 I'm here to talk, as many of you know, I'm an economist, so I'm going to be talking about the economic approach to voting. So I'm going to have two roles here. I'm going to summarize some of what conventional economic analysis says and then sort of give my cynical commentaries. We'll see the mainstream economists, as usual, are really smart people and they have nice conclusions and so forth. But often where they take it just shows that actually they know what they want to do beforehand. They have their political preconceptions and all this mainstream formal garb is just really window dressing. So that I will give you a little hint to where I'm going there. Also let me disclose up front, I know people have different strategies and views. When I was younger I used to go vote and I would typically just go in and on the ballot pick the third party candidate, whatever the race was, that was closest to the libertarian because in some races they didn't have that so I would pick the constitutionalist whatever. At this point in my life I don't vote but it's not that I think there's something intrinsically wrong with it. I know some libertarians think that oh if you're voting you're in league with the state. So it's not that and also I don't want you guys to be defensive in case you are. Like you know you're going to vote for you've already done early voting. My point here is not to wag my finger and say what did you do that for? I do kind of wonder that but I'm not here to criticize. I'm just curious baffled. I want to give you a frame to help you think through just to see because we'll see a lot of the analysis of voting is really nonsensical when you think about it. So first of all this whole notion of get out the vote or rock the vote. So there was a thing recently where Justin Timberlake, the pop star, he got in trouble because he went and voted and I think was in Memphis, I don't know if he lives in Nashville and that's why he was voting in Memphis but in that event he was in Memphis and he voted and he took a selfie you know of his ballot and then tweeted that out or something to put on his social media encouraging young there was some hashtag I don't know if it was get out the vote or whatever the cool kids are doing these days but his point was hey I just did my early voting and you should too let you know let's get out the vote and there's this recurring thing every four years where a lot of celebrities go and they're especially appealing to young people and the implicit message is the reason our government this you know the state apparatus is so horrible is because the good decent people all stay home and it's only the evil people who go and vote all the time and that's not really true right I mean it's because really what's going on is I think I don't I'm not in Justin Timberlake's head but I that would be kind of odd wouldn't it but I'm pretty sure what he means is hey all you progressives out there who really wanted Bernie suck it up and go vote because otherwise Donald Trump's gonna be the president we don't want that right if millions of Trump potential Trump voters saw that tweet and said you know Justin you're right I'm gonna go vote I think he'd be like right I don't think that's what he intended all right so there's there's that issue really what so if you just think about in general to just broadcast hey those of you who are thinking of you know who are on the edge you're thinking it's I gotta go to work that day and the lines and just go ahead and vote in general unless you thought you were targeting a particular thing they would just cancel each other out right I mean voting is intrinsically really wasteful and stupid when you think about it so I had a proposal one time I put it up on Facebook got a lot of a lot of likes so you know share it with you guys the market approved I said instead of our current system where everyone gets one vote which is kind of wasteful right the people go and they largely cancel each other what they should do is you go up to the voting booth every year and then you get as many votes as you can do legitimate push-ups right just think about that we would still get awful leaders right because in general they would still cancel up but now everybody would be in better shape right so I mean but but that just kind of underscores how this whole thing is incredibly wasteful if what we're trying to do is just come up with some system to see you know to gauge public opinion all right and Ryan has pointed out the problems with that now what's what's really funny is economists have some pretty powerful results formalizing sort of crystallizing the stuff that Ryan was talking about and in particular it's what's called Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem so let me very quickly summarize what that is so this is Kenneth Arrow you know huge gun in economics not a an anarcho-capitalist by any stretch for those of you who know him but he had this famous result now I know for sure what the result is but I heard a back when I was in grad school and I taught us they told us this anecdote to to motivate how he found I have not like gone and read a biography so this this might just be an urban legend but the story goes that Arrow was in grad school working on you know voting systems and so forth and there were a lot of problems that economists had discovered you know economists have been studying voting systems at that point for decades if not centuries and just to give you an example so if the simple majority rule right that leads to problems because what let's say the public you know looking at choices A and B they prefer A to B but if you looked at B versus C they would prefer B to