 Good evening. Welcome to the Cato Institute. Tonight we are debating the question, should libertarians vote? It is sometimes said that metaphysics begins with the question, why is there something rather than nothing? For libertarians at least, politics begins with the question, why is there some government rather than no government? For some of us, politics also ends there perhaps. Tonight though, we are going to ask about a very specific act within the polity, namely voting. Taking the affirmative side and saying that yes, libertarians should vote, we have Cato Senior Fellow Jim Harper and Michael Cannon, who is the Cato Institute's Director of Health Policy Studies. Taking the negative side, we have Trevor Burris on my far right, Research Fellow at the Cato Center for Constitutional Studies and Cato Research Fellow and Editor of Libertarianism.org, Aaron Ross Powell. I am Jason Kuznicki, also a Cato Research Fellow and the Editor of Cato Unbound, and I will be moderating this debate tonight. Some ground rules, because debates always do that. First of all, nothing that you hear here is to be interpreted as an endorsement of any particular candidate or party or ballot measure. We do not take sides on those things, that's not what Cato's mission is, and so we are going to do our best to avoid that and do not infer it, because that's not what we're trying to tell you. The format will be like this. First, we'll have a 10 minute opening statement from each side, starting with the affirmative. Then there will be 20 minutes of moderator questions, where I will ask questions of the panelists in alternating order. Then there will be 10 minutes of questions from the audience, and I will stress they must be questions, not speeches. And following that, we will have 5 minute closing statements from each side. Hopefully we won't run too far off time, but we will do the best we can. So without further ado, I suppose I shall turn it over to our affirmative side. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, colleagues, for participating. Thanks, all of you, for observing this debate. Thanks to the folks watching at home. I hope it's interesting and entertaining, maybe just one or the other. There's a lot of folks in the libertarian community who argue against voting. Some of the best are right here with us, but I think there are three reasons, cumulative reasons, to vote. One is your direct influence on the outcome, your indirect influence on other political actors, and what I'll call our social influence that Michael Cannon is going to discuss mostly. Friends of ours and good people in the libertarian community argue against voting, because there's no way, almost no way, your vote is going to affect the outcome. That's fine, again, good people, but I daresay they haven't thought this all the way through. So I want to assess briefly the costs and benefits of voting. We'll go to the back of the envelope to do some really, really excellent calculation. Start with cost. Does it take a thousand hours to figure out how to vote? Do you need to educate yourself about every dimension of every issue? Not really, because voting is very constrained. And if you're a libertarian, you probably already know enough about a lot of the issues. So maybe it's one to two hours, the time it takes to go, maybe there's a line, maybe not. But if you vote by absentee ballot, you're going to knock it down quite a bit. So let's say it's 20 minutes of your time on the cost side of the equation. Most models are that only that you're voting in a presidential, and so that's the one that they calculate for. A very interesting study by Gelman, Silver, and Edlin, showing that your chance of affecting a presidential election is about one in 60 million. Depending on the state you're in, it can be higher and lower. And the next really interesting study, I think your conclusion would be, okay, one in 60 million, not worth doing. I'm out of here. But another study by a guy named Scott Alexander assesses the value of that chance of affecting a presidential outcome at $5,000. That's based on the $2 trillion that the Bush administration expended in the Iraq war, for example. What if you could have stopped that from happening? What if you had a one in 60 million chance of stopping that from happening? Maybe that's worth $50 million. The trillion plus expenditure of Obamacare. If your vote could be the one that stopped that from happening, that's worth $5,000. Still, I think that's an overestimate. So let's take it down by a factor to $500. Of course, that model of a presidential vote is not the entirety of it. You've got to vote in the Senate. Maybe your chance of affecting a senatorial race are one in 1.3 million. Let's throw $10 value at that. A house race, $1.15. Your governor, maybe you can affect things such that it's worth $10 to get to be the deciding vote, the chance of being deciding vote for your governor. Your mayor or alderman, whatever the case may be. A dog catcher. Maybe that's worth a buck. Initiative campaigns in many states are pretty big deals. California has a $9 billion bond issue that being the deciding vote on could be quite valuable. So you're one in 1.3 million chance and tweak these numbers any way you want. Let's say it's worth $5. So you're going to spend a little more time, say, 35 minutes on all of these. Your chance of affecting them are small, but the value is quite high. I put $530 here, but let's say it's more like $53. I think it's at least a close call. So that's direct influence. Then there's indirect influence. And I want to quote one of my favorite scholars on this question. Myself. Votes. And this comes from experience. Michael and I both worked on Capitol Hill, so we have some experience. Votes are a dazzling Roman candle of information, supplied to elected officials, their staffs, political parties, journalists, opinion leaders, and future candidates to name a few. These witnesses are incorporating vote information, not just outcome, but win-loss margins. So they're watching those margins that you create with your vote, even if it doesn't elect or prevent the election of a candidate. And they incorporate that into their actions and assessments, well beyond election and inauguration day. We're talking about people who decide to run or decide not to run. We're talking about the parties who decide to get behind candidates or not. We're talking about reporters who write differently about different candidates or parties based on all this. We're talking about opinion leaders, and of course we're talking about donors. So that's the question of indirect influence, where your vote can have some. I haven't quantified it like the direct influence, but there's also social influence. And I'll hand the microphone over to Michael Cannon to continue with that topic. