President Barack Obama has created a political firestorm by floating the idea of mandatory or compulsory voting. "If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country," Obama said, calling it "potentially transformative." Not only that, Obama said, but universal voting would "counteract money more than anything." Stefan Molyneux has some thoughts on the subject, mandatory voting? Thanks Obama!
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| So recently, President Obama said, if everyone voted, then it would completely change the political... | |
| Sorry, map in this country. | |
| He's a little dull. | |
| He called it potentially transformative. | |
| He said universal compulsory voting would counteract money more than anything. | |
| Now, this supposed... | |
| The constitutional scholar seems to be a little bit shy on what the right of free speech is. | |
| The right of free speech doesn't mean that you have to go to a rally. | |
| The whole point is you can have a rally, you can choose not to attend it. | |
| So the option out of participating in the democratic process is foundational to freedom of speech. | |
| He cited Australia where there is compulsory Voting, but in Australia, there's no constitutional guarantee of the right of free speech. | |
| Forced association is a violation of freedom of association, government unions. | |
| And so the First Amendment really would not permit it, which kind of begs the question. | |
| The supposed scholar doesn't really seem to have the first clue about what's in the Constitution. | |
| I guess they're handing degrees out to just about anyone these days. | |
| Now, the reason why Obama is interested in the moral abomination known as compulsory voting is because he wants a more engaged population in the civic... | |
| Man, that's going to be disorienting after a while. | |
| No. | |
| It's because the people who aren't voting would most likely vote Democrat. | |
| According to a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association... | |
| Oh, man. | |
| It's like getting shot with narcolepsy brain errors. | |
| A meeting of the American Political Science Association in 2011, quote, Generally speaking, poor, younger minority and female Americans have been found to possess lower levels of overall political knowledge. | |
| Women tend to be more informed than men about local politics and gender-relevant issues, but women typically score lower than men on political knowledge questions about the role of different branches of government and current political leaders. | |
| Somewhat important to help. | |
| Republicans, in fact, fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in a political survey, typically the case in surveys about political knowledge. | |
| The great economist Walter Williams has said, quote, while people might be motivated by non-economic factors from a strictly economic point of view, it simply doesn't pay individual voters to learn about and take action against the myriad assaults emanating from the political area. | |
| Rational ignorance pays. | |
| Politicians know this and exploit it to the hilt. | |
| Yeah, the midterm shellacking that happened, which was the second straight one that Obama had suffered, he said, because two-thirds of voters didn't vote. | |
| He says, to everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. | |
| To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too. | |
| So, this is a typical government-slash-sociopathic, but I repeat myself, approach, which is, hey, really engaged people would come out to vote. | |
| So, if we force people to come out to vote, then they must be really engaged. | |
| In other words, it's an attempt to tweak... | |
| The symptom not address the problem. | |
| It's sort of like saying, a woman who likes me would get into my car. | |
| Therefore, if I put a woman in my car involuntarily, she must really like me. | |
| Well, this, of course, would be ridiculous. | |
| Poor people need money. | |
| Let's shovel lots of money at poor people, and everything will be fine. | |
| Well, maybe people are poor because of a lot of other factors, and the lack of money is in effect of those other factors. | |
| But, of course... | |
| Governments can't really take that approach. | |
| A little bit too sensible, a little bit too complex and nuanced for your average public school. | |
| Cube, brain, spongebob, squarepants, universe, inhabiting of thought, product of, yes, government schools. | |
| So, let's just have a look at the last election. | |
| Let's look at the 2012 election. | |
| How did that go? | |
| What was your value in participating in that election? | |
| Well, of course, the way it's supposed to work is politicians make commitments. | |
| And then people listen to those commitments, and if they like those commitments, then they vote for that politician. | |
| Yes, slight challenge. | |
| Well, of course, the big challenge is that politicians are not legally bound by their commitment. | |
| So, like applying for health insurance, and they can just write whatever they want, and then your health insurance policy can be completely different from what you signed up for, and the price can be completely different, and you have no legal recourse. | |
| Politicians enforce laws, but you don't want to be in charge of the government in order to be subject to government laws. | |
| That would sort of be pointless. | |
| That would like to be becoming the head of a restaurant so you could be a busboy. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| The whole purpose of power is to elevate yourself above all of the rules that you are inflicting upon the fools who vote for you. | |
| So politicians are in no way, shape, or form ever, ever legally liable for the promises that they make. | |
| They promise to change rules, but their promises are not subject to any of the legal standards of the rules anymore. | |
| They propose to change. | |
| So, right before the 2012 election, wouldn't you know it? | |
| It's amazing how this happens. | |
