Dear Friends,
They say we live in the “Information Age,” but it seems to me, we live in an Ignorance Age. We have access to heretofore unimagined volumes of information, we have the ability for very little money to put up a page and speak to the world, we can even create an app that improves the lot of Mankind and get rich. Yet in our most important duty we willingly remain ignorant. The suffrage is the only way we can protect our liberty and standard of living. Most everyone agrees about the importance of the vote, but in the US, the people feel so disenfranchised by the system, most of us don’t even bother to vote! The last few elections have been decided by 26% of the electorate! One quarter of the people eligible to cast a vote decided who we would have for President. One quarter of the people decided who would run Congress and who would serve on their local boards. We have access to all the information in the world, economics, politics and philosophy, yet we remain ignorant enough to have given up the power to hire and fire, to our and our children’s detriment.
What good is access if we don’t use it? There are egg producers who can legally advertize their eggs as coming from “free range” chickens. The chickens are supposed to have a better life because they were allowed to wander about the yard. When in fact all that is legally required, is for a door to be opened in the coop for a certain amount of time, if the chickens “feel” they would like to roam around they can. They never do… but that is irrelevant to the legal question of “Free Range.” We are no different than those chickens! We are allowed free range but we choose to stay in the coop.
The same holds true of voting. We have the Right to vote, yet so few of us use that Right it can be subverted by a faction, and we see that it has. That faction is the one that strenuously opposes any protection of that Right from fraud and abuse. They bigotedly accuse anyone who seeks to protect that fundamental Right as a hater or someone who wants to take away voting Rights. In this they show their hypocrisy, every instance of fraud disenfranchises 2 voters. and so are doing what they accuse others of. Since elections are decided by fewer and fewer people and the decisions are made by slimmer and slimmer margins, a tiny amount of fraud can turn an election, and we see that it has in the last few election cycles. Since the faction in charge is the beneficiary of the fraud they won’t do anything about it, so the only way to mitigate the pernicious damage to the moral of voters and disenfranchising voters with fraud, the only avenue open to us is to vote en masse. The greater the percentage of voters the less fraud can vex the outcomes.
What good is it to vote if we remain ignorant of the deeper issues making us easy to manipulate? Moreover, if we can be easily manipulated to vote for whomever the elite want us to, do we really have the suffrage? It is up to us to use that vast storehouse of information, while we can, to ferret out the truth. It is incumbent upon us to read and study economics. We live in a pseudo capitalist society and as such it is necessary for us to understand what makes the clockwork tick. Without that knowledge we cannot discern truth from fiction when the elite preach socialism to us. The history of Mankind is there for anyone to see. Plutarch’s Lives is free online, is the definitive work on human nature in situations of power, and should be read by everyone 18 and over. There is a new version of the Federalist Papers available for sale that is written in modern English or the original is available free online. The Federalist papers should be read by all US citizens.
With a bit more research a person can get up to snuff, on why we are in the predicament we are in for jobs, wages and liberty. Let’s become rational maximizers, by incorporating foundational knowledge, so that we can avoid being manipulated into voting against our best interests, we have to exercise our Right to vote, if only to limit the damage of vote fraud and ballot box stuffing since the elite won’t, and most of all we must stop acting like free range chickens. Now that the door is open we have to go through it and find out what is on the other side. To protect our Rights, save our Jobs and raise our wages. Willful ignorance in the information age is irony writ large.
Sincerely
John Pepin
