FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE / October 12th, 2000 22:05 PST
Contact: Daniel C. Burton, (510) 632-8760, or dan@spaz.org
OAKLAND, CA - Daniel C. Burton, the Libertarian nominee in the 14th State Assembly race, is now urging people not to vote at all. Though he was once running for office, and even got 5% of the vote in the primary, he now remains on the ballot only because State Assembly candidates cannot legally drop out of the race.
Burton once believed that popular voting could change things for the better. Now he describes himself as a "direct-action libertarian anarchist."
"Libertarian anarchists," he explains, "buy into both libertarianism and anarchism. They are libertarians in that they believe individuals should be left alone in both their personal and financial lives. They are also anarchists in that they completely oppose the State. The `direct-action' component means resisting the acts of the State directly, when and where they happen, rather than fighting them at the ballot box.
"If you want more police brutality, corruption, government waste, higher taxes, more invasions of your privacy, and more restrictions on your civil liberties - then go ahead and vote for someone to rule you. Otherwise stop participating in the system that creates this, and join the resistance against all government."
Burton, like all anarchists, believes that legislation, though it may result from popular suffrage, nevertheless serves to protect the privilege of the few. Like libertarians, he also opposes economic collectivization. "Collective economic decision-making," he explains, "like legislation, supports the privilege of the few."
Like both libertarians and anarchists, Burton rejects the notion that people need to be protected from themselves. He opposes restrictions on activities that only affect oneself or other consenting parties. "I believe pluralism and tolerance should apply not just to culture, but to any form of personal behavior," he comments.
Burton challenges the conventional wisdom of our political culture: "We hear the words `freedom and democracy' together all the time, but democracy is not freedom. Democracy is the power of the majority to vote away the freedom of minorities. The only form of social organization truly compatible with freedom is anarchy.
"Similarly, people think we need government to bring law and order, but law is not order. Some places with a lot of law, like Nazi Germany, had very little order. Other places with a lot less law have a lot more order. Anarchists want to organize society with very little law, but a lot of order.
"People also think that law has to come from government. This is not the case. The most basic part of Anglo-American law, the common law, comes originally from processes entirely outside of government. It developed in the Middle Ages through private mediation designed to resolve disputes and avert violence.
"This type of law is known in general as `customary law' and develops bottom-up based on people's need for peaceful relations with others. It is so universal that virtually every primitive society had this type of law. It is the only kind of law anarchists want."
Burton thinks government police are unnecessary. "Until the 1830's," he explains, "There were no municipal police forces in England or America. It was the responsibility of crime victims themselves to arrest their offender and bring him to trial. People joined societies for the prosecution of felons to help them do this, and they functioned far better than the police forces we have today."
Customary law, Burton says, produces a system of individual rights that in a modern society would mean a nearly pure market economy. Burton, however, is against trying to use government to combat the inequality of the market.
"When government is allowed to redistribute wealth," he explains, "the direction it goes is usually upward from the poor to the rich. Also, this leads to a costly struggle over who is at the receiving end of redistributions that makes us all poorer. Finally, even if people would give less to the poor and needy voluntarily, the gains in efficiency from replacing a government monopoly on aid with free competition would more than make up for it."
Burton says environmental problems are not failures of the market, but the result of underdeveloped property rights. "We have overfishing," he comments, "because no one owns fishing waters and the fish in them like people own ranches with cattle on them. We have air pollution, because people don't own the air around their property like they do their front yards, so anyone can dump stuff into it."
Direct action is necessary to fight government, according to Burton, because "as long as you work within the system, you are stuck in its dynamic.
"You wouldn't join the Mafia to fight crime, so why would you vote to fight government? We might be able to eliminate some laws by voting, but not government's basic authority to pass laws. To do that, we need to present a challenge from outside of the system."
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