Selling Votes

Personally, I would agree to sell my vote to everyone.

As I understand it, if you’re a member of the US Congress, this is perfectly permissable, at least in relation to votes on the floor of the house:

So what’s sauce for the goose should surely be sauce for the gander.

William Hogarth understood.

In many countries you can sell your vote. Usually the US and Europe are highly critical of elections where this occurs on a large scale. Given the overall conditions in countries where vote selling occurs is usually wretched due to government corruption, repression, and inefficiency I am not sure why anybody would want to copy this model.

Selling your vote might be undesirable for the same sorts of reasons that make selling the use of your body for sex undesirable. Other relations besides the transaction in question are corrupted. How will you look your employer square in the eye – confront him on any issue – if he knows that you can be bought anywhere and everywhere?

This is precisely what I am trying to do with my absentee vote here.

Is it actually illegal to sell your vote? I’ve never thought about doing it, but if I agree, e.g. to vote Lib Dem in exchange for (hmm, thinks for a moment), $1,000,000 on a completely personal level – that is, Chris Bertram contacts me and offers me the money, and I accept – have I broken any actual law? Has he?

To be clear about my intention (linked in my previous comment):
I propose to sell my vote to the highest bidder. I had assumed that the bids would be coming from voters and not candidates (I believe those who still vote value their individual vote a whole lot more than the candidates they’re voting for do).

It’s not that long ago that people did sell their vote. Here’s an example from a talk I heard the other night about the history of Canadian banking (fascinating topic, I know).

It’s the 1890s and the Liberals nominate a candidate for the riding of Pembroke, which is heavily Tory. But he finds that he can’t borrow money in Pembroke to finance his campaign, because all the banks there are Tory supporters and refuse to lend to him. So the Prime Minister asks the head of another, Liberal-friendly, bank to open a branch in Pembroke and they do.

The manager of the new branch raises the money and before handing it over, in cash, starts to count it. “What are you doing?”, the candidate asks. “Counting the money.” “Why would you do that? I don’t count it when I hand it out.”

Wasn’t the secret ballot an innovation of the late 19th century, introduced to make it harder to buy votes as had commonly been done before?

I’d make a different argument: voting isn’t a right, so much as it is a trusteeship. You have the vote not in order to advance your own private interests, but in order to advance the public weal. Now the only person who gets to decide what is the public good is the individual voter, but he must make a good faith effort to do so. Accordingly to sell your vote would be corrupt in the same way that it is corruption for an MP to sell his vote. Alienation of a public trust for private gain.

Spending money on advertising to persuade other trustees, however, would not qualify as corruption under this view.

I’m aware that this is quite an 18th century argument, and ludicrously out of touch with the modern view that voting is all about rights and private interests. However, I think this is both the historical basis for the law, and the best reason to support it.

same reason you can’t sell your jury duty – it isn’t a property-right of yours, it’s a (weak) obligation to take part in a process which is mutually owned by society.

John Holbo, I literally did a double take when I saw this in my google reader. I was like…”What…is this really coming from the Crooked Timber website?” When I was reading your article I kept waiting for the…”Now here’s why this would destroy society as we know it…”

My point is…you have my vote…which I wouldn’t sell for anything less than $10,000 dollars.

The goal of voting is to determine which side cares the most. It surely wouldn’t make sense for the side that could care less to win. People get confused though and think that just because one side has more numbers it automatically means that they care more. Yet…it’s fairly reasonable to say that one person who would sell his/her kidney for an additional vote obviously cares more about the issue than one person who would sell his vote for only $1.

That’s why limiting campaign contributions would be as counterproductive as limiting how many hours people could volunteer for a cause that they care about. Time is money.

So the question shouldn’t be: Do you care about an issue? Rather…it should be: How much do you care about an issue? That’s why we have the common expressions…”put your money where your mouth is” and “actions speak louder than words”. It’s one thing to just “like” a cause on facebook and it’s another thing to volunteer for that cause in real life.

Not too long ago Jason Brennan wrote a book on the ethics of voting. In his book he argues against “bad” voting. Of course…”bad” voting for a libertarian isn’t necessarily the same thing as “bad” voting for a liberal…and vice-versa. Here’s my comment on his BHL blog entry (you have to sort the comments from oldest to newest). In my comment I argue why it’s perfectly reasonable for people to sell their votes.

Also, here’s my 10 topic Self-Ownership Survey where I juxtapose the issue of campaign contributions with children’s suffrage, procreation licenses, consensual slavery, etc. in order to encourage people to evaluate where they stand with regards to self-ownership.

The bottom line is…if it was easy for people to think objectively about voting then we would have embraced universal suffrage from the get-go. As it is…people automatically evaluate voting issues in terms of the outcomes that they desire.

Hey,

I find the statement about the immorality of ‘using public money’ to buy votes in the blog post to be hilariously ridiculous. When a political party offers to cut taxes or provide a particular benefit it is straightforwardly providing public money to voters. And this is entirely analogous to Harald’s value-only-in-case-of-victory statement.

