Every four years, Americans are encouraged and even guilted into the voting booths. It’s set up as a sacred ritual for which participation should count as an honor and a privilege.

The mainstream push for our pilgrimage to our designated shrines of democracy on November 8th (or earlier for the especially pious) is based on a faulty assumption. They say we all have one vote — no matter how rich, poor, tall, short, smart, or uninformed, we all get one vote. Elections are the great equalizer in that everybody is reduced to one.

Right?

Politics is of its very nature biased in favor of intervention and planning. Even in its “minarchist” or “night-watchman” version, politics is based at root on the idea that some decisions must be made coercively and imposed on unwilling minorities — or even majorities, as the case may be. This is contrary to the principle we observe in private life every day: the consent of both parties is necessary for a transaction to take place.

The naïve view of democracy has long held that “every vote counts,” and that close elections can be decided by “counting every vote” and by inferring the “will of the people” from an election result where the winner’s vote tally beats the loser’s vote tally by as few as a single vote.

I have said throughout this presidential campaign that it doesn’t matter much which candidate wins. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are authoritarians and neither can be expected to roll back the leviathan state that destroys our civil liberties at home while destroying our economy and security with endless wars overseas. Candidates do not matter all that much, despite what the media would have us believe. Ideas do matter, however. And regardless of which of these candidates is elected, the battle of ideas now becomes critical.

It’s not clear how Mises would feel about every individual facet of the current election, but we can say without hesitation that he would not support either major candidate. It should be obvious that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump oppose virtually every tenet of classical liberalism and sound economics. Unfortunately, justified opposition to Clinton has led many people to overlook the fact that Trump’s major positions also run directly contrary to the economic and political doctrines of classical liberals like Mises.

While it is rarely stated explicitly, the legitimacy of the modern American electoral system is founded on the idea of majority rule. Because of this, at the conclusion of each election, the victors claim the election reflected “the will of the people” and, in many cases, also claim a “mandate” to implement the victor’s policy agenda.

[Excerpt from the Dallas-Ft. Worth Mises Circle, November 5.]