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Aaron and Trevor and Jason and all of you. The good news is that libertarians have defeated every threat to liberty on the planet, and the only thing left for us to discuss now is whether libertarians should vote. And if you're the sort of libertarian who does not care about making the world a better place, if you're the sort of libertarian who just wants to complain, who wants to turn people off of libertarian ideas, if you want to confirm stereotypes about libertarians being tinfoil hat-wearing basement dwellers who don't care about anyone but themselves, then you should not only not vote, you should brag about how you don't vote. You should blog about how useless one vote is. You should insinuate that people who do vote are silly, ignorant, enumerate, irrational, that sort of thing. If, however, you're the sort of libertarian who wants to make the world a better place, yeah, you should vote. And Jim has talked about the benefits of voting in terms of your influence on policy outcomes or why from a strictly financial cost-benefit perspective, it can be economically rational for you to vote. The benefits of voting in terms of your influence on electoral outcomes and policy outcomes, while still not dictatorial, are even greater than Jim suggests. And that's because voting has value apart from its direct effect on vote totals for various candidates or referendum. And that's primarily because a lot of people see voting as an act of caring. So here's a thought experiment. Suppose an African-American mother approaches you with a campaign flyer and asks you to vote in the presidential election because she fears for her sons if Donald Trump wins an institute stop and frisk policing nationwide. Now, a significant share of African-Americans already believe that libertarians are full of it and really only care about preserving white privilege. If you tell her, I agree with you, but I don't vote. Now, let me tell you why libertarians are your real friends. What do you think she's going to think? Is her mind going to be open to your ideas after you've told her that you don't vote? Or what about a Latina who asks you to vote because she fears house-to-house sweep in Hispanic neighborhoods that end in the federal government deporting her grandmother? If you give her the same answer, is she going to believe the libertarians are her friends? Would you believe it? If you don't vote, some people are going to think you're selfish and most people don't open their minds to what selfish people think. And that not only applies to you, it applies to every libertarian including every libertarian who listens to you and anyone you might persuade to become a libertarian. Aaron and Trevor have thousands of obedient followers on Twitter. One more? There we go. Thousands of obedient followers on Twitter. If they broadcast to their followers that voting is a good idea, there are thousands of Twitter followers will vote. Give or take. If they broadcast that smart people don't vote, then their obedient Twitter followers will not. And the decision to make not voting your thing affects more than just one vote. And what if all libertarians made not voting their thing? What if, who have we got here? PJ O'Rourke, Charles Murray, Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie Kennedy. We've got Gary Johnson there, John Stossel, Drew Carey. Libertarians with a lot more Twitter followers than any of us have. If they decided voting is irrational and it's not going to have an impact and they broadcast that message to their followers, their Twitter followers. A lot of them are going to be libertarians. We're going to depress the libertarian vote even more. And what if Penn Gillette did the same thing? He's got about 2 million Twitter followers. What if Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who a lot of people, the creators of South Park, who a lot of people suspect are libertarians, came out and said, we're libertarians. Or maybe a celebrity like Stephen Colbert decided that he was a libertarian. So they encourage their followers not to vote. Pretty soon you're talking about a significant number of votes not showing up in the vote tallies of general elections, not showing up in the vote tallies in primary elections, which are arguably even more important, or even in the polls of likely voters, because pollsters screen for whether you voted or not, or likely to vote in the next election. And that's going to skew how politicians, and if you don't vote, if libertarians don't vote, then their views won't show up in those public opinion surveys of likely voters, which are the most influential surveys, the ones that politicians pay the most attention to. But if they could show up, our views could show up if libertarians play our cards right. Now the late great economist Glenn Whitman once wrote, okay, Glenn is not actually dead. Glenn is just a writer in Hollywood now, and he wrote this just a week ago. Glenn writes that this whole question is just a classic collective action problem. He says libertarians would all be better off if they all voted, because we'd be able to pull political parties and policy outcomes in a more libertarian direction. Yet each individual libertarian has a big incentive not to vote, because if I don't vote, I get to spend time doing other things, and you're right, it's not likely to affect the ultimate outcome. But if every libertarian follows that incentive and chooses not to vote, then we're all worse off, we don't move policy. Everyone else, that is, the people who believe in liberty or equal dignity for some, but not all, adapts to this problem the way humans usually do, by creating a social norm that people should do the socially beneficial thing. Libertarians would benefit from adopting such a social norm in favor of voting. This prisoner's dilemma is a repeat game. The optimal strategy is not to defect, it is to coordinate. And there are principled reasons not to vote, but some principles are bad principles, and I vote that libertarians who oppose voting reexamine theirs. Now Jim said we should close with some shameless pandering that portrays us as sympathetic and caring people. He even offered this picture of his newborn son wearing an eye-voted sticker. To do that, I have three kids. He told me his is cuter, so we could use it. In fairness, the other side has some adorable kids, too. And I am going to allow them now 10 minutes to make their case. Well, thank you. I thank you, Jason. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for Jim for coming up with this event. And Michael for letting me join on. So I want to start with the basics. Jim kind of went over it already. But I want your vote does not matter. I want to be very clear about this in most situations. The article he cited is still the sort of gold standard, one in 60 million chance of deciding a presidential election. Now, that's a general chance. If you were in California and you're voting Republican, it can go up to one in a billion. In terms of expected value, this is a different question. You're one in a billion chance times the possibility that something's going to get passed is how you have to actually run those numbers. Jason Brennan in his book ran the number and came up with 2.5 times 10 to the negative 2,053 power for your vote to actually make a difference on expected value. Of course, those are in relatively close elections. If it's a runaway victory like 1984 for Reagan or 1936 for Roosevelt, it's different. And no single vote has ever decided a presidential election. And despite Jim's argument about margins and turnout, it's the same problem. You do not meaningfully contribute to a margin. No politician has ever said, well, I won by 4.00017. If I would have won by 4.0018, then I would totally have a mandate. That has never happened once in human history. In a 2001 paper by Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter that looked at 56,613 contested congressional and state elections since 1898 and the 40,000 state elections of about a billion votes, they found seven that were decided by a single vote. There was one congressional election decided by a single vote and that was a 1910 race in Buffalo. About 41,000 votes cast, but upon recount, the single vote disappeared, which gets me to Bush v. Gore. You might be thinking that your single vote matters because of Bush v. Gore. Bush v. Gore actually proves that if a presidential election ever comes down to 500 votes, it will be decided by courts and lawyers and not by the actual voters. These facts are not reasonably up for debate. You've not mattered in every election that you've ever voted in. We could run a It's a Wonderful Life George Bailey situation and I