I think, therefore, the exchange only works if it is a straightforward cash-for-vote scheme, which is blown up by the secret ballot (as others have observed). So, in this frame, selling your vote would not be illegal but rather the anti-coercion measures make it impracticable (I assume a priori that the social cost of eliminating anti-coercion measures is greater than any greater utility in allocation of votes and wealth gained by vote-selling).

Yours,

JMH

1. Policing the contract: I sell you my vote. I request an absentee ballot. I sign the ballot and send it to you, or we meet and you observe me voting correctly. This is how it’s done with Alzheimer’s patients in nursing homes, except the voters don’t get properly compensated.

2. Is volunteer slavery (hat-tip to Rahsaan Roland Kirk) illegal? Can we not execute a legally binding contract under which I agree (in exchange for compensation) to live in conditions you set, perform duties you describe, for the rest of my life, and with the contract being transferable by you? I don’t know enough law to answer this question, but on the surface I don’t see why it should be illegal. I have the idea that personal assistants to famous celebrities bind themselves to these contracts (except they are not life long, and not transferable, so maybe those are the important distinctions). And isn’t Michelle Bachman’s marriage contract like this (except for transferability, and perhaps not even with that exception)?

“What do you think?” he asks…

Well I thought I was at Crooked Timber, but I think it sounds like Marginal Revolution.

What would it look like the other way about? That is to say, not that citizen X can sell her vote, but that (a) she can only vote if she buys the right — at, let’s say, $10 a vote; and (b) she can buy as many votes as she wants. (I actually had this system as part of the background worldbuilding in a science-fiction novel I once wrote). The benefits would be: that only those prepared to take a stake in the system would vote; abstentions could not happen; and of course it would raise revenue for the State. The most obvious downside is that it would mean rich people could literally buy election results; but — as people are saying in this thread — that’s kind of what happens now anyway.

Why do we allow people to contribute as much money as they like to political candidates rather than just cutting-out-the-middle-man and putting as much money as they want into the election directly?

Electronic voting machines could print receipts, and you could show your receipt to collect your $2 or whatever.

That is to say, not that citizen X can sell her vote, but that (a) she can only vote if she buys the right—at, let’s say, $10 a vote; and (b) she can buy as many votes as she wants.

This is a nice idea, but as stated it offends basic principles of democratic justice. The first vote should be free, so that even the poorest citizen can participate in this great civic duty. Each additional vote that citizen X wants to buy would be $10.

If you sell your vote you do not go into the ballot box at all. Someone else gets to push the button twice. And they can do whatever they want, twice, secretly.

You’re missing the point about secrecy. If someone else knows how my vote is used, it doesn’t matter whether I know or not. I am vulnerable to coercion.

Under your scenario, my employer decides who I vote for. Period. If I don’t turn my ballot over, I’m fired. Mitt won’t be doing business with me, he’ll be doing business with my employer.

I don’t know much about the subjext, so I will ask:
don’t we have actual example of places where and times when John’s “modest proposal” is/was the norm?

If so, what conclusion can we get about what would happen if such proposal were actually implemented?

not quite what you’re faux-proposing, but worth mentioning even so…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondour

in 45, the “I” in the second line refers to Cohen, not me

People could donate to candidates, to help them buy votes.

Even though probably no one would be willing to vote for free? So I’d give you $x, with some of which to buy my vote back from me?

The assumption Holbo is making is that political advertising benefits only those with money. That’s not the case: no amount of advertising will make Santorum palatable to gays. People realize that advertising is paid for and evaluate it accordingly: political advertising works by increasing name recognition and potentially bringing out new information to voters that, because it is likely to sway them, is exactly the information we want them to have. There’s also the fact that the Solicitor General could not figure out how to ban it without banning the newspaper. (Read the transcript of the orals of Citizens United).

By contrast buying votes directly affects how people will vote. As J. Otto Pohl pointed out it rewards cronyism and corruption and empirically does worse then free votes. Furthermore, because you only need 51% of the people to win an election, it doesn’t actually take into account everyone’s concern for the policies that are being argued about.

Are there no corporate lawyers reading this? I would set up a vote brokerage. I would buy and offer to sell blocs of votes to CEOs, who could then offer to vote for politicians who would support legislation, say, exempting their firms from all taxes. All nice and confidential, and no risk of prosecution for bribery — there’s nothing illegal about voting for someone who supports your favorite policies.

This efficient system could speed the installation of total plutocracy by several years. You should not give away ideas like this for free!

As mister 3/5 here, never mind how *I’ll* sell my vote…

On a more serious note…
Voting does not really work outside of relatively equal privilege, always buying off or eviscerating the power of unfortunates, and I don’t think democratic or republican government works in a framework where *everyone* is supposed to have civic rights and responsibilities. The main utility of modern voting is in the process of coercing a losing regime out in favor of an ascending one without violence. As we can also see, there is unfortunately low capacity to vote for a policy, even by referendum, given the shenanigans…

Mike Huben, on one hand…all the policies/candidates that the poor would vote for provide them with definite benefits…yet on the other hand you argue that the poor would be willing to trade those benefits in for cash.

