a lawless frontier environment I would have the right to employ force directly in defending myself; in a civilized society, I expect government to intervene.

But if my neighbor supports a party I dislike, worships a deity I don't approve of, puts chemicals in his body which I think he shouldn't, has sex with or gets married to consenting adults of whom I don't approve, declines to rent me a room or bake me a cake, or refuses to vote - my rights have NOT been violated. In a lawless frontier environment, if I tried to force him to alter his behavior at gunpoint I would be in the wrong; in a modern society if I vote for a government which forces him to act against his judgement that is just as wrong.



Oddly enough, everything on your list was the product of government - mostly at the state or local level. Those were bad, rights-violating laws, which should have been struck down long before they were. Today it's the federal government which is the most determined violator of individual rights. It isn't a county NSA which is spying on us all, it isn't a state tax agency which is harassing and intimidating groups opposed to the party in power, it isn't City Hall which has dictated that I must now pay more for insurance and get less. And it's not a state governor who wishes he could frog-march everybody to the polls and force them to vote.



"Intolerance" is irrelevant. If "intolerance" were a crime, most progressives would be in prison, because they tend to be extremely intolerant of other points of view.

I belong to the camp which says that individual rights are sacred, inviolable, unalienable. They belong to everybody equally, even people whose ideas or principles I consider irrational or wrong. To say that the government may sometimes "step on" the rights of Group A, in order to confer some alleged benefit on Group B, is to abandon the concept of rights altogether, in favor of pressure-group warfare. Logic and history say that without the principle of individual rights all that's left is the rule of force, with this or that class or cabal temporarily gaining the upper hand and dictating terms to all the others. Maybe you're secretly a member of some rich and powerful family, and you're certain that if "might makes right" the "might" will always be on your side. I can't say the same myself.

Those segregation laws which you attribute to the local governments existed because the business owners - in this case, whites - wanted them to exist. Conservatives are constantly claiming that government had forced segregation on people, while in fact, it was clearly the will of the dominant class.
Incidentally, I am talking about the government using force to protect us from the lawless behavior of others. As for being refused to have a cake baked for you not worthy of government force - well, why was refusing to sit at the back of the bus so important to blacks? Couldn't they just call a cab? Why was eating at the Woolworth's lunch counter so important to them? Couldn't they have just eaten somewhere else? It's a matter of right and wrong; that's why segregation was wrong, and that's why homophobia concerning wedding cakes is wrong today.
And me, a member of a wealthy family?!?! I wish, as I could use the cash.
By the way, despite what conservatives and libertarians claim, elites do not enforce the rights of the downtrodden in order to take rights away from everyone else.

SOME of them wanted the Jim Crow laws. But nobody demands that a law be enacted to force him to do what he was doing anyway. Clearly, some hoteliers, restaurateurs, etc. didn't want to operate according to segregationist principles, otherwise there wouldn't have had to be laws forcing them to do so. We'll never know what would have happened under actual free enterprise, because that never existed in the South. The law went straight from dictating one form of action to dictating the opposite.



Not being a conservative, I really, really, really don't care what you think they are claiming.



Lawless? So all laws are good and should be obeyed at all times? Make up your mind.



It's not worthy of government force because nobody's rights are being violated. There is no such thing as a right to a service which other people are obligated to perform for you. Other people are not your slaves.



I am open to correction, but weren't the buses operated or chartered by the city? Governments represent everybody and should thus be absolutely impartial.



If it were the store management which independently decided to bar them, then they absolutely should have taken their custom elsewhere (and so should have decent people of all hues). But the existence of the segregation laws complicates things.



Nobody is saying that such things are "right." The purpose of government, however, is not to enforce any particular code of morality. Just as freedom of speech pertains even to Nazis and Communists, even though their ideologies are demonstrably evil and harmful, freedom of association and property rights pertain even to people you and I would probably both find obnoxious.



I don't know what that means. Rights, in the sense that Jefferson and I use the term, can neither be "enforced" nor taken away, they belong to everybody in equal measure, and they do not conflict. They can be either respected or violated – and if it's the government that's doing the violating, we're back to pressure-group warfare. Which pretty well describes American politics nowadays.

So, are you arguing that laws enforcing desegregation were comparable to those enforcing segregation?
And by the way, yes, most white southerners of that day supported segregation laws. Proof of this lies with those businesses that continued to treat blacks as second class citizens, even for years after the change in law. And I seriously doubt that private bus companies in the south would have been much different than their municipally controlled counterparts.
And yes, all people of good will should have avoided Woolworth like the plague - but they didn't. Rather, that store's policy was upheld by whites at the time as it was a symbol of white supremacy.
And rights can neither be enforced or taken away? Maybe in some abstract, intellectual argument sort of way. But in real life, rights can and have been both taken away and enforced.

It's a shame that you don't understand natural rights theory – the explicit foundation of our society, and the implicit foundation of what we loosely call Western civilization.

It confuses things that we sometimes speak of "legal rights" in a narrow, concrete fashion. Women didn't used to have the "right to vote," but now they do, and so on. Natural rights, on the other hand, are universal principles defining and delimiting human behavior in a social context. They follow from man's nature as a rational being – whether you think man was created by a deity, or is a product of nature, is irrelevant – and no external force can take them away.

Suppose I publish a newsletter or blog which local officials don't like, and they pass laws intended to shut it down. They are not taking away my right to freedom of speech – every man who attended the Constitutional Convention would happily line up to slap the person who said that – they are violating it. Say I am charged with breaking their law; I appeal to a higher court which eventually overturns the law under the First Amendment. The higher court has not granted or restored my right to freedom of speech – here come the Founders again, and Madison looks especially peeved. Nor would it make sense to say that the court has "enforced" my right to freedom of speech. It has affirmed that right.

The concept of natural individual rights underlies everything good that has been accomplished since the Enlightenment. Society abandons that concept at its peril.

Oh, I understand the concept of natural rights, and appreciate it's place in western culture. My point is, those rights mean nothing without government power representing the people enforcing them. If I live in a totalitarian state, I can talk all I want about my natural rights, but that talk isn't going to get me any closer to those rights. If I was a black man living in the civil rights era south, I could agitate long enough for the government to take up my struggle, and force change. Circumstance of where individuals live determines whether one's rights are respected. And the fact is, actually enjoying those rights means nothing without a means of making them happen, and that's when the weight of the government comes in.
And if I come across as rambling more so than usual, it's because I've literally been up all night with my daughter who has been suffering through a nasty stomach bug, and so am in dire need of sleep.

Oh, you mean something like "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…" I think I quoted that already. Unfortunately, that's not the only sort of action governments are capable of taking. Far, far more often, they act to violate rights rather than protect them.

Sorry to hear about your kid. Been there, done that, will no doubt do that again.

In a word: yes.
As for your accompanying point - while we can never let our guard down regarding government power, we shouldn't be so eager to shy away from the benefits that we get from a government that is looking out for the welfare of the people and the individual.
Thank you for your kind words regarding my little girl. As it so happens, I am also suffering through this wretched bug.