could take you back as your angel and say, look at the world that happened in all the elections that you didn't vote in and it would be the exact same world except for you would have more time because you didn't vote. So we should reframe the question. Why should libertarians do an unquestionably ineffective activity, at least insofar as the outcomes are concerned? You think about it that way. Well, there's a lot of reasons to not do an ineffective activity. Actually, anything effective is a good reason not to do an ineffective activity. Rain dances are ineffective and if someone says, why don't you do a rain dance? You would say, well, because it's ineffective and that's a good enough answer. But you ask people, why don't you vote? And you say, because it's ineffective, well, that just seems weird, which is odd. You all know that your vote doesn't matter. So it's weird that probably most of you are on the other side from Aaron and I and we're the weirdos in the room, which is also weird. So what makes this weird? Of course, what matters is what Michael pointed out, that yes, your vote doesn't matter, but voting in the aggregate matters. It's a trivially true statement that we're not going to be addressing today. Voting en masse obviously matters. We're reframing the question slightly to ask whether or not it is wrong for a libertarian to abstain from voting. And the answer to that question is no. So I want to reiterate what Trevor said. We are not making the case that libertarians should abstain from voting. We are not saying that it is wrong for libertarians to vote. If your vote is mathematically meaningless, we don't much care what you do with it. Instead, we reject the idea that there's something wrong with choosing not to vote. That choosing to abstain from an election is nothing to be ashamed of. We believe that there are reasonable arguments for abstaining. In fact, the argument between Jim Harper and me began when I wrote an essay laying out some of the morally troubling aspects of voting that I thought people rarely recognized. Jim responded with a blog post titled, Don't Not Vote. That's what we're pushing back on. Vegetarians abstain from eating meat because they believe that there are morally troubling aspects to it that cut against the benefits and tastiness and perhaps health. And they do this knowing full well that any individual's decision to not eat meat won't save the life of a single animal. Yet we don't take this as evidence that they're behaving irrationally. And what about Quakers, many of whom don't vote? What about Jehovah's Witnesses who see voting as clashing with their principles? Do we condemn them for not fulfilling their civic duty? Are their principles stronger or better than ours? Trevor and I see voting to some extent like Quakers and Jehovah's Witnesses do. Yes, your vote has no impact on the direction of the country. And yes, even still, it, like Jim says, doesn't take much time or effort. But that doesn't mean it's without costs. Voting has deep symbolic meaning in our culture. And that symbolic meaning is both overplayed and wrong-headed. Trevor and I are weird, as are many of our colleagues here at Cato, because we have a fundamentally different view of the state for most people in Washington. We believe the state's authority has moral limits and that there's a private sphere of choice it's not allowed to penetrate. Very nearly everything we vote on. Very nearly everything the presidential candidates have said they would do falls outside the bounds of libertarian principle. Voting is symbolically signing on to what those people will do in your name. And given that the outcome will likely be profoundly on libertarian, that's not something I'm willing to do. Like eating meat to the vegetarian, even though I know my abstaining won't directly influence the government in a better direction, I also know that it won't make government worse. And at the same time, it allows me to maintain my principles to live my sense of justice, which is important because I owe it to the world to make it better. And I can do that in part by pushing back against the histrionic and incoherent view most Americans have about the moral and causal weightiness of voting. And that makes me weird, I admit, but it's a weirdness I'm happy to embrace and it's a weirdness that I wish more people would as well. Voting is not just a positive good, it can be positively dangerous. This might sound weird too, but it's not. People have been talking about the dangers of voting since the American founding. James Madison was terrified of voters, so he wanted filtering mechanisms and representatives. The progressives were terrified of voters, so they started creating the administrative state to insulate it from politics. All the while our government has grown to be the most powerful organization in the history of humankind controlling our daily lives to an almost unimaginable and unacceptable degree and making us hate each other in the process. And why can't it do this? Well, voting, of course. The fetishization of voting buttresses the idea that voting is an adequate check on government and a justification for whatever government does. But many things we vote are beyond the legitimate power of government. We need to step back from the fetishization of voting and accurately characterize voting as a weak and inadequate form of collective choice that cannot effectively support the weight of the governments that claim legitimacy from it. The fetishization of voting can have real costs. If people raise voting to the pinnacle of civic engagement, which many do, then many may ignore other types of more meaningful civic engagement. For many, when President Obama entered office, it was like a messiah. He would solve things, fix them, make it better. The anti-war movement of the left mostly disappeared, partially because of partisanship, but partially because Obama was going to take care of it. Because voting is perceived as to support the government, it can be very dangerous as we see in every people's republic of in the world. If the election is Hitler versus Stalin, don't vote. What if they held an election and nobody came? Those who would vote for the lesser evil, whoever that would be between Hitler and Stalin, are only giving him an ability to say, however many people voted, that the people chose me and to claim legitimacy. My vote doesn't matter, your vote doesn't matter, my non-vote doesn't matter. It's symbolic, so let's agree that both are symbolic. You can vote for the candidate you enjoy and feel like you're doing your duty, and I don't, I symbolically non-vote. But it's important for me to stand up and remind people what's wrong with voting on the things that we do. If there was a national referendum on a national haircut, and we started having a discussion about whether or not you're going to get the hippie or the marine, and people started coming out and saying, make your voice heard, put up signs in your art, don't you believe in democracy? Someone has to stand up and say, we do not vote about these things, loudly and without shame, and honestly, and we'll be the ones who do that. Thank you. So thank you to both sides. I will now be asking each side questions. I will alternate from one side to the other. I will, however, tolerate some impromptu cross-examination and some back and forth here, because I think that's healthy, and I trust that my colleagues fear me sufficiently to respect my authority. So first question, first question is to the negative side. I can imagine your argument making the opponents of libertarianism very, very happy. If you don't vote, the median voter is that much less libertarian, and the median voter always carries the election. What do you say to that? So if I personally do