Is your issue that the cash that the poor is accepting is less valuable to them than the benefits? Or is your issue that the money isn’t going through the government? If that’s the case are you arguing that congress would spend the poor’s money better than the poor would? For example, would the poor just use the money to purchase big screen TVs while congress would use the money to subsidize public education?

Charlie @ 8: I don’t support the idea either, but I fundamentally disagree with your argument against it. Everyone can be bought. If someone offered you a billion dollars in exchange for your vote, even if your fundamental goal is to help other people you can help other people far more with a billion dollars than with a single vote, so rejecting the deal would be patently irrational. So it’s just a matter of haggling over the price, as the old joke goes. (Of course the “market price” of a vote wouldn’t be that ridiculously out of whack from actual outcomes, so selling your vote in practice would be a different matter.)

What is most important about voting? Finding out what percentage of the people have certain positions? Or finding out what each person thinks? Probably the issues would be different.

Or is voting just a probably reasonably good way to make certain decisions, which could be made even better without making it not voting anymore, though not necessarily a process that we should expect to come up with a “correct” answer, and could be drastically changed if it didn’t?

As long as we’re playing the ‘hey, enough of that fuddy-duddy civic virtue stuff, let the market rip!!111’ game, I wanna do some rational choice speculating.

Assumption: any rational actor should care about the laws that they have to follow.

Assumption: Money can buy anything, but the government can do anything, up to and including killing people.

Hypothesis: the bundle of goods ‘voting’ is not a rational substitute for the good ‘money’, since the law and the government enforcing it can theoretically do things like: take all that money away, put you in jail or kill you. While it may be rational for one person, who can’t change an election, to sell their vote, it would be irrational for too many people to sell their vote because that would add up to ‘trading a good of potentially infinite value (e.g. not being killed) for a finite good’.

Right there, we have a sort of prisoner’s dilemma (it makes sense for me to take the money and let rich people vote to have a poor-people-genocide, since maybe I can buy some nice stuff before my inevitable death; but if I knew that all the other poor folks were on board to vote against and I was the marginal voter, it would be totally nonsensical to sell), a situation where it makes a lot of sense for the government to step in and make sure that this doesn’t happen.

So why would anyone do this (because surely a lot of people would)? I think Mike Huben has the answer. I think that only grinding poverty, ignorance and a massively corrupt government could convince a rational actor to sell their stake in the society that they have to live in, because otherwise your vote should be invaluable for those reasons listed above (not to mention that it has sentimental/pride/self-respect giving value that no sum of money does.) I’m not saying solving the fundamental problem would be easy but I think it’s disingenuous to limit ourselves to saying ‘well, those fastfood workers aren’t gonna vote anyway, might as well give em a leg up for it.’

I suppose it might have something to do with why we require that legislatures make laws, aka rules of general applicability, rather than simply act in highly specific transfers of wealth and power.

Vote-buying, or vote-selling, is the democratization of corruption. And, what is corruption?

What does it mean, when we say that a country is poor because its government is corrupt? What goes wrong with political decision-making?

Let’s recognize, too, that “corruption” can be a pejorative, with an elastic and circumstantial meaning, quite at odds with the common weal. The Reconstruction state governments of the American South were legendarily corrupt, and the oligarchic, white supremacist regimes that replaced them were . . .

The political machines of the immigrant cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries were sometimes accused of effectively buying votes, by the WASP Republicans, who disenfranchised those cities in state legislatures. (It is often forgotten that one-man, one-vote transformed the politics of Rhode Island as much as any southern, Jim Crow state.) Those machines could be legendarily corrupt; they also organized the provision of public goods, with various degrees of efficiency: streets, transit, water, sewer, schools, police.

Strategically organizing political coalitions is inventive work. Maybe, buying votes would work well for a time, to marshall the concerted interest of broader electorates.

Anthony Trollope wrote a good number of novels in the mid-nineteenth century which examined this question among others. Sometimes the good guys bought votes, sometimes the bad guys. The price was about a day’s beer. What’s clear is that for the newly enfranchised businessmen and tradesmen of rural England in the 1870s, it made exactly no difference whether the Tories or the Whigs controlled Parliament, so they sold to the highest bidder ( and had a great party on election day).

replying to Zamfir at 35.

Thanks for your thoughtful and informed reply. I’m in the US, but I can think of working conditions that seem to violate normal labor law restrictions. I’m thinking of (1) professional baseball players who played for 32 straight hours or in 105 degree heat; (2) ultra marathoners who competed for 24 straight hours (or more); (3) movie stars in the 30’s (or so) who had personal service contracts that allowed the production company (say warner brothers) to sell the contract to another production company (say Goldwyn) either permanently or temporarily. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know enough about US labor law to know what allows these to occur (maybe not legal today, but not regarded as horribly unethical). I know there are loopholes in a lot of US laws that exempt small businesses, or employers of a single person. My more general point is that there are a lot of (apparently) legal contracts that bear resemblance to slavery (except for the incredibly important distinction of voluntariness). Historically in the US (and in England) indentured servitude (voluntary contract, limited time, otherwise much like slavery) was common and legal.