| The unemployment results that were published were huge! | |
| Oh, magnificent, fantastic, astounding. | |
| It was the biggest one-month jobs increase ever, ever, ever. | |
| Right before the election, and it does turn out to be the case, it seems, that government employees cooked the numbers in order to make the president look better so that he could be re-elected and none of those nasty Scott Walker-type Republicans would come into mess with their infinite pellet-blasting gravy train of near-infinite goodies. | |
| Job security, 40% more pay and benefits, pensions, health care, and so on. | |
| So that was kind of fraudulent. | |
| Of course, even before the election, Obama and his team knew for sure tens of millions of Americans were going to lose their health insurance as a result of Obamacare. | |
| And what did he say? | |
| Nope! | |
| You like your policy, you can keep your policy. | |
| You like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. | |
| You like my lies, you can keep me too. | |
| And this, of course, is complete fraud. | |
| And, um, Obama's own projections showed that 80% of small businesses were doomed to lose their insurance. | |
| What about voter fraud? | |
| What would you know? | |
| It's kind of remarkable. | |
| Statistically improbable, but kind of remarkable. | |
| Do you know that in 59 inner-city voting districts in Philadelphia, it was 30,000 votes for Obama and zero for Romney? | |
| Yes, that would be zero for Romney. | |
| And that's really quite remarkable. | |
| Romney did get 12% of Philadelphia as a whole, but in a lot of those inner city places, zero, not even one. | |
| Not even one person who put the wrong checkmark anywhere. | |
| Absolutely zero. | |
| So what about the IRS? | |
| Well, there is very strong statistical validation to the argument that the IRS stole the election in favor of Barack Obama by targeting conservative groups. | |
| And this caused a depression in voter turnout and activism for the Republicans. | |
| And therefore, the election was won quite handily by the Democrats. | |
| So that's a pretty filthy business all around. | |
| And of course, the Republicans, Ted Cruz at the moment, is talking about abolishing the IRS. | |
| Do we think the IRS is going to take that lying down? | |
| I would think not. | |
| And so, if you talk about abolishing the IRS, or you have some hostility towards the IRS, you know, a flat tax, if they replaced all of the tax that is currently contained in approximately 12 billion pages of Vogon poetry masquerading as a tax code, then you could have a 17 or 18% flat tax. | |
| You could fill out your tax on the back of a postcard and be done with it. | |
| But that would require a substantial diminishment in the number of IRS folks who are currently chasing around Americans with cattle prods to get them to crap their taxes into a silver bowl. | |
| And, of course, it would end up with a significant reduction in accountants and tax lawyers. | |
| And let me just see, a couple of lawyers in government? | |
| I guess I should look that up. | |
| But I think it's yes. | |
| I think that there's quite a few tax lawyers and other kinds of lawyers in government. | |
| So the fact that two-thirds of people... | |
| I mean, there's less than that for the actual election. | |
| In the midterms, two-thirds of people are not showing up. | |
| About a third of people don't vote in presidential elections. | |
| Well... | |
| None of the above is a perfectly valid choice in politics. | |
| You know, it's not like if there are two movies playing and you don't like either of them, then you don't have to choose one or the other. | |
| You can just turn around and go home or play some air hockey, have some fro-yo, and check your messages on your phone, and then head home. | |
| But none of the above is really important. | |
| If none of the above is not valid, then of course we have to outlaw being single. | |
| As a dating choice. | |
| So, this is the reality. | |
| People don't want to engage, I would argue, in a voting process because it's fraudulent, because people are basically voting on economic lines. | |
| Here's a graph about who votes for who. | |
| Well, once you pass about a $75,000 a year income threshold, you end up voting for the Republicans. | |
| And if you're poorer than that, then you vote for the Democrats. | |
| And women who are single vote Democrat. | |
| Oh, goodies, just in case they become a single mom. | |
| Women who are married vote Republican in general because they want to keep their money or their husband's money. | |
| So, it's got nothing to do with any kind of engaged civic philosophical understanding process. | |
| All that's happening is that people are engaged in a civil war over the public purse, and the people who are being pillaged tend to try and exercise defensive voting, which never seems to work. | |
| Social spending actually goes up under the Republican presidencies. | |
| And those who are on the shoveling conveyor belt of government goodies tend to vote for those, whether on the military-industrial complex, government unions, or those on welfare. | |
| So it is basically a completely fraudulent process. | |
| Everybody lies. | |
| Everybody covers up naked base economic self-interest with appeals to hallmark cards, sentimentality, and unity, and the good of the country. | |
| And it's just a complete repulsive process. | |
| Why don't people vote? | |
| Well, for the same reason, they don't want to jump off stage into a mosh pit full of brain-hungry zombies, because French kissing those with very few teeth and breath that come from the very pit of hell itself cannot be considered a rational approach to developing a civilized society. | |
| So not only has the Republic been dead for many generations, but even the pretense of democracy has died. | |
| And if we rip off the veil of pretty language and we see the scabrous corpses underneath, their invitations to dance with them might actually go unanswered. | |
| So thank you very much for watching. |