not vote, there is some sort of probably computer at NASA that could figure out how much the median voter actually changed, because it would be a very small amount. So because I'm talking about myself. Now if all libertarians don't vote, so Michael's tried to convert it into a question about voting on mass mattering, which we're resisting. Our point is that it is not wrong for libertarians to not vote. And there are other ways of trying to do social change other than voting, but I actually think that changing people's minds about what voting can do in terms of how much it can check government is something as socially beneficial and can change the median voter too. I would also argue that the question about the median voter is related to Jim's arguments about giving a cost to how much our vote might benefit us or other people, and that they assume that the candidate that we would be voting for stands some chance of winning. And if those arguments work, then they would seem to push in the direction of being obligated as a libertarian, not just to vote, but to vote for someone, say, one of the two major party candidates who can win as opposed to throwing your vote away for someone like Gary Johnson or another independent candidate who stands no chance of winning unless your vote stands no chance of influencing things in one direction or another. Can I ask Jim a question? If it's Jermaine to this. Jermaine, what do you think? Mike's argument is that throwing your vote away is irrelevant because you're about looking good. But Jim, what do you think about throwing your vote away? Is that a good argument? Do you have to vote effectively or just vote? You should vote your conscience. Any vote of conscience is not thrown away because of the signaling that it throws out in so many different directions. And even more than that. I mean, a vote for a third party candidate is not a thrown away vote. If what you're trying to do is build support for that perspective over time. And the way you do that is by having more votes in that column this year than you did last year or the year before. One way you do that. And you can't just assume that other people don't exist and we're only talking about Trevor because Trevor actually influences more people than just Trevor. Trevor has something more than maybe he thinks. And so we can't just assume that you're making all these decisions in a vacuum and that other people don't exist. So a vote for a third party candidate is only a thrown away vote. If you think the only thing that matters is whether your vote will be the deciding vote on who gets to be president or who wins this election or that this year. Okay, I'm going to move on to the next question. This is for the affirmative side. I can also imagine your argument making the opponents of libertarianism very, very happy. Because if all libertarians voted, it is still at least conceivable that we wouldn't win. But the decision would be perhaps said to have more of a popular mandate. After all, you voted. And this is the collective decision in which you have participated. What do you say to that? I think that whole argument that voting symbolically legitimizes or makes what the government does or makes us responsible for what the government does is nonsense. Democracy is like two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch. If the sheep screams, I vote no. That doesn't legitimize the process. There's nothing, I mean, you can vote for whoever you want for whatever reason you want. What a vote is, is you are registering your opinion about how your influence, such as a vote is, about how the government is going to use its coercive power. And if you say, I don't want it to use its coercive power, if you want to send that message, you can do that. And there's nothing that legitimizes the state about voting for, you know, you could vote for Iron Rand if you wanted to. You could vote for John Q. Anarchy if you wanted to. You could vote for Voting McVoteface. And there's nothing that legitimizing about that. It doesn't make you responsible for what the leaders elected by all the other people do with that power that they have. In brief, I want to, before I get to my answer, I want to discuss some point of agreement among us. Aaron and Trevor each said that they were weird and that's one point of agreement. But I do think that the example of the national haircut was a barb thrown in the direction of the bald guy. This is shirts for skins if you understand what you were doing there. When the revolution comes. So if I may move on? On the question of does voting ratify the outcome, I'm actually inclined to believe that there is a minor signal sent by participating in the vote. And maybe someone somewhere on the pro-big government side says, look at all the voting participation that there is. Therefore, the outcome is valid. But that is a minor and rarely used signal as compared to the margins of victory and loss in the electoral races themselves. Because those are used by, again, congressional staff, funders, future candidates. The signal that's given off by the margin of victory is much more powerful in many different instances than the ratification so-called of the democratic process by the fact of participation. Can I respond briefly? Yes. So on the sheep, it seems perfectly reasonable for the sheep to, instead of saying, I vote no, saying you don't get to vote on this. This is not the kind of thing that we vote about. Also, voting that people don't use coercive force seems like an argument more about ballot initiatives or similar things where should we make X illegal yes or no and saying no, we should not make it illegal, would not seem to violate libertarian principles or my libertarian principles. But it certainly doesn't seem to apply to candidates or anyone who has a reasonable chance of winning because they are, they may have some things that we think are libertarian, but they're going to do lots of things that are not. It's not about an abdication of use of force. And thirdly, for the social signaling perspective, my sense is that people take voting unseriously. So writing in Mickey Mouse or writing in a pretend candidate or writing in Ayn Rand as Berman Supreme, at least as offensive and off-putting as abstaining from voting. Is it just going to the booth? Is this all that you require of me to not think I'm a weirdo? Do I can go to the booth and I can vote if I leave the ballot blank? Or just leave the ballot blank? Is that more, is that better? Can we have a yes and no on that and then maybe move on? I'm not sure it was a yes or no. Is it okay to just go to the ballot box and cast the blank ballot to satisfy the requirements? The degree of signaling improves if you voted for one of the candidates as opposed to writing in Mickey Mouse. But if you write in a legitimate person and say this was my choice, then you're telling the person you're talking to who you're trying to bring to your side, I too care about our community. We are together on that. Now come my way on the substantive issue. And if I can respond to a point that Aaron made, I don't think it only applies to ballot initiatives. I mean, when we're voting for candidates for office, we are selecting between different people and deciding who is going to get all of these preexisting powers that exist in the apparatus of the state, in this particular office. And I don't think it's legitimizing or that it validates the bad things that the candidate I didn't vote for did or even the candidate that I did vote for does. If what I'm trying to do is I am trying to cast a vote for the candidate that I think is going to do the least bad stuff with all of those awful powers that I think government shouldn't have. Would you say that to Jehovah's Witnesses? I beg your