The Philippines. Pakistan. Thailand. Indian “voting blocs”. There’s a rich literature.

Aside from giving away the game and making it all too obvious, this also seems kind of inefficient, from the elite’s point of view.

Suppose I’m The Man. In your model, first I have to find a politician who will be loyal to me – which means that either I’m paying him (or, perhaps, blackmailing him) – and then I should buy millions of votes to get this politician elected. So, I’m paying to both the politician and the voters. But I don’t really care what particular individual gets elected; all I want is anyone who follows my orders.

Accordingly, in the current model, I just send a signal to the pool of potential politicians that whoever is elected will be well paid, I let them compete, and then I bribe the one who gets elected.

So, if I’m The Man, I’m not going to buy votes, don’t need to.

Now, of course the politicians who compete for my patronage might decide to buy votes. So, some voters might get some money out of it; like, say, 10 bucks/head from Romney, in South Carolina. $10, a free lunch instead of moronic ads (not even directed at you, in most cases) clogging your TV, that would certainly be a big improvement. So, yes, my vote is for John’s proposal, especially if it comes with $10 attached.

John Holbo, for even considering preference intensity…I’m bumping up the price to $2,000. It’s fine for liberals not to agree with a concept…but it’s preferable if they integrate their understanding of the concept into their argument…like you have.

That being said…I don’t get the feeling like you’ve made a real case…or any case…for equality…in the sense that it trumps revealing intensity. That’s kind of the equivalent of a libertarian that holds “liberty” as argument enough.

If you scroll down my blog entry you can read my detailed response to your comment. If I had to pick one sentence to share then I’d guess I’d go with this one…

Just like we should support free-speech even when it has an unfavorable skew….we should not let the possibility of an unfavorable skew diminish our support for people’s right to try and protect their interests.

The system of voting for the American President looks very complicated to outsiders and looks like it is open to abuse. Australians are confused about why Americans need to state their political affiliation when they register to vote, our major political parties keep this info in their detailed databases and we are shocked that people can queue to vote for 6 hours, maximum wait is one hour then polling officials will tell you which close booths are quiet. We also are shocked that companies like Walmart call all their employees into work when the polling booths are open, so they can’t vote – in Australia you can vote early – about 14 days prior to the election.

@85 et al. I don’t think the assumption JH makes is incorrect. In the US especially, we don’t want people who disagree with us to vote at all. We only have voting on one day. We gerrymander. We make laws hassling people about voter registration. Citizens, for various reasons, do not start off on an equal level concerning government participation, much less anything else. I think your sentence “you and your allies failed to make their case” is quite true in part, except for the large portion who aren’t doing their civic duty or are oblivious or apathetic to it. (Perhaps you can force people to vote, but it would suck for me if they voted against my candidate!) Voter turnout for the last US election was only 63% of eligible voters. That’s not stellar… while also being the highest turnout since 1968 before voting age was lowered. MY pulls from Nate Silver here, and I think it warrants a brief inspection at the least: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2011/12/18/rich_people_are_politically_active.html
This seems to reinforce the idea of risk aversion in elections. If you live in a democracy where the term equality pops up for whatever reason, you stand to lose much more (numerically) if you are already rich, and you stand to gain much less if you are already poor. On the other hand, if you look at purchasing power, the rich lose basically nothing while the poor gain quite a bit. If you want non-rich people or non-interested people to vote, a monetary incentive is an obvious option. Another would be making it much easier to vote, extending the voting window, making voter IDs easier to obtain by electronically linking it to an SSN, etc.

It seems to me that free market types would into this sort of thing. In the US, I’d expect interstate trade to see a huge increase in commerce. A vote for ManOnDog would be worth much more in liberal states where his votes are already rare than they would be in states where ManOnDog votes are common since conservatives are into catholicspandexwrestling. Such interstate commerce, as a “vote buying” loophole, would trump our electoral college as well. You’d have a huge vote market.

I can imagine a sleazy tv salesman marketing early, “Vote for ManOnDog today and get a $50 bonus!” Maybe you’ll take the offer, maybe you’ll wait until the ballot futures market goes up. How desperate are you for money anyway, and who would you vote for if you were just some silly person who voted for free?

This repost from KDrum is vaguely related: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/congressional-eyeballs-are-worth-more-yours. People more participatory in the game are worth more.

You could really look at the rest of the ~30% of voters as an untapped market since they aren’t interested in making their own personal choice anyway.

Last caveat – I look at this as still one vote per person that can be bought: one contract per person that they can sell to their neighbor, a PAC, a corporation or business, etc. I.e., you have sold you own vote and preference away to someone else.

grismcthorn

88: see this post: it should link and give to an abstract of the study you want
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/02/political_economy

How could you possibly police this. We have secret voting. Everybody would cheat.

