'Voting With Your Dollars' Isn't Democratic
If you spend enough time in any debate about the actions of corporations, a certain reply will almost always resurface: that you need to vote with your dollars. That we, as consumers, need to reflect our disappointment in the products and services that we buy by choosing something else. In the words of the business-friendly environmental group Grow Ensemble: "Is the provider of this thing I am buying creating, producing, and delivering it in a way that is good for the planet and the people on it? If not, is there another provider who does? Opt for them."
From a certain viewpoint, this advice makes a kind of intuitive sense. If you believe that the marketplace is a free exchange of goods and services, then it would naturally follow that only the products that consumers believe in dominate. Why would a customer purposefully invest in something they know to be fraught, both financially and ethically? "When you vote daily in the supermarket," Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in 1980, "you get precisely what you voted for, and so does everyone else.
This perspective, however, fundamentally misconstrues how capitalism works. The free market has nothing to do with democracy — some have even argued that these two forces are incompatible. Our current economy creates an environment where choice is not only limited, but that limitation is actively encouraged, making the "vote with your dollars" argument ultimately anti-democratic.
A Lack Of Choices
The marketplace does not operate like a ballot box where consumers have a free range of goods and services to choose from. The current economic paradigm is one of extreme consolidation. For example, a report from The Guardian found that in the US, "four firms or fewer controlled more than 40% of the market share" for the foods we buy, and that number gets higher depending on what goods we are talking about. If you wanted to buy a carbonated drink, three companies (Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Keurig Dr. Pepper) own 92% of the market. Want to buy a dip? Pepsico controls 87.5% alone.
If you truly wished to boycott one of the companies above, it could be very difficult depending on how much of the market they control, not only with that one good or service but with all the ones they own. Pepsico, for example, doesn't just own Pepsi, but Aquafina, Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Quaker Oats, and hundreds more. Since these companies have so many brands underneath them, you might not have the time to research all the goods or services they have, and even then, there might not be a true alternative with your local grocery store or delivery service.
Our current market is designed to make true choice very difficult. You might cut the cord with, say, Amazon by canceling your Prime Membership, but you could still be purchasing from them indirectly via services like Ring, Twitch, IMDB, Goodreads, Audible, Zappos, and many others. Some businesses are just so large that finding a real alternative in your area can be quite challenging.
Of course, this all presumes you have the privilege to cut from that initial service at all. Take, for example, insulin, a medication used to manage the conditions of diabetes. It costs somewhere between $63 to nearly $400 per vial or pen to pay out of pocket, more than any other country in the developed world. Diabetic Americans spend on average thousands of dollars on Insulin annually, and it's not because of "consumer" choice but aggressive patent law and market consolidation.
While insulin medication only costs around $2 to $4 to produce per vial and was initially developed around a hundred years ago, companies in the US have aggressively fought to keep prices high. Three companies — Novo Nordisk, Sanofi-Aventis, and Eli Lilly — control most of the market share. There is no national regulatory framework to cap prices, which means they are incentivized to price it at the highest level that will not spur regulation.
And in the meantime, customers will pay whatever they have to because delayed treatments can lead to deadly complications such as diabetic ketoacidosis. This complication is when your body begins to break down fat (instead of sugar) as fuel, leading to diabetic coma (i.e., passing out for a long time) or even death. Desperation locks in these customers because the alternative could be death.
This reality can be seen with any product or service where need prevents people from opting out. Whether we are talking about the sky-high costs of HIV/AIDS medication or the ridiculous price point of chemotherapy, a person cannot "vote with their dollars" for a service that they require for the sake of their health. Some services are so vital that you will pay for them no matter the cost or die trying.
This logic also applies to major infrastructure services like housing, water, medical care, and even the Internet, where someone needs to use them, either urgently or in their day-to-day life, to exist in society, or even to exist at all. Over 40% of Americans live 5 miles or more from their nearest hospital. Around 64% of Americans have two potential Internet providers or less, with several million not having any option at all. Even fewer options typically exist for energy and water. You have a limited amount of options, and that's it. You aren't going to move your home overnight, or take your failing body five miles over, to shop around for prices.
The idea that you have the option to purchase any product that aligns with your values is naive, especially a vital service where your negotiating power as an individual is next to nothing. Our system likes to expound upon how much choice we as individual consumers have, but as we have just covered, that choice is often an illusion. The large market share of our biggest companies, in combination with aggressive IP law, prevents citizens from truly choosing ethical alternatives in the marketplace.
And believe it or not, this lack of choice is the smallest issue with the "voting with your dollars" argument. When it comes to this line of reasoning, it's not simply the options that hinder people, but the alleged "voting" as well.