pardon? Would you say that to Jehovah's Witnesses? That they should try to vote... They should vote for the least bad. That they should vote for the least bad? Well, it depends on, you know, what... I think that non-libertarians should not vote. So it depends on how libertarian it is. All right, so I'm going to move on. I have a question for the negative side. Quite a few people are unhappy that we are even having this debate. We have been told that we risk making ourselves look odious to the general public. Your point about rain dances may be true in that rain dances are ineffective at generating rain, but anthropologists have long pointed out that rain dances serve an additional function, which is social cohesion. In times of crisis and periodically even without crisis, communities perform rituals to bind themselves together as a community. What do you say about the ritual function of voting? Some of those rituals are child sacrifice, too. So we can actually just weigh the ritual and the morality of the ritual. I believe in social cohesion, but I actually think that voting pulls us apart in a very specific way. Politics makes us worse, as Aaron and I often say, and it makes us worse because of the things that we're voting about. If a Hillary supporter and a Trump supporter live next door to each other, they can live next door to each other because they're not in a world of property rights, because they're not trying to control each other's lives. But as soon as you have them voting about what children are going to learn, evolution, or creation, or whether or not they're going to, what kind of healthcare plan they're going to have, they start hating each other. And I think that the hatred that exists in America is directly proportional to the size of government and how meddlesome it is in our lives. Preparing for this debate, I was looking for texts about principle non-voting that were not anarchist texts. The ones I found were all Christian texts. They were all Mennonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, Quakers, writing about why they don't vote. And one of the most common ones was that it makes me hate my fellow man. And I do not follow Jesus' commandment to love thy enemy when I'm involved in a political system trying to control each other's lives. So in terms of civic engagement and how much we care about people, I think we have the better argument. Actually, I think that argument that you just made argues against your position. And here's why. What divides us is not the act of voting or the fact that we have different preferences when we go into the ballot box about this haircut or that haircut or our creationism versus evolution. It's that the government is trying to impose one answer on everybody. That's what divides us. That's not the act of voting itself. If the government weren't doing this, we're coming up with a one-size-fits-all rule for everybody, then I could teach creationism. You could teach evolution. We could shave our heads, and you could not. And we could look better than you. And we would get along just fine. We would be neighbors. We would be different, but we would be civil with each other. We wouldn't have any reason to fight because to each his own. But when you say that, oh, well, the problem is voting, and voting is what divides us, and so as libertarians are not going to vote, then you're making it even harder to get rid of those things that actually divide us. And so for all the reasons that Jim and I stated, libertarians should vote to try to reduce the government's influence over all of these questions and influence it doesn't matter. One quick response, and I'd like to move on. You're sliding back to voting in the aggregate versus voting individually. So my individual vote will not move the government in a more libertarian direction. And secondly, from the signaling thing, our argument is that all of this weight that people have that they place on voting and that they think voting is how we participate and that we ought to participate and that we're serious people we ought to participate in these ways is exactly what we're pushing back against. So we are saying that by voting and by telling people we voted and by signaling that voting is okay, we are reinforcing these false beliefs about the scope of government. And so it's not, it would be one thing if we said I'm not going to vote because I'm lazy and libertarians shouldn't vote because it's easier to just sit at home and play video games, that would look bad. But responding with the principled argument for why I am abstaining from this particular system seems at least arguably as persuasive in the right direction or at least as a ray of hope that we will move in a direction where people don't think that this is a legitimate way to choose how we run our lives. Okay, I have a question now for the affirmative side. I'd like to move on. Surveys have shown that less than a quarter of voters know who their senators are. They show that only half of voters know that the states get two of them. Voters often cannot name more than one candidate for the House of Representatives in their district. They can't say what the First Amendment does. They are routinely grossly ignorant about the facts of public policy. These are embarrassing and presumably not limited to the political mainstream. How do you recommend that anyone vote in light of pervasive voter ignorance? Like Michael, I think that non-libertarians should not vote. If you know enough about yourself to be a libertarian, you probably know the structure of the government. You probably know that there's one representative in your district and two senators for your state. You probably know how you come out on most issues. That doesn't affect our thesis, I don't think, that libertarians should vote. I want to be clear about what we're for connecting actually all three of these questions because what Michael had said about the intrusiveness of the government. It is the kind of things the government is doing that we think are outside legitimate boundaries of government and that people are voting on that is the problem. That's part point one. Secondly, for the question of ignorant voters. Well, we know why there are ignorant voters. Because your vote doesn't matter. Like, we have an entire system that explains why when you actually own the benefits or the costs of a decision you make, you will make better decisions. And because voting doesn't matter, it's not about the voters. It is true, though, and I think maybe Jim would endorse this. I'm not sure about Mike, but it is true that if you are very, very ignorant on the stuff that Jason talked about, it is probably your duty not to vote. And it's your duty not to vote because the point of voting is to use, is to affect the coercive power of government. And if you do it from a position where you don't know how many representatives you have, you have no idea how many senators there are, you don't know who's running for office, who's controlling, you have no idea, then your ignorance could do a bad thing to people if you were the deciding vote. And this is, I think, a reason to advance our principled objection to voting. Because one of the reasons that lots of ignorant people vote is because we as a culture have convinced ourselves that voting is this enormously important thing that everyone ought to do. It doesn't matter who you vote for, but just the way that you vote is the way that you discharge your civic duty. If you get out there and you do that every four years or every two years, then you've done what you need to do as a citizen and you're done. And if we push back against that by saying, no voting is like one of the more minor things you can do to advance your civic duty, that would seem to help cut out at