Kinda unrelated, but I have come across this "vote with your dollars" thing way too many times, always by USians. I ask this out of genuine curiosity - no criticism intended:
In a democracy, the most disproportionate power a regular citizen has is the vote. Bill Gates (as an example) has exactly one, and so do you.
Dollars, on the other hand - Bill G has quite a few orders of magnitude more than you. So many infact, that your "dollar votes" end up being a rounding error either way - with him or against him.
You cannot hope AT ALL to win based on "voting with your dollars". But voting with your votes, you just may stand a chance. What the US govt is doing, NSA is doing - in the end it will have to be fixed in Congress, not in Courts. Not by ACLU. But by people voting with their votes. Even congressmen are used to "vote with dollars", and of course the supreme court has now made it official that "dollars are free speech". All of that can be reverted with "vote with votes" only - not with dollars.
Thats my belief, not being a USian. I am trying to understand why "vote with your dollars" seems so popular and - well - believable a concept in the US? Isn't "voting with your dollars" a clear rejection of democratic power?
It's not like our votes really count either. It's far more of a rounding error than your money.
The electorate is full of easily-swayed morons, and they're the ones who get a voice, not us. If you want to affect policy, then you need to sway them harder than your opponents.
The last Presidential election involved a bit over $2 billion in campaign spending. That's about $20 for each person who voted in the election. If you can spend more than $20, then you can get a greater voice through money than through voting. Congressional races involve less money and are thus even more easily affected.
It's not a great way to run things, but there's not much use in wishing they were different.
Edit: I also want to point out that voting with your money allows you to express a more precise position. In voting directly, you have few options. For the last Presidential election, the only sentiments you could really express with your vote were, "I favor half-assed health care reform and an extreme overemphasis on combating terrorism in both domestic and foreign policy", "I favor a slightly different half-assed health care reform and an extreme overemphasis on combating terrorism in both domestic and foreign policy", "I am a complete nutcase", or "I hate them all". There is rarely any vote that corresponds to the sort of thing you push for by donating to the ACLU.
"It's far more of a rounding error than your money."
For Bill Gates vs. a median networth individual, they actually seem to wind up fairly comparable on presidential elections, ignoring the electoral college. The more local the election, the more sway your individual vote has, of course (and often the more influence the decisions have on your life, day-to-day).
How do you arrive at "wind up fairly comparable"? If you merely contributed $40 in the last Presidential election, your money counted twice as much as your vote, relatively speaking.
If you're looking at actual donations versus possible donations, the point is what you could do with your money, not what the average person actually does.
The original statement about rounding errors, which you compared votes to, was:
'Dollars, on the other hand - Bill G has quite a few orders of magnitude more than you. So many infact, that your "dollar votes" end up being a rounding error either way - with him or against him.'
Dollars Bill Gates has (or rather, net worth) divided by the net worth of the median individual is not terribly far from the voting population over one.
This is not a terribly meaningful comparison, I just thought it interesting that they wound up in the same ballpark.
The important point was that your vote matters a ton more on local things than things further away, though your dollar can go further there as well to be sure.
Got it. That is an interesting comparison (but as you say, not necessarily very meaningful).
It would be interesting to compare the political donations of wealthy people like Gates with those from regular folk. Does it scale with net worth? Do rich people give more or less, relative to what they have, to political causes?
You're right that your vote matters more locally, but so does your money, so I think the potential difference in influence remains similar.
I'd weakly expect the wealthy to donate less, on average, relative to their disposable income. Whether that winds up more or less relative to their income depends on a host of factors... There's also liquidity to factor in... and of course Bill Gates can probably manage a fair amount of influence before donating anything (I'm not sure whether that's gone up or down since he moved from MS to charity).
"You're right that your vote matters more locally, but so does your money, so I think the potential difference in influence remains similar."
There's another interesting factor at play, which is that there can be unintended effects from wealthy people spending lots of money on politics, because you can't just directly buy votes.
For example, if Bill Gates decided to put $5 billion behind electing his candidate of choice in the next Presidential election, it would probably backfire spectacularly. Just looking at the numbers, he ought to be able to determine the election on his lonesome, since money talks and he'll outspend the other guy by a hefty margin. But the idea that a rich guy is effectively trying to buy the election would mobilize people to fight against it on a huge scale. You can see this at work in a smaller scale with the infamous Koch brothers, and the smaller scale backlash their spending has generated from people who oppose their views.