But we really don’t have secret voting in the U.S. any more — most states now have ‘no excuses’ absentee ballots (and nobody really checks up on the excuses in the other states anyway). So anyone who wants to sell a vote now can do it, by requesting an absentee ballot and filling it out in the presence of the vote-buyer (or just by selling the blank ballot itself).

But we really don’t have secret voting in the U.S. any more—most states now have ‘no excuses’ absentee ballots (and nobody really checks up on the excuses in the other states anyway). So anyone who wants to sell a vote now can do it, by requesting an absentee ballot and filling it out in the presence of the vote-buyer (or just by selling the blank ballot itself).

Technical nit, just because I’m a voting nerd. You often need not just the ballot but also the envelope. Absentee voting procedures are generally designed to allow election officials to verify the validity of your ballot without seeing how you voted. For instance, some locations use the double envelope method in which you put your ballot in a blank envelope and then the blank envelope in an outer signed envelope. The election officials check the signature, then open the outer envelope, shuffle the inner envelopes, then open them and process the ballots.

This isn’t to say that you can’t sell the ballot plus signed envelope, just that it’s slightly more complicated than selling the ballot.

I disagree with the suggestion that the outlined scheme would be unlikely to be much worse than the current set-up [in Western democracies?].

Someone may have already said this, but here goes anyway. Let’s say you’re poor. The vote selling scheme is introduced and there’s an election. Candidates (or their backers) start buying up votes. Overwhelming, voting rights at this election will be transferred to those who have the money. Now think about yourself. Let’s say you haven’t sold your vote, but nor can you afford to buy others. In other words, you have a single, solitary vote, while richer voters have many more. They can out-vote you. This abolishes equally at the ballot box. I might want to sell my vote, but why should you let me, considering you have no say in who I sell it to?

If you want, you can think of it in economics terms – if people sell their votes, they impose an undefined, but likely extremely large, negative externality on everyone else (that temporary sale could become a permanent one if a dictatorship is established). Also, since buying one or two votes would seem pointless, those buying would buy millions of votes – the market would tend towards oligopoly.

Compare this with what goes on now. Yes, Goldman Sachs (or whoever) can try and effectively bribe every candidate, but they can’t assure that a successful candidate they backed will actually give them what they want when s/he’s in power (unless they stand themselves), and more importantly, the principle of one person, one vote is maintained. If Goldman tries to buy Obama, citizens can persuade each other not to vote for him. Whereas if Goldman buys millions of vote directly, it doesn’t matter how much you complain, the rich will take Congress and the White House in a landslide, because they have more votes than you do.

Vote selling would increase the chance of the abolition of democracy, and decreases the chance of any kind of leftist government. Yes, Western countries seem to be in (or sliding towards) a new Gilded Age, but things could be a lot worse.

By the way John Holbo, what would you advocate instead of the current system? Clean Elections where candidates get an equal share of public money?

John Holbo, your argument is that it’s not fair for the founder of Amazon.com…Jeff Bezos…to be able to purchase more votes than you or I would be able to.  My counter argument was that you “voted” for Bezos by selling your book on Amazon and I “voted” for Bezos when I purchased your book on Amazon.

We didn’t literally “vote” for Bezos given that he is not running for office.  We figuratively voted for him by making him that much more wealthy.  

The question is…would you still have sold your book on Amazon if you knew that Bezos was going to use your money to purchase literal votes that were against your interests?  We can see that the beauty of your idea is that it would establish a culture of ethical consumerism.

Like pragmatarianism, your idea would allow us to objectively discern the proper scope of government.  There’s no need to debate the proper scope of Jeff Bezos.  Why is that?  It’s simply because we’ve all used our money to figuratively vote for exactly what it is that Jeff Bezos should be doing…running Amazon.com.  

If we allow people to sell their votes…and directly allocate their taxes….then the government would simply do what we pay it to do.  Would you pay the government to do something that it was bad at doing?  No…nobody would  We would all only pay the government to do what it was good at doing.

If anybody disagrees with something that the government is doing then they would have the freedom to engage in ethical consumerism by boycotting that government organization.  If you support the concept of ethical consumerism in the private sector…then why wouldn’t you support applying the same concept to the public sector?  Wouldn’t you value the freedom to boycott unnecessary wars?

Alex, how is that the logical conclusion?  The context of my statement is the current system.  It refers to people spending their time and money to try and modify the current system.  With the current system what you described is illegal (well…at least in terms of the private sector).

If you want what you described to be legal…then even though it’s against my interests…I wouldn’t want to limit your right to spend as much time/money as you wanted to try and protect your interests.

Just to be clear…my issue isn’t the taxing…it’s the spending.  I could care less if there was 100% public ownership of the means of production…as long as 1. taxpayers were allowed to directly allocate their taxes and 2. people were allowed to sell their votes.

Socialism really could work…as long as we solved the incentive problem and the partial knowledge problem.  By allowing 1. taxpayers to directly allocate their taxes and 2. people to sell their votes we would definitively solve both those problems.

