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FEET, WALLET, OR BALLOT... HOW DO YOU VOTE?

Wrong!



FEET

Humans vote with their feet. It is the single most important, and most egalitarian of realities confronting us today or in any age.

But the single biggest exercise in voting with one's feet is also the most literal; moving from one home to a new one, for whatever reason - job, safety, the view, anything. If your move takes you out of one nation state / tax farm and into another one then congratulations! You're a migrant!

In general the vote with one's feet is at work when you choose what interests to pursue, since by making any serious choice in life you are removing the chance to do something else, time being limited by your own mortality. We vote with our feet not to listen to the ravings of conspiracy theorists, except for a laugh.



WALLET

We vote with every purchasing decision we make, including a decision not to purchase anything just now. This vote, voting with our wallets, tells those we trade with what we will and will not abide, and if they do not adapt to our desires they'll go out of business.

People make decisions in a free society about what to do. Within this society, they also make decisions in a free market about what exchanges to take part in; that is, what to buy and what not to. This is a crucial and meaningful



BALLOT

And so the good old vote - whether to appoint a person to political office, or have your say in a referendum. This is how to say whose promises for the next few years you most agree with or least disagree with. Course it applies no particular mandate upon the elected official except whatever's enshrined in the law at any given time, and since these elected exemplars are the lawmakers...

Anyway, having the political vote is demonstrably better than not. Democracies in the modern world have proven far more just than autocracies. Still, those previous forms of voting, with one's feet / attention, or with one's wallet, have far more immediate and significant positive results than the political kind.



WHY VOLUNTARISM INSTEAD OF COERCION?

Autocracy is coercive, but so is democracy. You must abide by whatever new laws come along, and pay whatever you are asked to pay for their maintenance, on pain of fines, imprisonment or death. The biggest difference is that in a democracy you choose who taxes and (usually) ignores you.

On the other hand, voluntary association, free exchange and the plurality of providers of every imaginable service offered by the free market makes a mockery of the shadowplay of government rules, regulations and services, however their masters get into their positions of power.

Remember, power, as much as impotence, is the enemy of liberty and so of justice. Dabble in the sandbox of liberty a while, and you'll soon become addicted.



On the next Ecomony Blogtime; Austrians go wild in Anarchy!

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