 When you look at the best arguments people have given on behalf of a duty to vote, they usually say things like you need to vote because you have to exercise civic virtue, or you need to vote because you should be an agent who's partly responsible for promoting the welfare of your federal citizens, or you should vote because you have a debt to society, you need to pay it. But the problem with those arguments is they don't specifically show you have to vote. Really what they show is you should do something publicly spirited, you should do something to give something back to society, you should find some way of promoting the common good, you should do something for others. What's so special about voting? There's all sorts of other ways to contribute back to society to help other people to be benevolent and to reciprocate with your fellow citizens, or even to exercise civic virtue. Aside from voting within politics, you can write, you can write letters to the editor, you can volunteer in a campaign and so on. But even outside of politics you can do all sorts of things. You can run a for-profit business that gives people jobs, makes them richer, you can do art, you can make advances in science, you can be a good parent, you can smile at people on the street even. There's all sorts of ways to be publicly spirited and to give back to society. Voting's just one of many. Suppose we found out that Thomas Edison never voted, right? Would you say, oh, he's a freeloader? Or suppose we found out Michelangelo, I guess, I don't know if he was in a democratic system or not, but suppose he were and he never voted, would you say, oh, he's a freeloader? He'd go, no, he's paid back his debts, they use people to pay back their debts to society by doing other kinds of things. So I have a view about how you pay back any sort of debt to society if there is such a thing. You receive a bundle of goods from being a member of society. You get economic goods, political goods, social goods and so on, cultural goods and so on. One thought is for every kind of good you get, you need to pay back that kind of good with the same type of good. You get cultural goods, you owe us cultural goods, you get social goods, you owe us social goods. Another view is you can pay for that bundle by providing maybe just one kind of good. You do enough economic stuff and that pays for everything else. Hardly anyone says Obama free-rides on art because he doesn't contribute to art. He just provides politics. No, instead we say the president provides politics in exchange, good government in exchange for the other kinds of things he benefits for. Why don't we say the same thing about people who provide these other kinds of things in exchange for politics? If I think Michelangelo or Thomas Edison aren't free-riders, they're just providing one sort of benefit in exchange for another.