Would the outcome be socialism…or anarcho-capitalism…or somewhere in between?  I have no idea…nobody could truly know the outcome.  That being said…what I’m fairly certain of is that if there was a shift…then the shift would benefit our country as a whole…completely irrespective of the direction the shift took.

“I’m pointing out that the machine will do a job that we don’t in fact want to be done: namely, disproportionately empower rich people. Compared to that basic problem, the tendency of the machine to break is very secondary.”

Well, if we’re talking about the mechanics of accounting for votes, we can mean either the particular concrete machinery used by various jurisdictions, or more abstractly as the design features any particular system has to be able to implement. I was speaking from that second meaning, pointing out a design flaw that would vitiate any attempt to have both purchased votes and the secret ballot, even if perfect concrete machinery could be imagined to embody the hypothetical system.

The particular design feature required by any secret ballot system, is that it has to keep careful and public account of exactly who has voted. However imperfectly that design feature is implemented, as long as it’s done at least half-way fastidiously, stealing an election becomes impossible without an impossibly large conspiracy (well, absent Dieboldery, which has the advantage of requiring only a workably small conspiracy). But most people haven’t absorbed the implications of the fact that they are required to claim to be some particular registered voter, whose name is checked off a public list, before they’re allowed to vote, and thus the Rs can make hay claiming a system that already works (as witnessed by the failure of the attempt to graveyard vote in NH), needs to have its machinery tightened up with voter ID laws.

Again, whatever the particular accounting machinery is used, you couldn’t preserve the secret ballot if purchasers of votes have to do en masse and by proxy what the individual voter does in the singular and directly, claim to be voter so-and-so. The purchaser can’t just claim to have purchased 50,000 votes, he has to produce the names of who those voters are, and has to be able to defend an audit trail establishing his proxy if challenged by individual voters, or by competing buyers. If you don’t make the buyer do this, enumerate exactly whose votes he’s using, then anyone can claim to have purchased any number of votes. And, of course, the need to produce the names, and defend that list in public, means no secret ballot.

“…disproportionately empower rich people.”

This really would have to be a naked power play by the rich. The key element to what you present as a system that allows the purchase of votes is that it allows the alienation of votes, it allows voters to assign their votes to someone else. Once granted that, sticks will work as well as carrots (probably better and definitely cheaper), and a system allowing alienated votes means much more direct and thoroughgoing empowerment of the rich and oppression of everybody else than is conveyed by the idea of some polite market of actors all free to pursue their own interests.

You don’t really have to go the long way around the barn as I did to spot this feature of purchased votes. The mechanics of voting was the natural way into the topic for me because we have multiple elections every year in VA, whether we need them or not, and I am an observer in some precinct for each and every one. But for that majority of people not PTSDed out on the mechanics of voting, I think it would probably be a more direct and easy way to the conclusion to just state the inherent feature of the assignment of votes to someone else, that it would have to be a public act. Without an audit trail back to particular voters, anyone could claim to have obtained any number of votes. My claim is that you really can’t have this idea of assigned votes without necessarily having the assignment be a public act.

Salem @20
I think you have it right.

John Holbo, we are not more concerned to reveal the political preferences of Bezos and Gaga than the man on the street.  The concept that I’m failing to convey is how the political preferences of Bezos and Gaga reflect a portion of the preferences of the people on the street.  If we want correct political answers then we need to integrate everybody’s social and economic preferences.  Politics is simply a reflection of economic and social preferences.  The more accurate the reflection the more accurate the answers.

Let’s consider the question of what the private sector should produce.  How many different people does it take to come up with this answer?  It takes every single one of us.  If we took your preferences out of the equation then would the answer still be correct?  No…it wouldn’t be.  It would be extremely close to being correct but it would still be wrong.  Each person we take out of the equation the more incorrect the answer becomes.

This is the basic premise of why socialism fails.  Socialism is resource allocation by proxy.  Unlike capitalism…it only allows you to indirectly communicate your preferences.  If it was just a 1 to 1 ratio it wouldn’t be so bad.  For example…I would give you all my money…and communicate my preferences to you…and you would buy me what I wanted.  The economy wouldn’t work as well but it probably wouldn’t fail.  But what about a 1 to 2 ratio?  Or a 1 to 3 ratio?  Or a 1 to 100,000 ratio?

Everybody has some information but nobody has all the information.  This is not a new concept.  Socrates said, “…it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”   Buddha expressed this in terms of the blind men each feeling different parts of an elephant.  More recently…Hayek referred to this as the “Fatal Conceit”.  You don’t have to agree with this concept…but it helps at least to understand it…given that it’s the very foundation of conservatism and libertarianism.  The irony is that conservatives and libertarians do not realize how they are nearly as guilty of this “Fatal Conceit” as liberals are.  For more on this see my post on a taxpayer division of labor.

If we understand that it takes every single one of us to correctly answer the question of what the private sector should produce…then it shouldn’t be much of a stretch to understand that it would require every single one of us to correctly answer the question of what the public sector should produce.  That in no way implies that we should all be forced to literally vote…it simply conveys the value of allowing people to directly communicate their preferences via the selling of their votes and the direct allocation of their taxes.

