Milton Friedman used to say frequently, in conferences and speeches, that people "vote with their feet". In authoritarian and non-democratic countries, people don't have the capacity to go to the polls to change government, so that people dissatisfied with these governments resort to immigration as a tool to get better conditions. By migrating people from China to Hong Kong, for example, they vote with their feet for a system like Hong Kong over Chinese.
During the Cold War, people from East Germany started to cross the border into West Germany, the reasons are many, but those people were constantly voting with their feet against socialism.
When the Germans came out of the East, they did not vote for capitalism, little could the East Germans know about capitalism, they had gone from living from the Kaiser's empire to the short and failed Weimar Republic, to then reach National Socialism, finally, they had been caught in the grip of Soviet socialism, so the inhabitants of East Germany never in their lives had lived in something slightly similar to capitalism. East Germans voted with their feet when they left, not by capitalism over socialism, but rather that anything, any system, any government, was better than what they were living. Even the capitalism they were unaware of was much better than the misery they were going through.
Many Germans even preferred to risk their lives to not stay in the conditions in which they were, going through dangerous land borders that the Soviets blocked, and crossing the Baltic Sea at the risk of getting the most fatal consequences, all just to get out of there. Those people were casting a vote saying that anything, even death, was better than staying in the conditions they were in. Anything, no matter the fear of the unknown, was better than socialism.
But where I want to go with this, it's not just about politics, although it's clear that the concept of voting with your feet is about that. Have you learned anything that serves you in daily life? Vote with our actions.
In the same way that in the past examples immigrants voted with their feet, we vote every day, every moment, every second, and every unit of time small enough so that it can be unquantifiable. Every action we do is a vote we cast, in fact, we also cast a vote when we do nothing. That is the democracy of nature.
If we think we are overweight, for example, we can do two things; or we change our attitude to lose weight, that is, we take actions, or on the contrary, either by excuses or by disinterest, we do nothing, that is, we don't take actions.
With these votes we are choosing, not a government, but a future.
Inaction is also a vote in this election; it means that we are satisfied with the status quo and that we will not do anything to change it. Think of it as a re-election, we vote to keep everything exactly like this, or go deeper into what we have been doing.
We can say that we don't like something, that current conditions are wrong, and that we can't "do it". But the reality is this, if we publicly support the red party, and at the polls we vote for the blue, then with our actions we are contradicting what we say.
If we don't like our current situation, and we say publicly that we are unhappy, and in turn we think about it, but in practice we do nothing to change it, then we are simply, even if we don't like it, voting to keep things as they are.
As I said earlier, this is the democracy of nature. Every action we take and every action we don't take is valid. We decided. If we are unhappy with the current state of affairs, then we should simply vote for a change. To finish this publication as I started it, that is, with a quote from Milton Friedman, you are free to choose.
What do you say about yourself? Are you voting for the future you want?
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