I learned something today that genuinely surprised me.
I have always assumed that far fewer Americans actually vote than the numbers show.
In the 2024 presidential election, roughly 64% of Americans who were actually eligible to vote cast a ballot. In 2020 it was 66.4%. In 2016 it was about 60.1%.
Go all the way back to 1952 and the number was 62.3%.
So throughout much of modern American history, somewhere around a third—and often closer to 40%—of the people who are legally allowed to vote simply do not.
Midterms are considerably worse. Turnout was roughly 46% in 2022, 50% in 2018, and only about 37% in 2014.
These are not percentages of the total population. They are estimates of the voting-eligible population—people who could legally participate.
At first, I found those numbers somewhat disheartening.
Then I started thinking about what they actually mean.
We are constantly told that government derives its legitimacy from “the consent of the governed.”
Those aren’t my words.
They are Thomas Jefferson’s.
Governments, Jefferson wrote, derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Fine.
Then show me the consent.
Who Consented?
Start with the easiest group: the people who voted for the winner.
They participated in the election. They chose the person who won. There is at least an argument that they consented to that particular government.
I don’t completely accept even that argument, and Lysander Spooner explained why better than I ever could.
Spooner wrote that even “their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent.”
His point was simple.
If someone has already been placed under a government he cannot realistically refuse, voting may simply be an act of self-defense—an attempt to make the government imposed upon him less harmful.
You wouldn’t say a man chose the war merely because, once dragged onto the battlefield, he tried not to get shot.
But I’ll grant the statist more than Spooner did.
For the sake of argument, let’s say everyone who votes voluntarily agrees to the rules of the election.
You knew someone was going to win.
You participated.
Your guy lost.
Too bad.
I understand that argument.
I agree with Spooner that it is wrong, but at least I understand it.
That still leaves everybody who didn’t vote.
In a presidential election that is commonly 35–40% of the eligible population.
What exactly did they consent to?
Silence Is Not a Signature
The first answer I hear is that abstention is ambiguous.
Correct.
Some people don’t vote because they hate the system.
Some don’t believe their vote matters.
Some believe both candidates are terrible.
Some believe whoever wins won’t meaningfully change anything.
Some are completely apathetic.
Some are lazy.
Some simply have something better to do that Tuesday.
I grant all of that.
But the ambiguity makes my point, not theirs.
If you cannot determine why someone abstained, you cannot declare his abstention consent.
You don’t get to say:
We don’t know what he meant, therefore he agreed with us.
That isn’t consent.
In almost every other area of civilized life we understand this immediately.
If I hand you a contract and you refuse to sign it, I don’t get to announce that your refusal constituted acceptance.
If I propose marriage and you walk away without answering, we’re not married.
If I offer to sell you my truck for $50,000 and you ignore me, you don’t owe me $50,000.
Yet somehow government has constructed a theory of consent in which the one party claiming authority gets to decide that the other party’s silence means yes.
That’s not consent.
That’s declaring victory.
But You Use Government Services
Then comes the old standby:
You use the courts.
You use government infrastructure.
You benefit from the system.
Therefore, you have implicitly consented to it.
No.
Imagine I walk onto your property tomorrow and plant a tree in your yard.
You never asked me to.
I then announce that the tree cost one million dollars.
I also have armed men preventing any competing tree-planter from offering you a different tree.
You object.
Too bad.
The tree is already there.
Years later, it produces fruit.
One afternoon you pick an apple and eat it.
Have you now consented to the original arrangement?
Do you owe me the million dollars?
Was I suddenly justified in planting the tree without permission?
Of course not.
Even if you wanted a tree.
Even if it was a beautiful tree.
Even if you enjoyed every apple it ever produced.
Using something imposed upon you does not retroactively create consent to its imposition.
A prisoner who drinks the water and eats the food provided by the prison has not consented to the cage.
Government may provide useful things.
That has absolutely nothing to do with whether I consented to its authority.
And if the response becomes:
“Well, government doesn’t actually depend on consent.”
Wonderful.
Then we’ve settled that question.
Stop saying consent of the governed.
“The People”
The next escape hatch is always collective language.
The people decided.
The people elected him.
The American people have spoken.
Who are “the people”?
There are people.
There is Mike.
There is Sarah.
There is John.
There is the guy who voted Republican.
There is the woman who voted Democrat.
There is the Libertarian.
There is the socialist.
There is the man who deliberately refused to participate.
There is the woman who forgot Election Day existed.
They are individual human beings with individual minds, individual rights, individual decisions and individual consent.
There is no giant human organism called The People that walked into a voting booth and made one collective decision.
Murray Rothbard rejected precisely this sleight of hand. The State, he wrote, is not “the human family getting together to decide mutual problems.”
Calling government us doesn’t make it us.
If 64% vote, 36% didn’t.
Of the 64% who vote, roughly half support the loser or another candidate.
The winning president may therefore be the affirmative choice of something around one-third of the eligible population.
And then we say:
The people chose.
No.
Some people chose.
Some people chose someone else.
And millions upon millions chose no one at all.
But Everyone Had the Opportunity to Vote
This may actually be my favorite argument.
Everyone was allowed to participate.
Therefore the result is legitimate.
Think about what that means.