So not only do you have to look at how much people can and do spend, but also how effective that spending is. The marginal utility of political spending probably has a weird curve, and almost certainly can become negative once you reach a certain level.
If either party was a proper "Capitalist Party" we would be much better off. I think it would be harmful if people said "capitalism doesn't work, what alternatives are there?" and switched to some system where the oligarchy is just as well off but everyone else has less freedom with their money.
> In a democracy, the most disproportionate power a regular citizen has is the vote
Actually, I would probably rank the power to work to convince others to vote one way or the other as more powerful, because it can have a lot more effect than one vote.
Naturally, this is also more difficult and time consuming than going out and voting.
People are going to vote anyway, so "voting with dollars" is really kind of a bonus option. And maybe to some degree it expresses the de facto effect of dollars on many government officials and government processes. So there's a need to have some money to counterbalance that, and while my $5 won't do much, it's a cumulative result that they're after.
At the same time, it's just a simple statement that wraps a "please support non-government groups that are fighting to change government" message. And there's no need to fight Bill Gates because he's not part of the situation at hand.
Post-WWII in the US, in Presidential general elections (generally, the highest turnout elections), the highest turnout was 62.8% in 1960, the lowest 49.0% in 1996, and most elections have been in the mid-50%s. So, "people are going to vote anyway" seems pretty far from true.
Yeah, that's kind of the throwaway part. I should have said, "Voting already exists as an option". I'd be interested to know what percentage of ACLU members vote, though.
You need to know that the ACLU can raise a lot of hell with a modest amount of money. "Vote with your money" means different things depending on the organization involved. The ACLU does not need more money than the government to win significant lawsuits.
Nevertheless, it does cost money, and not a pittance. Particularly since selecting the best cases usually means working pro bono. And teams of attorneys ain't cheap, and there's so much messed up in the United States that you've got to be able to field a bunch of those teams.
The U.S., by many measures, is not a democracy, but more closely operates as an oligarchy [1].
If Bill Gates donates $100 million to a set of Congressional candidates who then use that money to run campaigns, the additional money will have a noticeable impact in the result. Assuming nobody is on the other side making even larger donations, a higher percentage of Bill Gates' preferred candidates will get elected than would have otherwise.
If it was just Bill Gates doing this, it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal. But since the economic and political interests of a large percentage of America's elite are highly correlated, you end up with a large amount of money directed to candidates who support policies that benefit those elites.
In theory, your critique is correct. If every non-elite voted against the elites, all of this money would be wasted. But in practice a lot of that money gets used to convince the non-elites that their own interests will be served by the same candidates who are receiving the money from the elites. It would be called propaganda if it was done by the government, but since it's done by private economic entities it's just considered a form of marketing.
The average American voter is not very informed beyond a few specific issues (and often not even that). The result is that they can be easily overwhelmed with information related to issues they are unfamiliar with. Political campaigns in the U.S. like to portray these issues in dire terms. "My opponnent is soft on crime! Why? Because he voted for this obscure bill, HR834109241027308, that you've never heard of and couldn't interpret if you tried!" The implication is straighforward, but never directly said: "You and your family will be safer by choosing me!"
You don't have time to research all of these claims and debunk them, even if you have a good intuition for which ones are bogus and which are reasonable. The fact that both major parties bullshit equally means that even if you did, you'd still be trying to pick the most truthful liar out of the group. Some people recognize this and give up on the process entirely. A lot of money is spent trying to convince these people that this candidate is different and is worth your money, vote, and trust.
So you are correct that trying to out-money the monied interests is not a very promising strategy for political reform in the U.S. But simply trying to out-number them won't work since the average vote is so uninformed, subject to pathos, and fundamentally cheap. Over a large population, the average vote is all that matters. For this reason, small local elections in the U.S. tend to function in a much more democratic and intelligent fashion than state or national elections. The issues are less numerous, the stakes are lower (implying lower ROI for political "investors"), and the voters are more informed about what is happening in their own area.
Democracy, as discovered by the Greeks, is a fantastic political system for local governance. But it doesn't scale. From a certain perspective, it is impressive that the U.S. has scaled it as far as it has, given such a numerous, heterogeneous, and geographically distributed population.
I can't help but wonder if "voting with your dollars" is another one of those things which has been drilled into the citizenry with - as you put it - "...that money gets used to convince the non-elites that their own interests will be served by the same candidates who are receiving the money from the elites." Its an "arms race" that the "common people" CANNOT win. But getting them bogged down in it makes for a very calm populace of consumers - they have the power of the dollar, after all.
