Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Slightly tangential to the article itself, but quite relevant to the overall vibe of this comment section (and others like it): it seems like a large percentage of the HN community genuinely thinks that we should always do whatever is best for ourselves personally when it comes to politics.

"Voting against their own interests" has been a common refrain around here for the last months/years, usually in reference to Trump supporters and usually in reference to economic interests, as if your own personal economic benefit is the only thing that matters when in the voting booth.

Maybe some people believe in more than just their own economic self-interest? In fact, Benjamin Franklin once said that "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." And yet I feel like there are many commenters around here who are effectively encouraging everyone to do that, and/or gleefully experiencing schadenfreude when people don't do that.

Now that I have articulated this though, I realize maybe a community built around a startup accelerator is exactly the place you'd find people that fixate on economic self-interest.

Beyond economic self-interest, maybe particularly in the USA it is possible to vote for people who can actively undermine your vote in the future.

Pretty long history in the US of gerrymandering, ID voter laws and reducing voting stations that pretty directly limit people's ability to vote.

I think anger just blocks rational thought.

I don't think those examples make any sense in the context of voting for self-interest.

- gerrymandering: voting for someone that will gerrymander is once again voting for your own interests (this time at the expense of democratic values). If the prone-to-gerrymander candidate you are voting for does in fact gerrymander, it is likely to be in favor of that political party (which is the one you voted for).

- Voter ID: I think everyone who wants stronger voter ID laws and is voting for them is not particularly worried about not having an ID when it comes time to vote in the next election.

- Reducing voting stations is an interesting one, but again I think most of the people who would vote for a party that reduces voting stations are not worried about access to them (either because they can easily take time off to vote, they are quite mobile, or because they are happy with mail-in-ballots).

So I think you are helping make my point, but in the opposite direction of how you meant – those are a bunch of examples of people voting selfishly in a way that could hurt democracy. I want people that would vote for such things to vote against their own self-interest, and instead vote for what is best for the health of our democratic republic.

In this case I mean the people adversely affected by the above policies can still find themselves voting for them.

The voterID one for example, people who can vote one election that have otherwise out of date ID will find themselves unable to vote in the next election.

VoterID can be especially tricky in the US due to not having a Nation ID or a federally run election see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Uni... for a good summary.

I would imagine a pretty "rational" perspective would be to be in favor of policies that allow you to vote again in the future (just in general).

Right, I still don't think that is true. The people voting for Voter ID are not struggling to get a new ID when their old one expires.

Yes, there is no "federal ID" (besides passports and passport cards), but if you've had an ID before, it is not difficult to get a new one in any US state.

I think we have reached a terminus. But I do want to say I appreciate your respectful and straightforward messaging.

What I've described above isn't a theoretical problem, it is an actual occurring issue that has happened time after time.

I don't want to say it's "privileged" but I think you are personally down playing the difficulty these issues raised on specific groups.

If you read the Wikipedia article you will see that minority groups are significantly less likely to have up to date state IDs.

And respectfully anyone without a permanent address can also have a very hard time getting ID.

That point I'm making is that people in these groups will still vote for policies that directly negatively impact their ability to participate in democracy. Not a strawman argument, based on actual voter data.

It could be a part of the larger problem that a decreasing percentage of Americans are even voting at all.

That is the point that you're making, but you kinda need to back it up. I have seen little evidence that people voting for voter ID laws struggle to get IDs, just evidence that some people struggle.

> Beyond economic self-interest, maybe particularly in the USA it is possible to vote for people who can actively undermine your vote in the future.

E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

Fact: There are people who will tell you with a straight face how they voted for Trump even though he promised to do things that would harm them because they didn't believe him, that it was campaign rhetoric.

This isn't "I never thought the face-eating leopards would eat my face", this is "I didn't think the face-eating leopards would actually eat faces, I thought it was just a campaign slogan".

Yes, those people are dumb, however it doesn't really affect the main my point of my comment (which was a bit meander-y I admit), which was merely that "voting against your own self-interest" isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Norwegian citizens found that they could vote themselves money and it worked out fine. It's almost always a better strategy than voting to give money to oligarchs.

That's because there aren't many Norwegians and Norway has a lot of oil. It's one of the few countries where they can afford to do so.

And nobody is voting to give money to oligarchs. We'd just rather not have our country spend itself into the third world.

Ironically the result of all the cuts will likely be a reduction in the size of the economy - which can actually lower the tax take too (a portion of the money flowing around the economy comes back in taxes) so the combination of that will likely be an increase in the US's debt to GDP ratio and reduced living standards for most people.

That is not to say that Governments can spend to excess with no consequences of course, but that these indiscriminate cuts are likely going to have the opposite effect as intended.

> That's because there aren't many Norwegians and Norway has a lot of oil. It's one of the few countries where they can afford to do so.

Sweden probably has as many social programs as Norway, and it has no oil money—though it does seem to have more billionaires per capita than the US:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

I'd argue that rather than vote themselves money, they voted for sharing the exceedingly plentiful (relative to population) natural resources of their country.

But yes, that does seem to be a version of "vote yourself money" that is far less problematic than other instantiations.

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