Joakim Book – February 9, 2021 @ America Institute for Economic Research
If Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy met Bryan Caplan’s Open Borders, the result would be Ilya Somin’s great book from last year: Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.
In a dense 186-page book Somin does what these two great scholars did
separately over hundreds of pages: undermining voting as the most
effectful participation in civic life and showing that arguments against
foreigners coming to our shores don’t hold water.
The brilliance of Free to Move is to connect these two
arguments. Ballot voting is unsatisfactory for all the reasons that foot
voting is not: an individual has no ability to impact the outcome of,
and therefore has no reason to learn about, the political issues
involved. A foot voter has almost full ability to affect the outcome of
his or her decisions, and thus all the reasons in the world to
investigate them. Having accountable decisions made at the level where
their consequences are most urgently felt – the individual – aligns political life with personal values in a way no amount of democratic participation could.
The story of Somin’s previous book, Democracy and Political Ignorance,
is fruitfully weaved into a compelling take on migration. It’s not so
much the economic argument that international migration from poor
countries to well-off countries enriches the world – which Somin spends
some time exploring – but that in doing so people who vote with their
feet have a larger say over their own life than they could have by
ballot-voting. Individual freedom to live one’s life as one sees fit is
thereby advanced; fixing what you think is wrong with your country is
more easily done by leaving than by voting.
In terms of Albert Hirschman’s classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Somin makes the case that Exit is a more powerful tool than Voice.
One thing that often puzzles economists is why people would vote at all considering that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning
than to affect the outcome of an election. Most voters can’t
distinguish one candidate from another, don’t know what the topics
discussed mean, don’t know which party controls which branch of
government, and are in no position to assess what the future outcome of
proposed policies are likely to be. That doesn’t make for a particularly
effective decision-making process and Somin painstakingly takes apart
proposals to fix them: the scale and scope of modern government is too
large for anyone to grasp in its entirety, making effective and informed
voting an impossibility; “retrospective voting” doesn’t work as the electorate would just punish or reward politicians for things they had no influence over.
Deliberative solutions like Citizens’ Councils just beg the question
and make even higher cognitive and informational demands on an otherwise
ignorance populace – they also afford too much powers to insiders to
set agendas and control information flows: “Here, as elsewhere,
increasing the political influence of one part of the population reduces
the influence of others.”
Foot-voting lets us escape from the inherent zero-sum nature of
politics. If somebody gets more power in a democracy – through franchise
exclusions, non-equal voting or more palpably oligarchies and
dictatorship – someone else gets less. More people ballot-voting means
that my individual voice becomes less important. Not so with
foot-voting: for some to hop jurisdictional borders does not “reduce the
ability of others to participate in the formation of policy.”
In the latter half of the book Somin shows that foot voting does a
better job than ballot-voting in improving people’s lives, and, more
importantly, that the common arguments wielded against (im)migration
don’t hold water. We have plenty of problems with ballot-voting, and the
worse those problems are the better foot voting looks. As such there’s
plenty to annoy ideologues on both the left and the right, which
elegantly lets Somin claim the informed and enlightened middle ground – while still advancing a radical idea.
The private sector angle, briefly touched upon on occasion, is a
little weird and under-analyzed. Sure, having private institutions like
homeowners’ associations, membership clubs, or private security guards
let us opt into rules and policies that we deem most beneficial to us.
It lets us take matters into our own hands instead of relying on fickle
politicians every other year. But, as Somin freely admits it’s not clear
that these are political choices. Then again, plenty of people
ballot-vote on narrow personal, financial, or self-identity grounds that
aren’t clearly political either. Here Somin effectively takes apart the
false dichotomy between economic migrants and refugees (‘political’
migrants): what seems like economic choices are “usually at least in
significant part ‘political.’”
The essence of foot voting, like private-sector decisions, is that you decide.
In my mind, this selection point is the strongest indication that
foot-voting outperforms ballot-voting: with enough ranges of options
available for potential movers, they can choose a package that best
suits them. An obvious counterargument is that this doesn’t communicate
any message; just because Californians are leaving for Texas in the hundreds of thousands, we don’t know why
they prefer Texas – and thus, other jurisdictions don’t know which of
their own levers to pull to more align themselves with what people
want.
That’s right, but an equally damaging problem in regular
ballot-voting. Tons of people voted for Trump, both in 2016 and 2020,
but that didn’t tell us what they wanted or why they
objected to rival candidates. Communicative voting is very noisy and
seriously limited. Foot-voting excels in this respect as it doesn’t
require effective communication to work:
“Even if no one else knows why any
given set of foot voters acted as they did, they themselves presumably
know, and still were able to choose which policies they wish to live
under. […] I can enjoy the benefits of [my favored] policies even if no
one else knows that was my motivation.”