Henri Vieuxtemps, when Noah was building his ark…how many people were like…”hmmm…maybe this guy knows something that we don’t?”

Even though I’m an atheist…lately I find myself saying more and more…”hmmm…just because I don’t believe in God doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist.”

In other words…the flip side to humility is tolerance.

Why, the point is not just to receive a signal, but to react to it and preempt potential problems brewing down there inside the lower classes.

So, I suppose one could hope that selling votes, assuming that the equilibrium results in decent incomes for the vote-selling public, will actually produce a better feedback mechanism (redistribution mechanism) than political bickering.

The problem is, of course, that it is highly unlikely that prices will be so high as to produce some sort of a reasonable guaranteed income. People on top don’t like to compete; they’ll quickly produce an environment where your vote doesn’t matter anyway, and thus is worth nothing. Which is what you have already.

John Holbo, every day you have no choice but to consider the costs of the things you want…yet for some reason the burden is on me to prove to you that voters should be forced to consider the costs, as well as the benefits, of the things that they want from government.

A while back Obama’s favorite analogy was how the Republicans drove the “car” into the ditch. Do you really think it’s simply a matter of which party is behind the wheel? How can one party know our preferences more than the other party? Without knowing our preferences they might as well be driving while blindfolded.

If you want proof…then see how long you can make it without looking at price tags. The fact of the matter is that opportunity costs are just as essential in the public sector as they are in the private sector.

Also…in terms of handing political power over to a minority…can you do me a favor and tell me more about this political power that you have in the first place? Personally I have no political power…so being able to sell my vote…or directly allocate my taxes…would be a positive gain for me…and nearly everybody else.

Our gain would of course represent somebody else’s loss…specifically…538 congresspeople. How small a minority are they? I don’t know them…they don’t know me…yet I’m supposed to expect that they will represent my interests better than I can? I think not. If I had to choose between 150 million taxpayers each representing their own interests or 538 congresspeople trying to represent the interests of 300 million people…it wouldn’t even be a contest. Everybody would benefit from A) 150 million people considering the price tags on all the public goods that they want and B) 300 million people considering the price tags on their votes.

Speaking of price tags…your book arrived yesterday. I think it’s well worth the $30…but my girlfriend did not. Eh…she’s more into the beat poets than philosophy. What is the value of your book to society? It’s simply the revenue that your book generated. What is the value of any public good? It’s simply the revenue that it would generate if people were allowed to directly allocate their taxes. We all benefit by considering the price tags on the things we want…and we all stand to lose by ignoring those price tags. The only people that benefit when the “car” ends up in the ditch are the politicians in the opposite party. How perverse is that. I wonder how many more times the keys will have to pass back and forth before people start noticing a pattern.

reason, the overall point though is that it wouldn’t make any sense if we allowed 538 congresspeople to decide how many of John’s book should be printed. There’s absolutely no logical basis for believing that resources can be efficiently allocated by proxy.  It just doesn’t work for any resource.

I’m sure you would vote for John’s book…but whether you’d actually purchase his book offers an infinitely more accurate reflection of your own unique and valuable perspective. If you haven’t purchased his book it means that you have better things with greater positive externalities that you could spend that $30 on. If you have purchased his book it means you were willing to forgo those other things that you value. The greater the quantity of unique and valuable perspectives that determine the answer…the more accurate the answer will be.

How many of John’s books should be printed? How much money should be allocated to public education? How much money should be allocated to national defense? How much money should be allocated to public transportation? How much money should be allocated to everything that Rachel Maddow wants? How much money should be allocated to all those awesome things that Obama listed in his state of the union address?

All those questions should not be answered by 538 congresspeople. Instead…they should be answered by millions and millions of consumers each with their own valuable and unique perspectives. It’s a fatal conceit for 538 congresspeople to think that they can answer any of those questions more accurately than our entire nation can. Don’t get me wrong…if you’re happy with congress’s answers then I wouldn’t try and stop you from giving them your taxes any more than I would try and stop you from believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or God.  But if I’m going to concede that maybe you’re right and maybe I’m wrong…it’s going to cost you the same exact concession.  Once we both make that same concession then we would each allocate our own taxes and sell our own votes according to our own unique and valuable perspectives.

None of us knows what the exact outcome would be of allowing people to sell their votes or directly allocate their taxes…but it would defy everything we know to argue that our country as a whole wouldn’t positively benefit from the efficient allocation of limited resources.

John Holbo, ok, you’re right that I should bear the burden of proof. Why should citizens be in the driver’s seat? Because they know what they want. Are they capable of expressing their wants? Yes, they clearly express their wants in the for-profit sector and in the non-profit sector.

In other words…the demand for public goods should determine the supply of public goods. It’s really as simple as that.

Historically my proposal has been the norm? During what part of history have consumers ever been in the driver’s seat? First the king was in the driver’s seat…but then some barons took the keys away from him when he kept driving the country into war. After a while the barons became parliament and then parliament became congress.