Thats the fundamental way to steal a democracy, isn't it? Convince the voters that money is matters more, and is a more effective way for governance decision-making. Heck, even get the Supreme Court to declare that money is protected political speech!^1 Thats seems to be the foundation from where the democratic rot builds itself.
1) When I first came across that in US news, I actually thought it was some kind of Onion-esqe satire.
The ACLU can focus a small amount of donor money like a political laser and make real progress on the issues its donors care about. Its less like "voting" with your money and more like raising your own taxes a smidge to get the results you want.
Amen to that. That's a big issue with most charities, actually. I wonder how the cost/benefit works out, though? I'm guessing it's probably still worth it to send the mail.
I work at a 501(c)(3), and direct mail is absolutely worthwhile. Maybe 1.5-3% of recipients of a prospecting piece actually respond, and they probably won't make up for the cost of the mailing. However, those respondents then get more mailings specifically for current donors and those mailings make money.
Out of that group, donors are checked against databases of known giving history and net worth. These databases aren't always accurate or comprehensive, but it helps fundraisers to ID people who might be able to give more--sometimes a lot more.
When high-value prospects are IDed, they usually get assigned to a major gift officer who starts building a personal relationship to solicit very large gifts. This is where the charity makes the majority of its revenue. I usually see 95% of revenue come from the top 5% of donors, largely individuals.
If you're uninterested in receiving lots of mail, most charities will try to accommodate that request. However, resources are limited and dealing with the problems of $XX level donors often takes second place to the problems of $XXX,XXX level donors. I've seen stacks of returned direct mail several feet high from people who moved, died, wanted no more mailings, you name it. It was always on the to-do list to remove those names, but never at the top of the to-do list.
As someone who would regularly give to the ACLU - IF THEY DIDN'T SPAM ME - I can guarantee they are loosing money (and supporters) because of their policy.
In particular, I contacted them asking if contributors were put on mailing lists. I was told that regular membership contributors were added to several mailing lists, but that one-off contributors were only sent a small amount of ACLU generated mail, and if I put a note on my donation to the effect of "do not send ACLU mail" then I wouldn't even get that much. I set up my bank's auto-bill system to send them a $100 monthly check (i.e. regular "one-off" contributions) and had "DO NOT SEND ACLU MAIL" in three different locations on the check and that phrase was the only thing in all caps on the check. Within two weeks of the check being sent I had started getting non-ACLU mail that had a typo from that check. I immediately cancelled my bank's auto-bill to them. That was more than 3 years ago. So their spam has cost them at least $3,600 from me alone.
This comment is an excellent illustration of why privacy is so important. Your goals are noble (I hope) but the methods employed are absolutely terrible.
"databases of known giving history", "databases of net worth"...
This is precisely why I only donate to charities and causes anonymously. It's sort of stunning that ACLU, the champion of privacy, does not offer this option.
At this point, it's almost certain that the benefits outweigh the costs, considering that non-profits still compete, and every non-profit I've heard of sends tons of mail.
At this point, it's almost certain that the PERCEIVED benefits outweigh the PERCEIVED costs, considering that non-profits still send tons of mail.
There is little doubt that there are benefits to their current model. tvanantwerp covered some of those benefits.
But there are costs and benefits that don't appear to be included in their current calculations. If anybody doubted the difference that lots of little contributions can make need only look at successful crowd-sourcing systems and campaigns.
I believe that most non-profits have been told to go after the big fish donators and if they have to destroy all the little fish in the process, "oh, well". My point, and based on the other comments, I'm not alone, is that the little fishes' contributions may add up and be worth more than the big fishes with a lower overall cost (because it costs to produce and distribute those tons of mail).
The issue is that, from the charity's standpoint, your most likely donors are those who have already donated. It would be nice if you could volunteer a higher donation in exchange for a promise not to be mailed / emailed for a year or two (or ever). I donate to a public radio station on a monthly basis, and some months I feel like they're putting that entire donation into efforts to market to me.
I ran into one of the higher-ups for the ACLU at Ashby BART (executive director or something?). I mentioned this problem and asked how I could donate without receiving any marketing materials what so ever. He gave me his card and told me to email him personally.
The ACLU single donation page is here: https://www.aclu.org/secure/make-gift-aclu-3?s_src=UNS140001...
The ACLU membership page is here: https://www.aclu.org/secure/our-civil-liberties-are-under-at...
I have been an ACLU member for years, but am otherwise unaffiliated. Crap like this is why I'm a member. They are on the front lines.