least some of the ignorant votes. Very briefly, very briefly. Real movements that actually rise to the level that major parties put a good deal of effort into activating their own voters and deactivating the other side's voters. So making the other side's voters feel demoralized. This makes an excellent segue into my next question, actually, which is to the negative side. Well, pipe in the only movement that does that for all the other movements. Well, take heart, take heart. This week, a poll was conducted, a poll was conducted of the Cato Institute's policy staff. It showed that some 70% of respondents described themselves as regular voters, and another 17.5% were occasional voters. These figures are comparable to the figures for all Americans who have a college degree or higher. I ask the negative side, why are the libertarians of the Cato Institute not taking your advice? I'd start by saying that if we're going to take, having lots of people disagree with us is a sign that we're perhaps wrong. That would seem to be a big problem. We're in the wrong building. That is how voting works, though, isn't it? My colleagues haven't listened to us enough. We don't have a problem with libertarians voting. The best reason to vote is because it feels good. I mean, because it doesn't matter, it's part of the reason we don't really have a problem with it. But if you feel like you're discharging some important duty and the costs are not too prohibitive for you, you should vote. We're not arguing for a principle duty to not vote. I think we have in the libertarian community a lot of sensible people who understand these dynamics pretty well. That statistic you shared, Jason, suggests so. We also have some folks who really enjoy signaling how much they dislike democracy. I dislike the results that democracy produces. And my preference is for liberty over democracy. But by publicly expressing revulsion at democracy, I alienate myself from audiences that I could win to my side. So I think it's self-defeating to talk a lot, if you don't vote, about not voting and why it is stupid to vote. And if I can build on that, I have a question that I'd like to ask Trevor and Aaron. I gave the thought experiment of an African-American mother or a Latina, but you can imagine any individual who faces a real threat from the outcome of an election, a real threat to their liberty that really is personalized for them, and they're very afraid of that threat. Coming to you, imagine someone like that coming to you and saying, will you vote for candidate X in this election? And what would you say to that person that includes, I don't vote? It includes this statement, I don't vote. What would you say to that person that includes this statement, I don't vote? How would that advance the cause of liberty? Let me flip that on you, because as you said in your introductory remarks, what you're signaling is caring, and these people think that by not voting what you're saying is, I don't care about your problem. And you work in healthcare policy, and you argue that we should turn healthcare over to free markets. Lots of people, and it's one of the reasons that we have a hard time convincing people that argument, believe that saying, turn this over to the market as opposed to saying, I'm going to vote for a law that will help you, that will cause for someone to give you medical care, is signaling not caring. So the objection is we need to convince the people that this is a poor signal of caring, and that by not doing it, or by turning healthcare over to markets or any of the myriad other policies that we advance the Cato Institute, we are in fact doing it out of a sense of caring. But one of these is a libertarian objective, and one is not. The libertarian objective of turning healthcare over is turning healthcare over to markets. Not voting does not reduce coercion in society. Turning healthcare over from the government to the market reduces the influence of government and society reduces coercion. So that is the principle that I'm trying, and the inaccurate belief that I'm trying to overcome. But as far as voting, it's not something we have to take on. This belief that people have that voting is caring, even if it's false, even if it says false as the idea that markets will lead to worse healthcare. Even if it's that false, it's not an argument we have to take on because it does not involve coercion. So again, I ask you, instead of dodging the question, I ask you, what do you say to that voter who's very afraid of the outcome of an election, and how does it advance liberty? I'll tell you exactly what I say to them. So first of all, it's kind of... When people ask me about voting on initiatives and things like this, there are times I kind of imagine myself voting. Under certain circumstances where things are small, like based on my cognitive analysis, and if the government is limited. Now, this is an important point because Jim styled us as against democracy. We're not against democracy. We're against rampant, overpowering, and off-the-rails democracy, which is what libertarians are against, too. I like what you said at first, Trevor. Why don't you come on and sit over here? Well, no, but if we're voting, it's a very different moral question if we're voting on a limited government. It's a different moral question for a libertarian in the same way that it could be for a Quaker or someone else with different beliefs. If we're voting on courts and stoplights and whether or not there's going to be a road here when we have a VIN diagram that has broad overlap, that is a very different question of what we're going to vote on. Now, when people ask you to vote on specific things like mics, I want to get to Mike's question. Specific things on, like, Mike's question. First of all, I say I don't vote ignorantly. If I'm going to vote, I will research what you're talking about and make a decision about whether I'm going to vote on it. Her assertion that I have to vote or just say that I'm going to vote, I'm just going to walk away. And I didn't call this debate, right? Like, I don't go around telling people not to vote, like, usually, and making a big deal out of it. I don't do that. If people ask me, I'll tell them, or I'll just say, you know, I'm okay. So I don't make a big deal out of it in that way. I would say that... Could we wrap up with this comment? Yes. Okay. I would say to her the person who is scared of their liberty being undermined by a person winning, that first, me voting for your side is not likely to impact your liberty one way or another. Second, that me living out principles of justice, living out the principles of liberty that led me to believe in libertarianism by not legitimizing what I see as largely illegitimate powers of the government has at least as much of an effect in moving the world in the right direction. And third, that I have... Compared to voting, I have dedicated my career to protecting this person's liberty in all sorts of ways that I think are arguably much more effective than my vote. And so if that's what matters, then I think I'm doing okay. All right, with that, I would like to open the floor to questions from the audience. I see one question here. Please wait for the microphone and identify yourself and make certain that your question is in the form of a question. We'll do. My name is Drew Clark. I'm a columnist for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, and I'm also working with the Gary Johnson and Bill Weld Campaign for President and Vice President. I'm probably in the camp that why are you even having this debate five days, six days before an election? But I am glad I came because I want to be able to ask a question of those who are not in favor of voting themselves personally. And I just want to