A person is offered the opportunity to endorse one of several people who will exercise power over him.
He refuses.
And somehow his refusal becomes evidence that whoever everyone else selects may legitimately rule him.
If anything, the fact that participation was available makes the nonparticipation more meaningful—not necessarily as a rejection of government, because we cannot know why every individual abstained, but certainly as an absence of affirmative consent.
A person being allowed to say yes does not make his failure to say yes into a yes.
The burden isn’t on me to prove that every abstaining voter screamed NO.
The burden is on the person claiming consent to demonstrate the yes.
Then Consent Suddenly Stops Mattering
Eventually the argument usually changes.
The defender of the state stops trying to prove consent and begins talking about legitimacy.
The system is legitimate because it is fair.
Because everyone has rights.
Because there is equal treatment.
Because there are courts.
Because we have constitutional protections.
Because democracy is better than dictatorship.
Because good government is necessary.
But notice what happened.
We began with:
Government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.
Now we have:
Government derives its just powers from being good government.
Those are completely different claims.
And once consent disappears, the problem becomes obvious.
Who decides what good means?
Every tyrannical government in history believed—or at least claimed—that what it was doing was justified.
The slave master could believe himself benevolent.
That doesn’t make slavery legitimate.
Saying good treatment creates legitimacy doesn’t solve the problem of coercion. It merely says the problem with the master was that he was insufficiently kind.
If consent is unnecessary, what exactly establishes the line between legitimate government and illegitimate domination?
Equal treatment?
What if I don’t agree with your definition of equality?
The public good?
Whose definition of good?
Natural rights?
Good. Then we are right back to the individual possessing rights before government exists—and government having to explain where it acquired a right to violate them without his consent.
Majority rule?
Then we’re right back to voting.
Then we have to explain how a document signed hundreds of years before either of us was born constitutes my consent today.
Necessity?
Then we have abandoned consent altogether and are simply arguing that coercion is justified because someone believes it necessary.
Pull on the thread long enough and eventually the fabric breaks.
The Tree Is Still in Your Yard
This is why the argument inevitably becomes circular.
The state is legitimate because it governs according to legitimate rules.
Who determines that those rules are legitimate?
The legitimate institutions.
Why are those institutions legitimate?
Because they were established through legitimate political processes.
Why are those political processes legitimate?
Because the governed consent.
Where did they consent?
Well, they voted.
Except millions didn’t.
And millions more voted against the government that resulted.
Well, they had the opportunity to vote.
Opportunity isn’t consent.
Well, they live here.
Leaving is neither practically easy nor literally possible for most people in the meaningful sense required for consent.
Well, they use government services.
The tree is still in your yard.
Well, government doesn’t actually require consent.
Then say that.
Say plainly:
You did not consent, but we believe we possess the moral right to rule you anyway.
That is at least an honest position.
Liberty Before Allegiance
Ron Paul once said that the true patriot “rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state.”
He also warned:
“Liberty once again must become more important to us than the desire for security and material comfort.”
That distinction matters.
There is nothing wrong with loving the place you were born.
There is nothing wrong with loving your neighbors, your culture, your land, your history or your country.
But something has gone terribly wrong when our allegiance to government becomes indistinguishable from our allegiance to those things.
Especially if our allegiance to any nation outweighs our allegiance to liberty.
Jefferson did not say governments derive their just powers because governments are useful.
He didn’t say because they build good roads.
He didn’t say because 51% of participating voters approve.
He didn’t say because leaving is technically possible.
He didn’t say because some judge somewhere decided the process was fair.
He said consent.
That word means something.
You cannot simply redefine it when applying its ordinary meaning produces an inconvenient result.
You cannot call silence consent.
You cannot call rejection consent.
You cannot call coercion consent.
You cannot impose the terms, eliminate meaningful alternatives, declare yourself the final authority over disputes concerning those terms and then point to the arrangement as proof that everyone agreed.
Maybe someone can construct a philosophical defense of government without consent.
Fine.
Make it.
Maybe you believe government is necessary.
Maybe you believe democracy produces better outcomes.
Maybe you believe political authority is justified by natural law, justice, equality, social necessity or the greater good.
We can have those arguments.
But those are different arguments.
The question here is much simpler.
Do governments actually govern with the consent of the governed?
If consent requires an affirmative act from the person supposedly giving it, the answer is obvious.
Millions explicitly vote against the winner.
Tens of millions refuse to vote at all.
Those who do vote participate in a system imposed upon them before they ever touched a ballot.
And none of us were asked whether we wished to enter the arrangement in the first place.
Spooner saw the problem more than 150 years ago.
Jefferson gave us the standard almost a century before that.
Government receives just powers from consent.
Not from tradition.
Not from convenience.
Not from force.
Not from winning.
Consent.
If that standard still means anything, somebody eventually has to answer the simplest question of all:
When, exactly, did I say yes?
The Designs Behind the Argument
This argument helped inspire the Good Ideas Don’t Require Force collection. Consent is the entire difference between persuasion and power. A good idea has to earn your yes. A government assumes it, and then bills you for the tree it planted in your yard.
About the Author
Mike Shaner is the founder of Black Market Cattle Company and River Cade Farms. He writes about faith, liberty, food freedom, family, self-reliance, rural life, and building outside centralized systems.
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