Leaving people to choose for themselves allows them to opt out of systems that force majoritarian rule
on them. Somin makes a great case for migration as a life-changing
force for the people able to do it, not least his own parents leaving
the Soviet Union. He suggests that of all plausible ways of alleviating
suffering and misery, allowing people to vote with their feet might be
the best one. If you’re concerned with the morals, practices, and values
of the new arrivals so much so that you think they’ll negatively alter
the political balance of your state or country, Somin suggests a number
of “keyhole solutions” – policies that prevent or address such concerns
without barring the foot voters from showing up: directed taxes to make
up for perceived costs or delayed and restricted political influence.
Changing Societies
The simplest and most elegant counterargument against objections to
immigration changing the culture of a society comes in the format of a
classic “compared to what?” Every generation changes its society but
nobody really thinks that’s a big deal (elders complain about the
“decadence” of youth?). Even so, Somin kicks in the open door: “Few
argue that their elders have a right to use force to prevent [change],
much less expel anyone who fails to conform to the previously dominant
cultural patterns.”
Here Somin finds a club to repeatedly wield against detractors on
both the pro-democracy Left and the anti-immigrant Right. To uphold
restrictions on foreign immigrants one must resort to arguments that
equally well apply to domestic migrants – policies that nobody favors:
“Those who accept this type of
reasoning [restricting migration because of crime, burdens of welfare
state or cultural change] as a justification for immigration
restrictions but reject it as a justification for constraints on
internal migration have a deep contradiction in their positions, one
that in most situations cannot be resolved without applying the same
standards to both types of migration.”
A common argument in immigration debates is that a country is like a
membership club, a house us insiders own and govern collectively for the
benefit of us. Thus, just like I can restrict access to my house to
outsiders, a population can restrict access to their country. The
problem with the analogy is that the sort of people most likely to
invoke it would never allow handing over to the government similar
club-based rights of what one can do in their own homes. Libertarians
hold government rights tighter than private rights, and so
“Consistent libertarians should be
the last to accept any argument implying that governments should have
the same sort of authority over their territory as private property
owners have over their houses or clubs.”
Another angle of the same argument is the fear that foreigners don’t
share liberal principles. But plenty of natives don’t either and we
don’t (yet?)
go around expelling them from the country. Besides, writes Somin,
“Illiberal natives pose a more serious threat to liberal institutions
than recent immigrants do,” as they already have political power.
“Throughout history,“ Somin concludes, “emigration has been a
tremendous boon to people forced to live under corrupt, backward, or
oppressive regimes.” Before we restrict their option to leave by closing
them out from our societies and economies, Somin concludes, we should
ask ourselves three things: first, perhaps the problems we associate
with immigration are overstated. Second, we have keyhole solutions
available that would address the few problems that may survive such an
investigation. Third, migration creates enormous wealth; instead of
preventing people from arriving we could tap some of that wealth to
offset financial or otherwise perceived harm.
While not too preachy or moralistic, Somin dispassionately and in a very nuanced way takes apart arguments against his case. Free to Move is an exercise in careful reasoning, not policy prescription, yet Somin still pushes his readers a little further away from relying on ballot voting for improving the world and a little closer to letting foot voting rule.
However you slice it, voting with your feet is more impactful, more
likely to favorably change an outcome, and delivers the goodies to the
person who wants them the most. Allowing more and better options for
foot-voting doesn’t solve all or even major problems our societies face, but those are topics much outside the scope of Somin’s narrow focus.
Instead, he delivers a simple and justifiable point: Foot voting
isn’t ideal, but it often performs better than the ballot-voting
alternative.
Joakim Book is a writer, researcher
and editor on all things money, finance and financial history. He holds a
masters degree from the University of Oxford and has been a visiting
scholar at the American Institute for Economic Research in 2018 and
2019.
His work has been featured in the Financial Times, FT Alphaville,
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Svenska Dagbladet, Zero Hedge, The Property
Chronicle and many other outlets. He is a regular contributor and
co-founder of the Swedish liberty site Cospaia.se, and a frequent writer at CapX, NotesOnLiberty, and HumanProgress.org.
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The
Electoral College distribution is determined by the number of
congressional seats – so the number of US representatives a state has
plus two senators equals its number of presidential electors. Since
there are 435 seats in the US House and 100 in the Senate, that means
there are 535 electors spread out across the 50 states, plus three in
Washington, DC, for a total of 538. The states that either gained or
lost representatives after the last census also gained or lost an equal
number of electors.
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