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It seems you're both agreeing that voting with your wallet doesn't help much, but voting with your vote does.

• haswell 3y ago
  I’m disagreeing with the premise that making conscious choices about what I purchase can be reduced to “voting with my wallet”, or that we can conclude it “doesn’t help much” based only on a limited outlook on what helps i.e. there are many more reasons to do it that may never have a meaningful monetary impact on the system. If legislation is the only real end goal, that raises the question: how do we reach that goal? Gay marriage isn’t legal by some accident. Attitudes about cannabis aren’t shifting for no reason. These are issues that people cared deeply enough about to keep pressuring the system for decades. An apathetic voter base doesn’t accomplish those changes.
  • paulmd 3y ago
    > I’m disagreeing with the premise that making conscious choices about what I purchase can be reduced to “voting with my wallet”, or that we can conclude it “doesn’t help much” based only on a limited outlook on what helps i.e. there are many more reasons to do it that may never have a meaningful monetary impact on the system. The problem is that capitalism, like the internet, is a system designed to route around problems. From the position of the system, any node acting “incorrectly” and not maximizing its profit is doing it wrong. If you refuse to eat beef, you are only making it cheaper for the people who will still eat beef. And they will eat more of it. The system routes around the error. The only way to reliably effect large-scale changes in these economic patterns is to change the rules of the game. Which is why that is so fiercely contested, and why there’s so much effort to push the blame back down on individual behavior.