The Most Effective Way To Vote
There’s a more effective way of voting. One where you personally have it within your power to make change.
Which better serves your well being: voting in the ballot box where you’re one of millions? Or “foot-voting,” where you can move across state lines? Professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown University} explains why governments are more constrained by foot-voting than the polls.
Learn more about Learn Liberty’s partnership with the Rubin Report.
The Ethics and Rationality of Voting (article): An in-depth look into philosophical questions of voting, like “is there a moral duty to vote”?
The Ethics of Voting (book): Georgetown Professor Jason Brennan challenges our fundamental assumptions about voting.
How to Vote Well (video): Georgetown Professor Jason Brennan explains four common biases that have a tendency to affect our votes.
| Randy: | Which could you do more to advance your own personal well being? [Electro-voting 00:00:05] in the ballot box, where you’re one of millions, or foot voting, where you actually have it within your power to uproot yourself and move across? |
| After the Civil War, the south had to pass laws that prohibited labor agents from coming down and recruiting blacks to go north to work in better locations. That’s how mobile we are. Now, not everybody can move, but people really are able to move. That’s something you can do to improve your life. Going to the ballot box every two years, every four years, and checking off a name, that’s not going to do that much to improve your life. People pay a lot more attention to how they can improve their lives. That way, could they actually … If they take action, the action will have consequences. | |
| Rubin: | Right. They take action. They may close a small business. They take all their money out of the local economy. |
| Randy: | And they will actually yield the benefit by going somewhere, where as by if they go to the ballot box and they pull the lever, they may or may not get any benefit from that. They take that first decision much more seriously and that provides a much bigger constraint on what governments can do. |
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