I awoke on election day at about the same time that Boobus and his fellow robots were beginning their lockstep march to voting facilities in eastern states. I wondered how many were humming the statist mantra "it-doesn't-matter-who-you-vote-for-just-vote" as they strutted to their reward of an "I voted" sticker to wear on their shirts or jackets. Does this foolish slogan continue to have any life within it?

My question was soon answered when I read an online editorial from a newspaper for whom I began delivering papers when I was nine years old. Titled "Vote, then help the nation heal," the editorial recounted how the newspaper had endorsed various candidates and referendum issues. It then added: "more important than voting our way is voting, period." Any intelligent mind should respond to such a statement with the most powerful word in the English language: "why?" The editorial hinted an answer: "So vote. And after you vote, however, you vote, help our nation heal and prosper. . . . We can get better."

 "Heal" from what, and by what means? From what possible ailment might our "nation" be in need of a remedy? Isn't "America" synonymous with Candide's "best of all possible worlds;" have we not created political systems, documents, and formalized rules that guarantee that our personal interests will never get in each other's way; have we not been conditioned to believe that we will be blessed if not with philosopher kings, then at least with impartial, selfless, public-spirited leaders who can fashion a harmonious, peaceful, and secure society? Why would any nation, so blessed, have a need for "healing"?

Is it not evident to thoughtful minds that all political systems depend on conflicts among those who comprise a society? For the same reason that orthodontists need overbites, churches need sinners, and lawyers need disputes, the state must have an endless supply of "fundamental differences" among diverse groups if it is to act to harmonize such differences. Conflicts have thus been concocted among groups based upon racial, religious, gender, nationality, lifestyle, economic, and other categories; divisions that have been eagerly insisted upon by persons who foresaw advantages – whether in the form of money, power, or status – in advancing hostilities with others.

Is it not equally clear that resort to state power becomes attractive to so many for reasons to be found in the very definition of the "state?" Any student of government will acknowledge that such an institution is "an agency that enjoys a legal monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory." The coercive power of the state will become available to those who are able to get control of its machinery, whether through elections, coups, or any other means acquiesced in by those who sanction the system. Once any group(s) gain control of the apparatus of the state, it is able to generate mandates that either force people to do what they do not choose to do or to prevent them from doing what they choose to do. By their nature, such mandates are grounded in social conflicts.