preface this by saying that I used to believe like you all did on this side of the table. I didn't vote the first time I was eligible to vote, and I had what I think I might regard as an existential crisis, thinking, oh my gosh, I can't believe I threw away that opportunity. So I've always tried to vote. I haven't always succeeded because there have been times when you're out of the country and things are too costly. So I think you two have made some good points. Like we probably overemphasize the importance of voting. But by and large, I think you really have to come down on the side of voting unless you are anarchists. And I'm not sure if you are. I'm not asking you if you are. What are you asking? The reason the question is as a form of composable rights. If I am a believer that my rights need to be compatible with the rights of all other people, you act in a way such that everyone engaging in the same behavior as you would, if you're arguing, not voting, result in a system where there was, in fact, no legitimacy to the state. So the question is, can you believe in a limited state and still abstain from voting? Or I guess I should ask at the reverse, isn't it the case that your stance only holds value if you believe that the government as a whole is illegitimate? I would push back on the idea that voting is the way that we legitimize government. In fact, I think that there are quite airtight and quite compelling arguments that voting does not legitimize government and that if we're going to legitimize it, we have to do it some other way. So I would question just the very premise of your objection. I agree that, as I said, our argument depends on what this thing that you're affecting, like a flea landing on the back of an elephant, but affecting, theoretically, what it's doing. It is entirely dependent upon that question about whether or not I want to participate in something I view as deeply immoral. And there are things that are incredibly, the state does, like the drug war, for example, locking people in cages for smoking a drug that the majority people 80 years ago didn't like. That is deeply immoral. And I don't want to sign my name to anyone who is for that. Even if they're for political purposes, even if they're really against the drug war, but they say they're for it, they're still immoral, but for a different reason. For voting, well, first of all, I've never met the politician who was voting, who was for all my positions. So, and there's another noise in the system about politicians, because we've oversold, there's another noise in the system I said about with the expected value calculation. We need to understand that, so in 2006 when the Democrats took the House and the Senate, it was all styled as a huge referendum on the Iraq war. And it was time for, exit polls showed massive voter interest in the Iraq war. It was time for the government to rethink the Iraq war. That did not happen. Candidates are, they're like mirrors. They're nothing until you look at them, and they will change entirely based on when they get in office. So there's a huge amount of doubt about what they will do, including someone who would be for my positions. I'm not very doubtful they'd do anything moral, and I'm gonna abstain because of that ignorance. Another question? Let's see. Yes. Hi, my name's Christina. I would just had a question about the way you're addressing voting, I guess in general, but when you're talking about it, you're talking it seems like more of a presidential side, and when I'm listening I feel like you guys, I'm taking it more of like a local government. I'm from a small town Iowa of 800, so I'm just wondering when you're talking about the legitimate, I guess like aspect of government, what would you say to people that where one or two votes do matter or you're talking about people, you know, school board members or city council people where it really is gonna affect your lives and you're talking about making an impact on a smaller, more social level, that seems to be the most important, you know, in your community, your kids are learning and different things from everything, from their local economy or whatever. And then, yeah, I guess that's my only question. I won't go on anymore. So the position Trevor and I are staking out is that there are multiple considerations in play, and so one of them is how likely your vote is to influence things, to decide the election, to move margins in a way that's gonna change things, and then there are the moral considerations and that you need to weigh them against each other. And so the smaller the election is, the fewer people who vote, the more chance there is that your vote will matter, and so it may be that you flip to a point where that outweighs our moral concerns but also there's this weird thing that happens in this country when we talk about elections which is the indignation that we express for people who say that they're not going to vote only really comes up when we're talking about the presidential elections. Lots and lots of us, far fewer of us vote in those small elections as a percentage than vote in the national elections. We don't get mad when people say I didn't vote in the midterm or I didn't vote in the school board election even though they have a greater chance of affecting things in those. In this weird situation where rhetorically the rage that people feel at non-voters is inversely proportional to how much the vote matters. Let me endorse the question because a lot of people come to this based on a model and that's the model that you're gonna have one vote in the presidential election and that's the only thing going on. Down ballot gives you lots and lots of opportunity to affect things. You're more likely to affect outcomes by all, it's all on small margins but participating in these elections is a big deal in the small town. This is a tangentially related story. My mother used to rant against a variety of things but in the political sphere she turned that ranting into action. It wasn't a vote per se but she ran for office. She ran for a hospital board in San Mateo County California that purported to govern a hospital that no longer existed on the platform that she would do away with the board. Listen, she wasn't gonna get elected and she didn't but she said something to a lot of people and she maybe hooked up with some minds who thought again about whether the San Mateo County Hospital Board should exist. So think about the down ballot not just the pure economic model that we're all talking about. I've seen a lot of questions in the audience and I have promised both sides a closing statement although if you wanna waive that in favor of more questions I'd be okay with that too, what do you? I'm gonna kill it close. Okay, alright. We'll take one more question I guess and then close, yes. You in the front, yes. My name is Sage Leeson. I would like to ask something in regard to not voting because of ignorance. So what I'm wondering is why would you promote not voting instead of promoting being informed, educating yourself and being an ongoing learner? How is that better? Being educated on all of the issues so not just the presidential election but the down ballot stuff that Jim is big on is extraordinarily time consuming. It has a lot of opportunity costs. I mean there are plenty of issues that I don't have enough knowledge on to say that I could vote in an informed way one way or the other and I spend 40 hours a week doing this stuff. So I think that the cost the problem with saying to the ignorant voter become informed is that it means giving up a lot of things in their lives that they could be doing otherwise that are probably important to them and are probably more important to them than the effect of their single vote. And the