10A060 Boycott It! by Jim Davies, 11/1/2010 For those who recently visited the far side of the moon, tomorrow there's an election. Please, be sure to stay away. Like this b-sticker from Café Press explains, to vote is to encourage them; "them" being the whole crock full of those who want to rule lives other than their own - voters and candidates alike. That's the only no-no of a zero government society - because of the undeniable premise that every human being is his or her own self-owner, with the unconditional right to operate his own life exclusively. To cast a vote is therefore to deny that undeniable truth, to abandon reality and reason, to commit gross immorality by deliberately endorsing an utterly evil system. If, on November 2nd, you feel some compulsion to go near a polling station, let it be for one of only two reasons: to display a banner similar to the one appearing here, or to engage the supervisor in removing your name from his list of registered voters, and to do so as loudly as common courtesy permits. It has been mildly interesting to observe the charade so far, I must admit. Here in Northern New England the candidate-ads have been predominantly negative; that is, millions of paper dollars have been handed over to broadcasters for time to tell viewers that one's opponent is a bad guy. Maybe that's because they are aware of the increasing disdain with which the public views political promises. Good news! And the better news yet is that because of the rules that candidates make for themselves, negative ads have to be true; they can evidently tell all manner of lies, but not about each other. They are saying, without being explicit, that anarchists are correct. If additional reasons are needed please check my Five Reasons Not to Vote - and another has to do with those broadcasters. Ad revenue is their life-blood, so wall-to-wall candidate ads such as have saturated the channels for many weeks past must have been a most welcome transfusion. Notice how this works. Joe Pol solicits thousands of dollars from a business whose future is vulnerable to what Joe will do in the legislature. Joe can make the firm prosper with government contracts and/or the modification of pesky laws in its path, or he can do the opposite. This is why firms often back both, opposing candidates, so that if the unexpected one should win, they can point to their contribution and "gain access." That's the process that yields the megabucks being spent; we pay for it in the form of higher prices for the products the companies sell, and in the hailstorm of resulting legislation. The broadcasters come out ahead, and are understandably grateful for the bonanza every two years, and so the whole color and bias of their programming tends to favor the political process. That helps brainwash folk even further into supposing that blogs like this one are somehow strange. Your feedback, please!