{"id":16,"date":"2004-04-26T12:44:55","date_gmt":"2004-04-26T17:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=16"},"modified":"2004-04-26T12:44:55","modified_gmt":"2004-04-26T17:44:55","slug":"to-vote-or-not-to-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200404\/to-vote-or-not-to-vote\/","title":{"rendered":"To vote or not to vote?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yazad has a persuasive list<\/a> of reasons not to vote. I agree with a lot of them. Voting as a right is meaningless unless you have the right not to vote. The claim that those who don’t vote have no right to crib later implies that those who did vote for the party in power are also responsible for all the foolish things they do while in power. Claiming that unless you vote you don’t have any right to enjoy the fruits of living in democratic society makes sense only if you also agree that those who didn’t vote (or indeed those who didn’t vote for the party in power) can withhold their taxes, because their party is not in power and they don’t have a right to enjoy what benefits comes from living in society.
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\nBut I disagree with Yazad about the value<\/i> of voting. For example he says that the value of one person’s vote is very small. The same thing can be said about one person’s purchasing power, but I don’t think Yazad will think that product boycotts by customers are useless and that companies are all-powerful.<\/p>\n

He also finds it repugnant to vote for the least bad person or party. I wonder why. We capitalists don’t expect companies to be models of rectitude and superefficient. We accept that they are imperfect, but they will respond to incentives. They will repeat behaviour that is encouraged and refrain from the behaviour that loses them money. I expect politicians to be the same. If we do choose the least potent poison, we can hope that they will dilute it further the next time.<\/p>\n

The real difference<\/i> between political markets and private markets is in the granularity of choice<\/b> that I have. In this election for example, I want to
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    \nExpress my contempt for what the government did in Gujarat
    \nEncourage the government to speed up economic reforms and tell Vajpayee to retain Arun Shourie.
    \nTell the government to chuck Joshi from his post
    \nExpress impatience at the slow progress of the Mumbai Urban Transport Project II
    \nTell the Congress to come up with a real leader, not an incompetent idiot desperately trying to emulate her mother-in-law.
    \n<\/OL>
    \nI have to do all this using one vote<\/i>! Those who think that the government “represents me” had better explain why is it that I have so little control over the process as compared to a private market. But Yazad is not among them by the way. The point I am trying to make is that it is wrong to reduce the little choice we have even further by making voting a “moral duty” or going off in a huff and not voting because the process gives you too little choice. Vote or don’t vote, but do it strategically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Yazad has a persuasive list of reasons not to vote. I agree with a lot of them. Voting as a right is meaningless unless you have the right not to vote. The claim that those who don’t vote have no right to crib later implies that those who did vote for the party in power […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}