C but if you look at C and A they prefer C to A right so there's a it's it's what's called intransitive so that that's possible there's nothing contradictory about that that could be true right in sports you could see that to like certain teams like this team could be done they could be done but then they would be the first team that's logically possible so that could be the situation so if that is true then that leads to gaming the system by the people running the elections you know they can put the you know if they want candidate B to win they just got to make sure to arrange the sequence of face offs to make sure that you know B faces the person B is gonna win in the last round whereas if B had faced somebody else early on he would have gotten knocked out okay so economists knew in general there's theoretical problems with all these voting systems they had come up with and they could do all kinds of things okay let's have ten total points that each voter gets and you can assign the points to the list of potential candidates so if you really like Jim Smith you'll give all ten points to him right but if you if you're not he's all right I'll give him four points and I'll give my second-place person three points you know there's all kinds of things but even there there's gaming that's possible that somebody might not not respond truthfully there's somebody might give ten points just to the person that's their top pick even though they really don't prefer him that much more than the second target so there's things like that where it's they studied it so what arrow did is he said okay let's just try to winnow this thing down let's let's just get rid of all the potential theoretical voting systems that are clearly stupid that we wouldn't want to use to then focus on the ones that you know have some intrinsic legitimacy to them some of some appeal and so he said all right so what kind of rules am I gonna adopt to weed out clearly bad ways of translating individual preferences into some sort of social welfare function okay this is probably the first time in a Mises event someone has said social welfare function but I use the quotation marks all right so don't don't kick me out okay so you get the idea what they're trying to do they have a bunch of the tech voters like in the little model who have preferences over things and then we want to come up with some system to map from all the citizens preferences to one you know unified thing that represents the social will in terms of these preference rankings that's what they're trying to do mathematically so he said all right let me just come up with some criteria for a good mapping system all right and so he said so for one thing if every single person in society prefers a to b whatever you know these are abstract things whatever a and b are they could be candidates they could be policies like should we raise taxes they could be states of the world like should we crack down on pollution doesn't matter just very you know abstract things because it's a mathematical model but said if every single person prefers a to b whatever our social rule mapping is it better not turn out that the social rule says b is better than a right everyone get that that clearly so they can call it the unanimity rule so that's pretty straightforward I mean regardless of your views of democracy monarchy what have you clearly that seems kind of obvious yeah that would be dumb if every single person thinks a is better than b and yet our rule says therefore the government should do b because that's better than a all right stuff like that he also said there it should be transitive if the social rule thinks a is better than b and b is better than c then it better think that a is better than c okay so you avoid the cycling problem things like that okay people say yeah that that makes sense otherwise that leads to problems okay so he goes through enlist things like like that another one was non-dictatorship all right which is very weak tradition just said it's okay if in any particular outcome the social rule has identical preferences for some person in society but it better be at least possible with some combination of individual preferences that the social rule does not always map identically to one person's preferences because otherwise that person would be a dictator okay again that's okay so he goes through and lists things like that there are some that were a little more technical that I can't really you know just summarize for you right here but they were all is non-objectionable as the ones I just went through there wasn't anything that was really stretching once you understood what it meant you'd be like oh yeah of course you want that in any kind of sensible rule so he went and did and started proving so he was looking for the space of all rules that satisfy these criteria and it turned out it was the empty set right meaning he ruled here he concluded he just ruled out and said it is impossible to come up in general when you know you allow for people to have all kinds of preferences that they might have it's impossible to come up with a rule that satisfies all these criteria simultaneously and so it was called arrows impossibility theorem so that I think I didn't look it up again I think he found that like in the 60s so do you guys remember how back in the 1960s all of the economists and social scientists just abandoned their faith in democracy you guys remember that right didn't happen so I mean that should have been a literature stopper that's boom I mean it was the most unexpected again they so that's clear what the result is I mean I know that's the result is but I don't know if the story I told about