The Indefensibility of Political Representation

Rulers and Ruled

So, then, let us consider the situation confronting all of us in our daily lives. In every modern state, some group of people — usually a fairly small group of people — purport to have the authority to command the mass of the population to do this or that or to refrain from doing this or that. They do not possess such a right by virtue of some special divine gift, still less by virtue of their manifestly superior intelligence or moral virtue since sad experience shows that our erstwhile leaders, by and large, are no better in general than the rest of us and are often, sadly, much worse. By what right, then, do they claim the authority to command us, to make laws for us that govern many, if not most, of the significant aspects of our lives?

Our rulers have taken on the authority to rule us out of thin air, like the Fed's authority to print money. There is no Constitutional authority for government to bailout banks or to come into our homes to arrest us for smoking marijuana; but they do it anyway.