Election Time, HOA Edition

I found a message in my inbox from a member of my local homeowners association board who is running for re-election:

Hello Neighbors,

Early voting starts today and your vote counts! I am asking for your support in putting me back on the Block House MUD Board. I am also asking that each of you tell 10 of your neighbors to vote for me. This is a crucial election and every vote counts.

After a 2 year break from my last term on the MUD Board, I am ready to get back to work representing YOU and your best interest. During my first 4 years on the Board, I fought to keep the taxes low while maintaining the services that were offered to our residents the previous year. My record will show that the tax rate did not increase one time while I was on Board. I plan to continue this record because I know that, in this economy, every dollar counts.

With 4 people running for 2 seats, I need and want your support. I am pleased to have this opportunity and I look forward to the challenges that it presents.

While I hold no ill will against anyone on the homeowners association board, but this is a good time to discuss an idea that has been circulating in my head for some time. Could engaging in the act of voting, whereby the result is a situation where those who have not voted to support those who were elected, are forced or coerced to comply with the will of those in elected positions? I believe there is a moral deficiency here. One that is not unfounded. The opposition to this system of representative democracy goes back to the Romans, but more recently was supported by the likes of Frédéric Bastiat and Lysander Spooner.

In The Law, Bastiat offers this which he calls legal plunder, by which voters either use their vote to plunder others, or to defend themselves preemptively against plunder:

But on the other hand, imagine that this fatal principle has been introduced: Under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it to another; the law takes the wealth of all and gives it to a few — whether farmers, manufacturers, ship owners, artists, or comedians. Under these circumstances, then certainly every class will aspire to grasp the law, and logically so.

The excluded classes will furiously demand their right to vote — and will overthrow society rather than not to obtain it. Even beggars and vagabonds will then prove to you that they also have an incontestable title to vote. They will say to you:

"We cannot buy wine, tobacco, or salt without paying the tax. And a part of the tax that we pay is given by law — in privileges and subsidies — to men who are richer than we are. Others use the law to raise the prices of bread, meat, iron, or cloth. Thus, since everyone else uses the law for his own profit, we also would like to use the law for our own profit. We demand from the law the right to relief, which is the poor man's plunder. To obtain this right, we also should be voters and legislators in order that we may organize Beggary on a grand scale for our own class, as you have organized Protection on a grand scale for your class. Now don't tell us beggars that you will act for us, and then toss us, as Mr. Mimerel proposes, 600,000 francs to keep us quiet, like throwing us a bone to gnaw. We have other claims. And anyway, we wish to bargain for ourselves as other classes have bargained for themselves!"

Spooner goes a bit further in No Treason to present the idea that we are not bound by contracts that we have no entered into ourselves voluntarily:

If, then, those who established the Constitution, had no power to bind, and did not attempt to bind, their posterity, the question arises, whether their posterity have bound themselves. If they have done so, they can have done so in only one or both of these two ways, viz., by voting, and paying taxes.

In the very nature of things, the act of voting could bind nobody but the actual voters. But owing to the property qualifications required, it is probable that, during the first twenty or thirty years under the Constitution, not more than one-tenth, fifteenth, or perhaps twentieth of the whole population (black and white, men, women, and minors) were permitted to vote. Consequently, so far as voting was concerned, not more than one-tenth, fifteenth, or twentieth of those then existing, could have incurred any obligation to support the Constitution.

No one, by voting, can be said to pledge himself for any longer period than that for which he votes. If, for example, I vote for an officer who is to hold his office for only a year, I cannot be said to have thereby pledged myself to support the government beyond that term. Therefore, on the ground of actual voting, it probably cannot be said that more than one-ninth or one-eighth, of the whole population are usually under any pledge to support the Constitution. [In recent years, since 1940, the number of voters in elections has usually fluctuated between one-third and two-fifths of the populace.]

It cannot be said that, by voting, a man pledges himself to support the Constitution, unless the act of voting be a perfectly voluntary one on his part. Yet the act of voting cannot properly be called a voluntary one on the part of any very large number of those who do vote. It is rather a measure of necessity imposed upon them by others, than one of their own choice.

While this has little bearing on the institution of the homeowners association, Spooner's ideas on the unintended (intended) consequences of a representative government hold more weight in any argument defending the movement toward a voluntary society. It is time to Stop Voting, and I have cast my last vote; no confidence. What if they had an election and nobody came?