A Non-Voting Anarchist. . .Voting?

[SinCityVoluntaryist]

 Thought Dpalme and the rest of you would find this interesting:
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?369528-A-tale-of-intrigue-%28spying-on-the-opposition%29-MUST-READ

[Seth King]

The party isn't with the GOP. The party is opting out of the whole system. Let the old people do their thing. I prefer to take my ball and go home.

[dpalme]

I don't even get bothered by that kind of thing anymore. I've given up any hope I used to have. It sounds sad, I know, but there was never any hope really. Benton, Wead. . .the people Paul surrounded himself with made his campaign D.O.A.

Starve the beast, don't try to tame it. At best you'll stun it, but it will come back bigger and meaner.

[Mark Stoval]

... Starve the beast, don't try to tame it. At best you'll stun it, but it will come back bigger and meaner.

We tried to "starve the beast" and gobbled us up! Don't try to starve the beast: kill it.

[anotherfreeman]

A voting anarchist is an oxymoron!. It's like saying I'm a walking parapalegic. The state is evil in ALL it's functions because it requires evil to run at any level. It needs force whether Ron is pres or Obama is pres. It requires theft just maintain, even at it's most compact size. There is no acceptable level of state.... Meaning limited government is an oxymoron as well. Ron Paul is a minarchist at best and, him within the function of our current government, pushes people away from thinking it's too late to fix and not worth fixing at all due to immorality.   

[Aegidius]

There is no acceptable level of state

You're right, but there's a difference of degrees.  Elections can be likened to a master allowing his slaves to choose their driver; though slavery is a wholly unacceptable state, you can hardly blame the slaves if they vote to select a less cruel overlord.  You should never stop fighting the state, and never give it your moral sanction, but you can try to partially de-claw it.

The retort to this, is, of course, that voting is giving the system your approval.  I can certainly understand this point of view, but I'm just so desperate for a reprieve. . .

Besides, if Paul were to be elected and the state were less involved in people's lives, perhaps they'd start to see that it isn't such a great thing.  Perhaps they'd be more and more receptive to the notion of abolishing it.

Am I dreaming?  Probably.

Edit:

Rothbard had some interesting thoughts that I think apply here.

If, then, the libertarian must advocate the immediate attainment of liberty and abolition of statism, and if gradualism in theory is contradictory to this overriding end, what further strategic stance may a libertarian take in today's world? Must he necessarily confine himself to advocating immediate abolition? Are "transitional demands," steps toward liberty in practice, necessarily illegitimate? No, for this would fall into the other self-defeating strategic trap of "left-wing sectarianism." For while libertarians have too often been opportunists who lose sight of or undercut their ultimate goal, some have erred in the opposite direction: fearing and condemning any advances toward the idea as necessarily selling out the goal itself. The tragedy is that these sectarians, in condemning all advances that fall short of the goal, serve to render vain and futile the cherished goal itself. For much as all of us would be overjoyed to arrive at total liberty at a single bound, the realistic prospects for such a mighty leap are limited. If social change is not always tiny and gradual, neither does it usually occur in a single leap. In rejecting any transitional approaches to the goal, then, these sectarian libertarians make it impossible for the goal itself ever to be reached. Thus, the sectarians can eventually be as fully "liquidationist" of the pure goal as the opportunists themselves.

I didn't want to make my post too huge, so I just took a little snippet.  The full text can be found at http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp, the pertinent discussion being in the epilogue.

[MAM]

If Ron Paul does what he says he's gonna do then it can only be good. I was a Minarchist in support of Paul and then I became an anarchist. Paul's message gets people looking in the right direction! Now that doesn't change the fact that govt is evil and it doesn't make the use of coercion okay. And I don't think anyone here is saying that is the case. But it seems to me that this is an acceptable compromise, we must never lose sight of the goal, but I don't see taking baby steps to get there as a bad thing.

Progress is  measured in stages plural, not one stage. I think it is pretty foolish to think that we can accomplish anything on a large scale without some sort of massive media propaganda machine, Ron Paul getting elected will use that machine to show people that we don't need warfare/welfare to live and that liberty WORKS, from there it seems to me to be fairly easy to get people on the anarchist wagon. In any case if you choose to vote for him at least you supported someone who would get us moving in the right direction. And if you don't vote for him the outcome probably isn't going to be different than if you did.

As a side note I think that post above mine does a fairly good job of dismantling the so called purist train of thought. At the end of the day we all want the same thing, we just have different ways of trying to reach that goal.

[anotherfreeman]

I've read rothbard's explanation of why voting is acceptable AND I fully disagree.

[MAM]

Congratulations, you don't have to vote, I disagree with the notion that we must be in love with the ideal and anything short of the ideal in unacceptable. Like I said I think it's foolish to think that we are ever going to reach the goal in one giant bound.

If did do that then it seems to me that the transition would cement in the minds of people that Government IS necessary because they will see the transition as what anarchy IS and not simply a transition and we will be right back to trying to live our lives with them smashing our head in. Maybe I'm crazy but I think the less painful the transition is the more likely people will be to let us do what we want. And making the transition less painful requires compromise. There is a difference between compromising to reach the goal and seeing compromise as the goal. We must never lose sight of the goal and so long as we don't then compromise will get us there! But I'm probably crazy!