Like I mentioned to “reason”…I’m not proposing to eliminate congress any more than I’d propose to dissuade people of their belief in Santa Claus or God. What I’m proposing is that believers show tolerance for us non-believers. If they believe that congress knows their interests better than they do…then so be it…they can give all their taxes to congress. Personally, I’m highly skeptical that congress can know my interests despite never even having met me. In other words…I’m skeptical that congress is omniscient. What I’m proposing is simply that people have a choice to sell their votes and directly allocate their taxes.

“a promise that one group – the rich – which is only a subset of the citizenry – will, if given predominant political power, adequately express the interests and preferences of the whole citizenry.”

The challenge is to see citizens as consumers. If we applied your argument to the private sector then we would expect that transportation options would only consist of private jets and Rolls Royces…which would reflect a failure for the rich to adequately represent our interests. But if you can see citizens as consumers then you’ll understand that we don’t need representatives to adequately express our own interests and preferences.

Consumers would have a choice which government organizations received their taxes and they would have a choice if and who they sold their votes to. If you weren’t happy with other people’s choices then you would bear the burden of convincing them why your choices were better. Why should you have to convince them? Because maybe they are right and maybe you are wrong. That’s the biggest challenge…for people to accept the possibility that they might be wrong. This humility is essential to foster a culture of political tolerance.

To summarize…consumers would be coerced into paying taxes…but they would have a choice which government organizations received their taxes and they would have a choice whether to sell their votes or not…and if you disagreed with their choices then it would be up to you to convince them otherwise.

John Holbo, here’s a not so brief synopsis of my post on The Dialectic of Unintended Consequences.  At the height of the unions’ power in the 50s and 60s it became economically feasible for manufacturing companies to move overseas.  Labor costs are one of the most important factors in determining a factory’s location or relocation.  So the factories relocated to some countries with extremely low labor costs…such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

At that time the large majority of people in those countries were primarily engaged in subsistence agriculture.  When they were given the option to work in the new factories…many chose to do so rather than continue to engage in subsistence agriculture.  They learned new skills and quite a few left to start their own factories.  The demand for labor increased…while the labor supply stayed constant…so wages started to rise.

When my hero, Deng Xiaoping, opened China up to foreign investment in the 80s…many factories from the four Asian Tigers relocated to China in order to take advantage of what seemed to be an endless supply of cheap labor.  The pattern repeated itself….people chose working in the new factories rather than continue to engage in subsistence agriculture…they learned new skills…many started their own factories…and wages very gradually started to rise.

The other day when Obama gave his state of the union address he said that it was becoming expensive to do business in China.  Just amazing.  Prior to Deng Xiaoping…Chairman Mao had attempted to impose on the entire country what he felt to be the most efficient allocation of resources.  The result?  Thirty million people starved to death as a direct result of state induced famine.  When Deng Xiaoping took over he gave people a choice between manufacturing and agriculture.  The result?  Millions and millions of people were lifted out of poverty within one generation.

You have trouble seeing how giving citizens a choice to sell their votes would put them in the driver’s seat…and I have trouble seeing how it wouldn’t.  We would be giving citizens a choice that they currently do not have.  Anytime we give people a choice that they currently do not have we are giving them that much more control over their lives.  Whether it’s a good choice for them to sell their votes wouldn’t be up to me to decide.  Along those same lines…it would be very presumptuous for me to tell people whether they should choose working in a sweatshop over subsistence agriculture.  Another example…even though I served in the military it would be very presumptuous for me to tell somebody whether it would be a good idea for them to sign up for the military.  In all three cases though I strongly advocate that people be given the choice.

That being said…regarding people directly allocating their taxes…because of the free-rider problem…people shouldn’t be given a choice whether they paid taxes and individuals shouldn’t be able to choose their tax rate.  Those debates are useless without first establishing the proper scope of government.  It would be like somebody asking me how much I’m going to pay them without first establishing what their skills are.  Regarding too much potato salad…people wouldn’t generally allocate their taxes to a government organization that doesn’t need more money…and it would be completely subjective to say whether somebody is spending too much money on infrastructure, public education/transportation/housing/healthcare, cancer research and various other public goods.  If you get a chance read my last response to Henri Vieuxtemps.  It offers an example of trying to establish whether the public or private sector should publish your book.

What becomes of the United States (or any other state) under Xerographica’s argument? I mean, why the US? Or Britain, or Libya? If voting is just a way to aggregate interests, why aggregate these interests? Should not the sale of votes come under WTO rules? If the Chinese government wants to use its holdings of US bonds to buy US votes and then pass US laws, why, in this reasoning, should it not? It’s a market, right?

I don’t think the war on drugs is a line item. You can send a check to the DOJ, and they will (hopefully) enforce the laws. If the law says ‘anyone smoking a joint should be shot on sight’, that’s what they’ll do. And if you don’t send them your check, then, true, there will be no war on drugs, but also no one will respond to your 911.