Inequality Impairs Democracy
In a democracy, one person's vote isn't supposed to be vastly different from any others. Your vote for one candidate should equal the same as anyone else's.
This ideal has not always been realized in the US. The way the Senate and the Electoral College work means that citizens in certain states have a disproportionate say in elections like the presidency, compared to citizens in more populous states. Many people living here have also been denied their rights as citizens or the right to be considered a citizen at all.
In theory, however, these inequities are simply quirks of our system, ones that are highly controversial and debated, and are not "supposed" to be the norm. Few argue openly that a minority of citizens should be able to vote more or have their votes weighted higher than other eligible citizens. They frame it much differently than that because saying that some votes should matter more would go against the core principles of our democracy. And that would not be a good look.
Again in a democracy, every citizen's vote is supposed to be counted more or less the same. This is why the saying "one person, one vote" has become the rallying call in the fight against anti-democratic measures like voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and removing suffrage for prisoners. These movements are trying to align the ideal of American democracy with its inequitable and often harsh reality.
The Supreme Court Ruling Citizens United v. v. FEC (i.e., the ruling that allowed corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections) was so controversial because it upset the idea that everyone's vote should be counted equally. Money doesn't operate on a principle of equality, but rather inequality. The more money you have, the more you can buy, and in the case of political donations, the more influence you can obtain. As William Horncastle wrote in one of The London School of Economics blogs:
“The impact of Citizens United has had a significant impact on democracy, eroding the foundations of the political finance and disclosure system in US politics. While the future is unknown, it is likely to involve increased spending, reduced transparency, and increased cleavages of political power.”
This problem is even more pronounced in the marketplace, where there are indeed fewer constraints imposed on how much influence you can buy as an individual. The whole purpose of capitalism is that, barring any regulations, people can buy as many goods and services as they want and can afford. It's a system tied to the individual liberties of a few rather than the collective decision-making of the many.
A thousand people could decide they want something, but it makes no difference if they lack the capital to invest in it. It doesn't matter if we are talking about the cure to cancer or magical pills that increase crop yields. No matter how good an idea it is, it simply will not see the light of day. Something contributing to the common good doesn't mean it will succeed in our current marketplace. If anything, we have just seen how capitalists benefit from constraining innovation and overcharging people for essential services.
Conversely, if one wealthy person wants a product or service to exist in the world, no matter how harmful or wasteful that product or service may be, they will most likely succeed. Think of the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch. They made their initial fortunes on oil refining and chemicals and didn't like the threat that acknowledging climate change would have to their bottom line. And so, they spent millions funding (and founding) think-tanks as well as donating to climate-denying politicians to cast doubt onto this reality. They weren't the sole contributors to this skepticism (see ExxonMobil), but they were a major one. We are now facing a ticking clock because a couple of individuals choose this fate for everyone else.
And this is just one example. We could talk about how Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are spending billions of dollars to restart civilization on Mars, a dead world, all while contributing mightily to carbon emissions in the process that make it difficult for this planet to survive. We could also talk about how Bill Gates used his Foundation to keep the COVID vaccine in private hands, contributing to its slow rollout for countries around the world over. And the list goes on.
When you create a society where people are allowed to "vote with their dollars," you are essentially creating a tyranny of the dollar. It's a situation where someone can vote many more times than their peers because of the disparity in wealth between them.
Conclusion
From this lens, capitalism isn't democratic. It's about maximizing the disparities between people. Our economic system naturally conflicts with our current system of governance. Democracy is where every citizen, regardless of their wealth, is ideally (though often not in reality) supposed to be permitted an equal say in how we run things. Capitalism is where some people matter more.
When people use the "vote with your dollars" argument, they are appropriating the language of democracy to give an undemocratic institution a veneer of democratic credibility. They are asking people to avoid the realm of politics (e.g., fighting for greater regulation, breaking up companies, unionization, etc.) and, instead, telling them to stick to capitalism, where people overall have less say in how things are organized. This argument simply does not hold up. It's bad logic that, at best, is a defense mechanism that someone uses to not think too deeply about how power works, and at worst, is gaslighting used to discourage political organizing that is genuinely effective.
We do not need people to "vote with their dollars" in the marketplace. We need them to vote — not just in the ballot box, but in the streets, for their union, at their local grassroots meeting. And yes, we need them to vote with their checkbook too, but not for a product they have very little control over, but for people and organizations fighting in the realm of actual politics: groups advocating for political reform; mutual aid funds giving resources to people who need them; and the few politicians fighting to change things.
That's voting worth rooting for.