why he went looking for I don't know if that's true but that's what I was told in grad school and I don't think those people would have lied to me so right so you can see how that's a very it was a very unexpected result he thought that he was just gonna win out of way and just find like let's focus on the stuff that's sensible and then found out oops I just ruled out all possible political systems so so what did they do they just went huh okay and then they just kept going on and doing all their journal you know they're they're peer-reviewed articles and whatever and publishing in that area and so this is just another example I think to underscore how these guys are bluffing when they say to Austrians that oh you guys just use your verbal analysis but we know we're very formal and we have our mathematical model so we know what we're talking about it's rigorous but when you get something like that they don't care and they just keep moving on another example because I'm still holding a grudge on this is my my my dissertation one of the results I found there was as some of you may know the mainstream economists they embrace what you might think is a productivity theory of interest right in their models they have that interest equals the marginal product of capital Austrians verbally blew that up in the 1800s and so I was like well how can this be you know the math is correct in these models they're not doing a contradict so how and I realized what it was I won't boy their models had one good right so once you allow for the world to have more than one good which some would think empirically is true the result falls away okay and so I just kind of did a little counter-example or I showed how you know if we have two or more goods then interest doesn't equal the marginal product capital like that that doesn't even make sense in that world you got to worry about changing prices blah blah blah but if there happen to be one good the model reduces to what you guys are teaching us here in grad school and so I showed I showed this guy and I'm I guess I am making fun of him but it's he's a nice guy I'm not saying he's a jerk or he was dishonest but I showed it to this guy who was real sharp with math and everything I was really excited like I did it you know like Rothbard and these guys they just didn't know to go do it with the math but now I've done it and so now we were it's gonna change the world these guys and I showed him he goes somehow we know and then he just kept going on with this thing somehow they know so I think somehow they don't know but the point is that this is just another example of where they you know you they get these results mathematically and then if it's doesn't you know they can just come up with a way okay well that's interesting and we're gonna go ahead and do something else so with voting like I say it's the stuff Ryan was talking about I mean that's it's crystallized you get it from mathematical economists to prove that in principle the general will makes no sense that's an empty concept it's nonsense they prove that in principle all right let me focus a little bit more now on what some of you may have heard when economists who are real cynical talk about why they don't vote all right and so there's a standard argument let me just reiterate just there might be people here I've never actually heard it crystallized and then I want to tweak it and say that's somewhat related to my own views as to why I don't vote but it's not identical and so here the standard view goes something like this an economist will say okay what would have to happen for your vote to be decisive for the fact that you voted for a particular candidate versus another one that that made the difference over who's gonna be in the White House you know in January and they said first of all the state in which you're voting has to be decisive in the Electoral College right that if you're in some small state and the winner ends up winning by a margin in the Electoral College bigger than the votes that your state has it doesn't matter which way your state went okay and so there's that element and then let's say though your state is crucial that if your state had gone the other way than a different person would have won even there now it needs to be the case that in your state the popular vote is determined by a margin of one right that so that that's the only circumstances in which your particular vote would change you know which way your state went and then it also has to be true that your state going one way they're determined to the president is so just empirically the chance of that happening is astronomically low and so this is where they come up with this you know quips like you're more likely to get in a car accident on the way to the polling booth then to actually determine who the next president's gonna be right so some economists who are real hard boiled and cynical give that kind of argument and then say and therefore that's why I don't vote because I know it's not gonna affect anything QED and they they step away so there's it's important to work through that logic but strictly speaking I don't think that's a great argument that's a very utilitarian argument and you wouldn't or at least most normal people would shy away from applying that logic in other areas so for example we're walking down and we see some guy passed out on a park bench in his wallets hanging out and you wouldn't say well let's take his wallet whoa yeah it's that stealing you can't do that and he goes well look at there's lots of people coming and going what are the chances someone's not gonna take his wallet right it might as well be me it's not gonna affect the