From the White-PillBox: Part 39

Another logically inconsistent claim of statism: no, you can't initiate violence against people; but yes, you can give others the right to do it.

This installment of the White Pill series offers another example of the internal inconsistencies of statism. As explained in essay 36, one of statism’s fundamental weaknesses (and thus a major White Pill) is how so many of the arguments used to support it lead to logical inconsistencies.

In this essay we discuss an obvious logical flaw in the notion of democratic politics:

As individuals, we may not violate the consent of others. Yet voting somehow delegates that very “right” to the State.

A deadly question for statism

Statism ignores a very important question…can a person delegate a right that he doesn’t have?

Once would think the answer is an obvious “no”.

After all, since you don’t have the right to steal your neighbor’s money, you cannot assign someone else the right to steal his money.

Or consider murder: you cannot kill, so you can not legitimately hire a hit man to do it for you.

It is clear the only rights you can assign, are those you already possess. I can give you the right to borrow my car…but only because it’s my car in the first place. What I cannot give you is the right to borrow my neighbor’s car.

The general principle is simple: in order to assign someone a right, you have to have that right in the first place. You can transfer rights you have, but no others.

Democracy’s cracked foundation

Armed with this simple truth, it is easy to see democracy’s glaring contradiction. Recall that people do not have the right to:

• Force others to do things

• Forcibly stop them from doing things

• Steal their property

And yet by voting, people pretend they can authorize someone else (a member of the State) to do all of those things. The State violates the consent of others via taxation, regulation, military conscription, war, etc.

The devastating contradiction

Statists jump right past this problem. They simply declare that government has the “right” to do these things.

But the contradiction isn’t so forgiving; it’s waiting there with the fair question, “exactly how does the State acquire these rights?”

The statist cannot answer this intelligibly. Government cannot acquire these rights from people, because, as indicated, they are not rights normal people have in the first place.

And yet there’s really nowhere else from which government could acquire such rights.

More distractions

Statists try to distract us from the contradiction in several ways:

• They claim the State acquires these rights from constitutions and law. But the source of these are people. Logic forces the statist to circle right back to the contradiction.

• They claim a collective of humans is an entity itself, separate from individual humans. This magical status is called “the will of the people”. But a human will is individual by definition. A group has no will of its own.

Conclusion

The sad truth for the statist is that government cannot legitimately acquire these rights at all. When the State acts in any capacity whatsoever, it does so illegitimately.

There are many problems with the idea of democracy. But the best White-Pill take-down is the ever-present contradiction at its foundation…