It’s election day, which means that I’m seeing a healthy trickle of people—invariably my fellow libertarians—declaring their intention not to vote. The exact arguments vary, but this post by Eli Dourado is representative of the genre.
Before getting into the specifics of why I disagree with Eli’s argument, I think it’s helpful to look at the big picture. Over the course of human history, there have been many, many societies with awful systems of government. Virtually every government prior to World War I was cruel and barbaric by modern standards. Even in the last century, most parts of the world have been ruled by kleptocratic tyrants. By world and historical standards, then, we residents of the United States have been blessed with a phenomenally humane and competent system of governance.
This isn’t to say that public policy in the United States is perfect. Far from it. America would be an even better place if we liberalized our drug laws, had a less imperialist foreign policy, brought more choice to our education system, reduced farm subsidies, liberalized our housing markets, lowered taxes, and so forth. But the remarkable thing about our system of government isn’t how much injustice it produces, but how little injustice it causes relative to the political system of almost any other society in the history of the world.
Getting a system like ours to work tolerably well is a huge collective action problem. Most of the tasks involved in running the government are unglamorous and non-lucrative. Many positions of authority in government also present opportunities for dishonest people to “cash in,” for example by accepting bribes and kickbacks. In a nation of strictly self-interested individuals, the honest among us would never volunteer to do these jobs, the dishonest would get all of them, and living in the United States would be like living in a Third World dictatorship.
Fortunately, we’re not a nation of strictly self-interested individuals. We’ve figured out how to solve this collective action by developing strong social norms that encourage civic participation and honesty in government. Thousands of Americans feel a duty to volunteer for those unglamorous, non-lucrative jobs. Most of them do their jobs honestly.
The same point applies to voting. In the aggregate, a well-informed, attentive electorate improves the quality of governance. But a single vote almost never decides the outcome of an election. So if everyone behaved in a narrowly self-interested fashion, we’d wind up with a much worse system of government (since the only people voting would be those who’d been bribed or coerced into doing so) and everyone would suffer.
Luckily, that doesn’t happen because we’ve figured out how to overcome the collective action problem by establishing a strong pro-voting social norm. We remind each other to vote, wear “I voted” stickers to set a good example, and say things like “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain” to shame those who don’t participate. And this works pretty well—a majority of Americans vote even though it would be in their personal self-interest to skip it.
Now here is Eli:
The cause of all these harms is not just that voters make bad choices. That is a narrow perspective. It is that so many domains are subject to collective choice in the first place. The correct response to the question, “Shall we pass a law that destroys the lives of people who use drugs, especially if they are black?” is not merely “No,” but “Take your democracy and shove it.” Merely responding “No” is collectively harmful, because it fails to challenge the implicit proposition that the domain is rightly subject to collective choice.
This ignores what the actual universe of possibilities is. Of course it would be nice if there was a political system that magically removed certain issues from the realm of collective decision-making. But no such system exists, or is likely to ever exist. After thousands of years of political experimentation, it seems pretty clear that some institution is always going to have a monopoly of force, and some human being or group of human beings is going to have the ultimate authority over how that force is used. We have strong evidence that the best (or least-bad) option is to disperse that authority as widely as possible through an election open to the general public.
Letting your personal revulsion at the bad things your government does deter you from voting is an error exactly analogous to the pacifist who refuses to take up arms when faced with a hostile invading army. Obviously, it would be nice if you could persuade the world’s aggressors to voluntarily renounce violence. But in the real world, the only thing that stops a violent aggressor is a willingness to use deadly force for defensive purposes.
The pacifist stance is only viable when one lives in a society with others who are willing to take up arms in self-defense. Likewise, “principled” non-voters have the luxury of not participating in the political process because millions of others are doing the hard work of making democracy work, thereby staving off the much larger injustices that tend to occur in non-democratic political systems. We’re a wealthy and peaceful society, so we can tolerate a large number of such freeloaders. But there’s nothing virtuous about refusing to do your part.