outcome you know no matter what this guy's just while it's gone I might as well get it right so you can see there how that wouldn't follow at least necessarily it would if you were you know complete utilitarian you know in an amoral sense and had no value system but you can see how that argument by itself so it's not that I endorse the version of the economist argument for not voting I just gave you what mine's a little bit different what I tell people is what makes no sense is when someone says oh yeah I'm voting for so-and-so it turns my stomach I can't stand the guy or in today's elections like I can't stand her but you know it's I'm avoiding the the greater of of two evils by doing this alright and that's and so that's why I'm doing it yeah I agree and so you could sit there and try to say all the horrible things about the candidate for whom they're playing to vote and the person gets it yeah I stipulate all that it's just you know the other person's even worse so that's why I'm doing it so there what I'm saying and this is the where the title of my talk comes if you saw in the brochure is I'm saying it doesn't make sense to do something that you think is kind of immoral or if you're voting for a bad person that someone you really actually don't like whose policies don't come anywhere near your preferences because you think you're acting smart and pragmatically because no you're not your particular vote does absolutely nothing and so if it's not something you feel good about then there's no point in doing that so just to give it a silly analogy just to drive home this point you're over at your friend's house and you're getting ready to leave you know hang on hang on one second you five minutes and he takes out magnets on his fridge and spells a TR UMP he was okay now we can go you're like what what did you just do that for and he's like because Hillary's trying to take our guns that's why what what what is that and he's like Bob Supreme Court that's why I did this and what do you say and so the point is the guy could he just kept sitting there telling you how bad Hillary was and that's why he arranged Trump on his fridge you would be utterly baffled by the same token when someone's trying to explain to me why next week they're gonna go and pull the lever for Trump in a voting booth I'm equally baffled that the two have nothing to do with whether Hillary's in power or not right now the obvious response is people say wait a minute Bob you're you're that's clever and there's something fishy though because if everybody acted like you will then Hillary is gonna win and I said okay if everybody acted like me then there'd be 150 million podcasts taken down Paul Krugman every week right so that would be awesome I would much rather have that all right so again just look at where the logic goes though even in terms of voting so okay right so that's why if you're agreeing with me that you really don't like Trump you know it's like and you don't like you know what's Gary Johnson so on okay go right in whatever go right in Lou Rockwell or something right so if what if though if the reasoning you're using is I want to you know be a manual con and do the thing that I wish everyone else would do okay so go right in the candidate you really like because that you see what I'm saying so it's this weird thing where they flip back and forth between pragmatism and idealism where they're saying oh no I'm doing this thing that I feel queasy about because I'm just looking at the consequences and I'm pointing out no consequentially your thing has nothing to do with whether Trump or Hillary is elected and then they say okay but I can't just reason selfishly like that I got to take one for the team and do what I want the team to do and say right you just told me you wish the team would all vote for you know Ron Paul or somebody like that so why don't you go ahead if you are gonna go vote so anyway that's like I'm not telling people what to do I'm just trying to get them to see that a lot of times the justification when they try to explain to me why they're doing what they're doing it doesn't make any sense they keep flipping back and forth so let me in the few minutes I have left here now talk a little bit about you know why I've taken the stance I have and then to get you to see how this affects the power of the state so I think the part of why I don't like voting and and now this is less of an unpopular opinion so as Jeff was talking about how there's silver linings here for me the silver lining has been in previous elections I don't like confrontation with if I'm at a social gathering and people want to start talking about politics I usually just nod my head and I don't get into it but you know if someone point blank was saying what we're gonna vote for in previous elections if I said oh I don't vote they would get mad at me right like they would really jump people have died for this and they get really mad you know because the Fuhrer was sitting around thinking how can I keep Bob Murphy from voting you know that's that's what they were he's like how many Panzer divisions do we devote to that so the so so what they're but but this time around talking to no you know normal people or whatever and then they said what are you doing this and I said oh I don't vote and they'll go yeah you know they don't get mad like this time around people at least see the appeal of that like oh you're just not gonna participate that's interesting let me think about that you know so so that's that's the one one silver lining but part of my rationale for that is because as Ryan was pointing out here they they like to use it to legitimate legitimize the state right the