Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What, when it comes to corporations I can 'vote with my wallet'? I'm sure Apple, whose profits exceed those of some developed countries, will surely change their ways if I boycott them over stuff like the Uyghur slave shops. Your argument is that voting with your wallet doesn't change things even if it reduces the profits of the company by an amount proportional to the number of people who do it, but voting in an e…
I agree that governments could be better at monopoly busting and that a wide variety of choice is better (here in Belgium there are enough different parties (the Greens, the Socialists, the Labour Party, the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, some right wing parties,...) that it seems to work okay, but I gather that elsewhere there's a dearth of choice). The biggest problem with 'voting with my wallet' is that it mea…
The thing about "vote with your wallet" is that it's not actually a tabulation. Poor people wouldn't get a "vote" as to which yacht companies succeed or fail because they don't buy yachts, but for the same reason, why should they then care anything about yacht companies?
Conversely, the ordinary person still buys necessities, and at scale buys them in larger numbers than rich people do, because the majority of people aren't rich. So the companies making the things ordinary people actually buy do have to be responsive to them.
> I know in the USA there's been some back and forth about it regarding voter ID laws (getting an ID costs money so it penalizes the poor) and the fact that people who can only vote by going to the poll office may get penalized by their employers (who can dock wages for the time the employee spent not working)
The whole thing is so dumb. Just require ID to vote and then don't charge any fees to get an ID. Just open the polls at 8PM the eve of election day and keep them open a full contiguous 24 hours so that nobody has to come during work hours regardless of what shift they work.
> but technically there is universal suffrage and it's better than what came before.
"Technically" seems to be doing a lot of work there, because the actual problems have nothing to do with people not being able to get off work to vote.
The main one is that you have a ballot with a small, finite number of viable candidates and none of them represent your interests. In many cases they all have the same position on a particular issue and that position is different from yours. Even when their positions differ, the ones you agree with don't align.
Candidate A supports zoning reform and opposes alternative energy, Candidate B opposes zoning reform and supports alternative energy, you want both zoning reform and alternative energy, therefore you're screwed into flipping a coin. And so is everyone else, which means the politicians don't actually have to do what anybody wants because most of the votes are people who didn't like any of the candidates holding their nose to choose the one they think is the lesser evil, only to have their vote canceled out by someone who 90% agrees with them on everything but came out the other way on the coin flip.