Vote Sizing Institute

One reason the rich keep getting richer is because capitalism functions on the principle of weighted money - the more money you have, the easier it is to buy and consume. For instance, magazines are cheaper when you buy a subscription, and cigarettes are cheaper by the carton than a pack at a time. If you have enough money to buy lots of magazines and cigarettes, then you can open up a kiosk and sell them on the street corner.

If your kiosk makes enough money, you can use the profits to rent a chain of kiosks and pay others to operate them. You can even take out ads in those magazines you’re selling. If your chain of kiosks is successful and raises enough money, you can turn it into an international corporation with thousands of people on the payroll including lawyers, tax advisors, publicists, lobbyists and private security guards; and buy the publishing company that produces the magazines with your ads in them.

Along with this system of weighted money come other rules of capital, such as interest, treasuries, taxation, deferments and governmental enforcement of financial laws. The more stuff you want to have, the more the rules of capitalism are designed to give it to you. Equal or no wealth distribution goes against our nature and doesn’t work - capital will always be weighted according to our needs.

However, there remain many of us whose money is not weighted; who pay premiums on cigarettes, magazines, payday loans and mortgages; who can’t afford insurance, tax advisors, lawyers or publicists; and who must find another way to live than just surrounding themselves with stuff. While capitalism is focused on enhancing our relationships with wealth and property, communism focuses on power relationships - no private property, no currency, no wages, etc. Those who own little or no capital ride busses, wait in lines, look out windows, use the park, cook, clean, sleep and depend on the police communally.

Americans tend to associate democracy with capitalism, but in reality democracy is the middle ground between capitalism and communism. While weighted money allows capitalism to flourish, the rules that govern our communal relationships do not allow the same - in fact it’s just the opposite. Steve Glickman, founder and president of the Democratic Empowerment Party (DEP) puts it this way: “When it comes to money, the sky’s the limit. Yet when it comes to power we’re all supposed to be perfectly equal through one-person-one-vote; but that one vote does not offer people enough political weight to stop the tide of corruption. So if you happen to be in an abusive relationship with capital and need more communism in your life, you’re out of luck.”

In our society, when weightedness is applied to our wealth relationships but not our power relationships, the imbalance causes a massive shift towards the domination of capital. Only when our government can ensure that people without wealth get their needs met will we be able to collectively steer towards balancing wealth with power. Glickman’s solution for putting democracy back on track is to take capitalism’s principle of weightedness and apply it to the communal side of government - by giving poorer, working and middle class people larger votes.

Risky? Not to Glickman, who sees no reason to think that poorer, working and middle-class people with a weighted vote would shoot themselves in the foot by electing leaders who would intrude too heavily into the marketplace. Says Glickman: “History teaches us that with government truly on their side, people become less dependent on handouts and manufacture higher quality goods in more intelligent ways. When American women and freed slaves got the right to vote, they worked at streamlining government, not squeezing the rich. The politician’s lies that poorer, working and middle class people fall for again and again are not promises to tax-tax-tax, but to trim governmental fat. Weighting the votes of the people most detrimentally affected by corruption, injustice and neglect gives them the tool they need to work towards real change, which benefits us all. Increasing their political involvement leads to cleaner, safer and more exciting environments to live and work in - and lowered taxes across the board.”

Vote sizing can be implemented in economic systems too - as in board member and CEO elections. The DEP promotes an outside-the-box business model called Empowerment Inc. that would distribute voting shares to employees as well as investors. Then the pool of employee voting shares would be distributed inversely to their wages, so that janitors’ and secretaries’ voices would be heard over middle and upper managements, functioning as a worker-perspective ballast against pure profit in the decision making.

Would the janitors and secretaries vote to liquidate the company and screw the investors? If they do, it’s a bad omen for political vote sizing. But if they use their weighted votes to improve working conditions, services or products, productivity, salaries and growth, and decrease the company’s environmental impact - then Empowerment Inc. would become a magnet for more investment and an indicator that vote sizing can also work in the political arena.