Celebrating Diversity Means Embracing Inequality

Reply to: One dollar equals one vote in the economy

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Great story! Dollar voting is a very important concept. The thing is though… the three areas you listed as needing a lot more improvement… energy, public transportation and welfare… are not primarily in the realm of dollar voting. They are primarily in the realm of ballot voting. This is because they are mainly public goods. Supplying public goods is the point of government.

The heart of the issue involves figuring out whether things improve faster with dollar voting or ballot voting.

Personally, I’ve never once dollar voted for sports in my life. Yet, my taxes have subsidized sports despite the fact that, from my perspective, there are far more important things in life.

Sports really aren’t a priority for me. But they are a priority for some people. People have different priorities because we are all different. We aren’t all equally productive, effective, responsible, perceptive, careful, intelligent, informed, competent, prudent, insightful, diligent, creative, talented, resourceful or rational.

Dollar voting reflects our inequality… ballot voting does not. We all have an unequal amount of dollar votes and an equal amount of ballot votes.

In the public sector it’s one person one vote. Each person has the same say in determining who are representatives are. And our representatives determine our country’s budget for public goods.

People will of course argue that it’s only fair that everybody be given the same amount of ballot votes. But I have yet to see a good, or even a bad, argument that fairness helps to improve public goods in any way.

Fairness doesn’t make everybody equally rational. And giving unequally rational people equal influence really isn’t the recipe for improving any goods… public or private.

If we want public goods to improve at the same rate as private goods… then we simply have to give taxpayers the freedom to choose where their taxes go (pragmatarianism).

It’s a fact that some people pay a lot more taxes than other people… which reflects the fact that some people receive a lot more dollar votes than other people… which reflects the fact that some people are better than other people at using society’s limited resources… which reflects the fact that we are all different.

Celebrating human diversity means embracing human inequality.