cliche of if you don't vote you have no way to complain that sort of thing that they want to go through these elections so that people feel like well you know we just lost this time around so if we don't like what Hillary's doing then you know four years from now we just got to put in new people right they people running the state like that mentality they want you to think that the only avenue by which you can affect social change is by going and knocking on doors and getting people to sign petitions to get your guy or your woman on the ballot next time around they like thinking that that's the the channel through which you have to move and in general no that's not true is as Mises he was relaying a point that David Hume made all governments rest on public opinion even totalitarian dictatorships right and so it's you know the function the social function from their point of view of having periodic elections is just to reassure the masses that this is a representative system and so if you don't like what we're doing don't worry just you know go to the polls later on and so if you can do other things to try to get the public to reduce their respect for the people in power then that's also very effective and so clearly that that's what I've been doing with my time so it's not that I'm apathetic it's that I think there's better uses of my time than fretting over you know oh gee who are we gonna vote for this next time around let me just give you a few observations to drive home that point so some people when they hear that kind of talk they think it's very naive and they say no these totalitarian dictatorships I mean they have a police state if you criticize the government they lock you up or they just disappear so that's what keeps those people in power I mean that that is true that's one necessary element of their control but it's also they control public opinion there if it were correct to say that in these really totalitarian states it's all about who how many guns they have and it's not about public opinion then in those totalitarian states they would have open media that the schools would have nothing to do with the government the ruler wouldn't carry so yeah go ahead and teach whatever you want in school go ahead and look whatever you want the internet because if you challenge me you're dead but that's not what they do it's precisely in these closed societies where the ruler has much more power than they do in so-called Western societies where they have the tightest control over the information that people get because it's in those societies in particular where most people have to not know how bad it is otherwise the regime would fall all right I saw somebody come to NYU one time and he gave a really interesting talk about what was called network goods and he was talking about he had this example where he said that in totalitarian regimes in particular they have to quickly scrub anti-regime graffiti right that if somebody in the middle of the night climbs up on a bridge and says you know the ruler's bad or down with so-and-so the regime has to quickly scrub that because it's a focal point it's a signal when other dissidents see that it's not merely that they see it and say oh there's at least one other person who thinks like me it's also not that they know oh wait a minute other people who might be disaffected are seeing that but they all know that they all know it right so it's like a it's sort of builds a spree to core and so that kind of thing needs to be scrubbed immediately so in terms of our system here let me just try to hopefully this works okay great so I don't know I'll try to read this to you I don't know if you guys can see it in the back so Hillary Clinton had a tweet a while ago she said if the FBI is watching you for a suspected terrorist links you shouldn't be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked so this wise guy says if the FBI is investigating you you shouldn't be able to run for president okay but now but now those of you who use Twitter you know and you do this probably without even thinking about it what do you do when you see something you love and it's hilarious you go and check and see how many other people have liked this or retweeted it and so it's not just that this guy had a great zinger but you look and say all three point two thousand people liked this status or this tweet that this guy put out so if you're you know concerned about a Hillary Clinton presidency or whatever this thing gives you hope it's not just that you derived enjoyment out of seeing this guy zing her it's you realize three thousand other people you know saw this so then you extrapolate and say well you know how many people weren't at their computer or whatever so you see all there must be many millions of Americans who would have read this and thought this is hilarious right so you see the function of this and how in terms of undermining the legitimacy of the corrupt regime the methods we have right now it's not merely that we can beam information into millions of people's brains very with low cost it's that we can all be aware of just of what our numbers are and it's this kind of thing so in terms of you know undermining Clinton but potential Clinton presidency whether she gets in or not to me the the two seconds it took this guy to send that tweet out is way more useful than him waiting in a line and casting a boat for somebody against Hillary on election day and so I guess it sounds like I'm wrapping up and saying so okay everyone go out there and get on Twitter that's not really what I'm saying what I'm saying is voting is so useless that even being on Twitter is way more useful all right thank you