I was having a conversation with my wife recently.
“When you say you want to create a consent-based society,” she said, “what do you mean?”
I replied that I want all human relationships in that society to be consensual, not compelled. We went round and round for an hour.
I didn’t get very far in persuading her.
To most people—my wife included—the very idea of a society based on consent is a strange abstraction, even though it’s in our Declaration of Independence.
For our entire lives, we have grown up under the authority of a monopoly that, at the end of the day, has power over us. This group of people has the power to tax. It requires us to use debased money. It has the power to kill, and it has done so.
So, if we do not comply, the group can and will compel us.
But the government is not a thing. It’s a group of people, no different from you or me, with a monopoly on the initiation of violence.
It uses the threat of violence to maintain its power to tax, transfer, and erect programs and projects we might despise.
Voting is a Veneer
Around this tremendous power—including the armed agents, the guns, and the jails to put you in if you don’t comply—there is a veneer of legitimacy. We do a little dance every couple of years called an election.
But depending on where you live, the odds that your vote could decide who shall be the senator in your state are about 1 in a million, which is only slightly better than the odds of getting struck by lightning that year. For the U.S. president, your odds of casting the deciding vote are about 1 in 60 million.
You might as well cry a teardrop in the ocean and expect the tide to turn.
Still, most people can’t imagine things being decided any other way. Power gets transferred and tossed around rather arbitrarily by “democracy.” Otherwise, a massive managerial state rules over us, and it’s even less accountable to us lowly voters.
That’s right: lowly. Not only is voting a flimsy accountability loop, but a third of voters don’t even know what the branches of government are, much less anything about the national debt. (It just hit $40 trillion.)
Most of us aren’t hyper-partisan. We just go about our lives sandwiched between two vocal partisan mobs shouting for us to vote this way or that.
Surely we can do better! But how?
It comes down to overcoming people’s failure of imagination. And that’s nigh impossible when the partisans go around with dumb talking points and bumper-sticker logic, and half the voters with intelligence below the mean.
What then?
Okay, so let’s get back to the idea of a consent-based society.
I remember my wife telling me a story about how she hated her AT&T phone plan and decided to switch to Verizon. She promised never to use AT&T again.
“What if things could be more like that?” I said.
By that point, she was tired. We’d been arguing for an hour.
So I’ll wrap up here with three points I wish I’d said to her. It might help you in conversations like this with your spouse:
Consent means you can leave. If Verizon treats you badly, you can go to AT&T; if Publix disappoints you, you can shop at ALDI or Whole Foods. The simplest test of consent is whether you can say no—and leave the system—without being punished. Otherwise, would anybody propose a grocery store monopoly for 340 million people, give it compulsory dues, and call that consumer choice?
Competition makes the powerful accountable. Imagine if your phone company could charge whatever it wanted, change the terms whenever it pleased, and send armed men after you if you refused to pay. We would never call it “accountability” if customers got to vote on the CEO every four years.
Governance doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all. Different communities could offer different rules, services, and ways of living together—and people could choose among them, just as they choose schools, churches, neighborhoods, insurance plans, or phone companies. Instead of fighting endlessly over who controls the monopoly, we could experiment with ways of breaking it up.
We already understand consent everywhere else: the right to say no, the right to leave, and the right to associate with another organization.
The radical question—the one Thomas Jefferson asked—is why governance should be different.
I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.
