Before we begin, let me just establish my impeccable anarchist credentials: I don’t vote. I haven’t voted since I was a young, idealistic greenie and believed voting (for the obviously correct party) to be the sacred duty of all self-respecting citizens. I have an anarchist tattoo on my left thigh. Last time it was election day in the country of my birth — and the only jurisdiction where I’m allowed to vote — I didn’t even know about it until a family member mentioned it.
I’ve written for Mises before about how voters implicitly accept the rules of the game and therefore voting robs them of their (moral) right to complain (“If You Vote, You Have No Right to Complain”). I wrote that “If you really supported democracy, you’d be equally thrilled regardless of which side wins.” You participated in the ritual where choices about property and livelihood are made by majority rule (conditional on the how votes are carved in your country); you implicitly accepted the decision-making process by which the winner is thus the leader.
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Ergo: no right to complain.
And I like complaining, and to remain somewhat detached from the partisan clown symphonies that are electoral cycles.
Now, if I could vote in America’s elections this year, I would first look up the polls or history for my state. No point doing violence on one’s morals unless there’s at least a fighting chance for impact.
If I’m not in one of the half-dozen states where the race is closest, the usual statistical-economical calculation sways me: If you like to do good in the world, go do something else: It’s OK not to play, and the real (i.e., non-digital, non-political) world matters more.
Only if you are in some of the states that poll-aggregation models (like those from Nate Silver) say are toss-up level close, would voting be conscionable. As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I took voter registration numbers from this nice little resource (that unfortunately show voter registration numbers from two and four years ago; Ugh, whatever: these are ballpark figures, anyway) and multiplied them by the polling difference that the Silver Bulletin model showed at the time of writing (early October). I then weighted the implied vote count change with the electoral votes of each of these states as a share of their combined electoral votes (yes, yes, poor method… but again, I wasn’t going to replicate a full Nate Silver model here; bear with me). Out came the following:
Economists usually tell you that voting is irrational behavior. If you, indeed, wish to improve the world in some specific way doing literally anything else—help an old lady over the street, volunteer in soup kitchen, clean your bathroom—is more impactful that participating in a paper charade where one’s chances of influencing the outcomes are astronomical. Worse than lottery tickets.
When the race gets tight enough, or the differences between the candidates substantial enough, voting is less of a stupid activity. If you vote in any of these seven states, however, we’re no longer talking astronomical or lottery-ticket level chances (which are on the magnitudes of tens of millions, depending on the draw and the lottery).
I asked ChatGPT for other events of equally unlikely magnitude and I received answers about lifetime risk of being struck by lightning, dying in plane or train accidents, or from general anaesthetics during emergency operation. On either side of these we have: having your house burn down (something like 1-in-3,000) or being dealt a royal flush in the opening of a five-card poker game (1-in-649,739). If you worry about or take precautions about these sorts of events, feel free to vote as well: These are no longer astronomical, ridiculous chances.
If I were eligible to vote in say, North Carolina, I’d march my sorry, reluctant behinds to the voting booths… and then I’d vote Trump.
Three reasons.
First, nothing matters more than Bitcoin. It’s the financial and monetary correction, the most tangible freedom-now vehicle there is; it fixes basically everything. One side of this election has spent years legally going after the Bitcoin industry, with fake hyperboles about environmental destruction and money laundering, and the other has actively approached it. Fair, Mr. Trump panders to whichever crowd he’s in front of and some in-the-know speechwriter just helped him, but Trump is at least saying the correct words; his policy team is reading the correct briefs. Bitcoin lives better under Republican than Democrat rulers. Like Nik Bhatia, influential Bitcoiner and finance professor at the University of Southern California, said in a recent newsletter:
“it would be disingenuous to say there isn’t a bias—Harris is part of an administration that engaged in lawless attacks on the crypto industry, and Trump has indicated potential support for an enormous bitcoin mining boom in the US.”
Second, Dan Klein and Zach Yost convinced me in a long-read for Fusion this summer that classical liberals should favor Republicans. (Pour yourself a coffee and go read it. Right now.) Not because we like them, not because they’re even remotely good, but because they’re less bad. That’s a common argument that has never swayed me before; what made the difference in their piece is situating political power alongside the other powerful pillars of society—media, entertainment, academia, deep state administration. Nowadays, those are squarely left-wing institutions, which, coupled with left-wing governments, becomes too dangerous of an echo chamber for any freedom-loving person. Reversely, a Republican presidency faces much harder criticism, skepticism, and scrutiny from those camps. That’s better.
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Third, the culture war is more important than most people realize: demographic declines, cultural values, taking a stance for reality, etc. Last month, The Economist showed statistically that wokeness has peaked but that we still have a long way back to the levels of ten years ago. The work isn’t done: The pendulum swing back hasn’t gone far enough yet. (Plus, by the trope that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, it’s also intrinsically satisfying to spit a little in a corrupt, incompetent establishment’s face: A Trump presidency annoys the right people.)
There was a point in the recent past where libertarians could reasonably look at the incumbent parties and throw up their hands: Republicans were better on fiscal and regulatory matters, Democrats better on social freedoms and warfare. That’s no longer true: Republicans like social security, and Democrats are actively bombing foreigners and going after wrong-thinkers, Inquisition-style.
But there are notable differences. And for chances in the hundreds of thousands, I would take a gamble.
For all else, I urge you to ignore the noise: Go outside, touch grass, do hard things.