ignorant voter question relates to the local government question. There are concerns I have in local government that I might vote but I don't know enough about it to vote and I have other things to do with my time that I consider virtuous and okay. I mean if Aaron is taking care of his kids he's going to take them to school like these things if it's like well I can learn everything about this ballot initiative or I can take my daughter to piano practice. Those are the kind of trade-offs that matter and people make those trade-offs in different ways which is why they're ignorant voters. Alright I think we should move to closing statements. Jim you have promised a killer close so deliver. Oops I played the expectations game wrongly. Listen around the middle of this thing I said that I do not like the results of democracy and when I say that I'm talking about the war on drugs and particularly its impact on minority communities the war making that is a constant feature of United States policy mass surveillance the list goes on and on and on but that isn't a reason not to vote it doesn't create moral arguments against voting. I think you've got to live in the world. Persuasion is the name of the game of the game. When I worked on Capitol Hill some professors came in some professors came in and they said in 20 years the whole thing is going to be regulation of bits forget about cable, forget about telephone forget about satellite it's all just going to be bits and my colleague and I we sat and looked at him and kind of laughed to ourselves well you've just solved 5% of the problem that's figuring out what the right answer is the other 95% of the problem is getting people to come along with you getting a bill passed in Congress in this case but we know a lot of the answers we think in the libertarian community the other 95% of the problem is getting people to come along with us let me also say that the people who have the power now and the people who use this power of democracy in ways that we don't like they have that power because they've solved the collective action problem on Facebook, on TV individually they're all saying get out and vote they're not doing these precise calculations about whether it's rational or efficient they're all voting and they're going to turn around next year and start telling us something they want to do in another realm that I'm not going to like so join me in solving this collective action problem join me in voting for the candidate of your choice that was a killer clue I think we've got about a little bit left in our closing statement so I just want to answer two questions the first one is is voting wrong? I think the answer there is no I think voting badly is wrong but voting itself is not wrong is not voting wrong? well I don't think it's so wrong that we should be that we should be publicly shaming people if they choose not to vote especially if they were likely to vote badly but if you're a libertarian who wants to influence people if you want to influence policy outcomes then yeah, I think not voting is wrong because you are reducing your influence you're reducing your ability to affect policy outcomes and I think Aaron's answer to my hypothetical question about that that woman who hands him the flyer and says will you vote for me illustrates why because that was a coach and answer I think it's actually correct that you are devoting your career to trying to expand human liberty but I think she moved on to the next three voters and you took to give that answer whereas a simple yeah, I vote and I care about what you care about would have gotten you a lot farther so we're going to ask you now to deliver your closing statement and then after that we will close this has been a lot of fun I want to point out a few closing ideas first, Mike's entire argument is only an argument for lying about voting and not voting so you can combine both of us together and you just lie and said you did second, Jim Harper's argument about being a rational calculator I asked them how many times in the last ten years they've written their congressman gone to a local school board meeting voted in a primary, voted in a local election all of these things that can matter on Jim's calculus writing your congressman matters a lot and I don't understand if we're having this debate about what effectiveness is should be saying well why didn't you do that Jim if he hasn't maybe he does all the time but one reason you wouldn't do it is because you rationally calculated the cost and then this whole voting thing comes up and we spend this whole debate on this we should be talking about other things again we're not talking about voting in mass they keep sliding over into this fact that voting matters that's so trivially true that it would be crazy for us to come up here and say it doesn't your vote doesn't matter and if it goes against your conscience you don't have to vote so that's what this is about it's not wrong for a libertarian to abstain from voting it's also okay for libertarians to vote don't vote, do vote makes no difference to us but if you vote what's about you and vote for something or someone that doesn't compromise what you stand for who cares if it won't matter it matters deeply to you and it should if you want to have principles that matter and if you don't vote don't sweat it take your kid to the park write your congressman stick it to the man and become an Uber driver circumvent the state we don't have to preach the gospel in non-voting but having a mature conversation about the virtues and vices the powers and limitations of voting is always beneficial in many ways it's long overdue principles are a very difficult thing to have in the world of politics in many ways politics is the art of the possible is the art of compromise which means that a principal politician is usually an unemployed one if you're a libertarian please don't forget what you stand for and that's liberty democracy or voting is not the same thing as liberty yes democracies look like they promote liberty more than some of the alternatives but they can also easily go astray and when they do those in government usually cite the people as justification maybe by consciously not voting by being able to explain to others why we're not voting we can change not just the policies of our existing government but people's beliefs about government we can say that there are better more meaningful ways to achieve prosperity and peace and justice we don't need to resort to the state every time we see a problem and we can convince them the state is very often the wrong way to solve those problems in a sense the problem with voting as practiced today is that people take it too seriously as a means for achieving good governance they invest it with too much meaning when abstaining doesn't make things worse and voting doesn't make things better by making the principal choice not to participate in a false show of public spiritedness we can take some of the air out of big government's balloon just because everyone is praising the emperor's clothes doesn't mean that you have to thank you thank you so I am not unaware of the irony of asking who won this debate and asking you all to vote on that question however, if I might have a show of hands first for the affirmative for the affirmative and for the negative I think I'm going to call it for the affirmative how many here change their minds? hey and which direction did you change your minds toward? I saw one hand go this way one hand go that way and one hand not move so oh well maybe you won more than you realize then in any event in any event we can continue to discuss this at the reception which I believe is one floor down in the lobby is that correct? okay great great thank you all for attending