Why I Didn't Vote

I'm not normally a fan of "feeling" surveys -- "How do you feel about the economy?" stories dominate financial news throughout holiday shopping season, and while I understand the implied cause-and-effect, I'm not sure how this approach is better than raw numbers. But this graphic on how Americans view unemployment contains two fascinating nuggets amidst the obvious. 

First, check out the swing on "the primary responsibility for helping jobless Americans." (The key is hard to find: light green is everyone, dark green is those who are unemployed and seeking work.) When people have a job, they believe the government should be the primary party solving unemployment. When people don't have a job, they take this burden on themselves. Not only is this counterintuitive from a "who cuts your paycheck" perspective, it says a lot about the continuing stigma of joblessness. Indeed, our very measurement of unemployment is rooted in the idea of this stigma, that there's something unhealthy about not having an employer.

Second, 25% of the employed sample says they've loaned money to family and friends due to the recession, while 60% of the unemployed sample say they've borrowed money from family and friends due to the recession. The "unemployed and looking" demographic mainly detests asking the government for a check before exhausting their family networks.

I should preface what I'm about to say with three facts. First, I was living on unemployment for about a quarter of 2010. Second, V has been between employers at several points during the recession, and is just now on the path to having a job, and has not held any of her jobs long enough to qualify for unemployment. Third, V's mom has been living on unemployment, especially the emergency federal extension of it, for pretty much the duration of the recession.

Even though I've traditionally identified with the libertarian perspective politically -- and I've said it before but still I'll say it again, please don't confuse me with those obnoxious, racist Tea Partiers -- I believe in unemployment insurance. I'd go far enough to say that there can be state-to-state variances in such insurance and whether or not it's mandatory for employees to purchase, but I do believe it's a good system. Still, what's with the perspective of the unemployed? Why the sudden shift from "government solves it" to "I solve it with a little help from my friends"? Are there just that many unemployed Libertarians (and that many employed Democrats)? Or does the economy look different from outside the security of regular direct deposits?

I've known a lot of temporarily unemployed people in the past two years, most of them in my rough age range. Some have gone back to school, some have embraced freelancing, some have moved in with parents and entered a stasis of low-wage work, and some have roughed it out to emerge with a better job. I've also known a few people who have job hopped without a gap, despite the economy. One thing that nearly all these people have in common is that moment -- the "what will I do now?" moment. I believe that in the past, this moment has led to redoubled effort to find a job or despair at not being able to find a job. The people I know who have lived through this moment, however, have almost all put "job" as one option and pursued a few others: random freelancing gigs; a collage of part-time work; adult internships; sole proprietor businesses; startup business plans; pretty much anything that doesn't involving having a single, regular employer.

In a country that embraces entrepreneurialism to the point of mythologizing it, unemployment can fairly be called a state of mind. Obviously, not everyone can simply choose to own their own business and make ends meet. Not everyone can choose to successfully pay the bills freelancing or take years off their resume by disappearing into university walls. But for people with those options, unemployment is a choice among many, and I think some of the attitudes this survey shows reflect a bunker bravery. "If I want a job, I'll get one." Even as those same people admit the harsh difficulty of finding jobs, they still find it more acceptable to carry the onus than ask society to do it for them.

Like all "feeling" surveys, this betrays more of a reporting bias than a reality. Who, when unemployed, wants to say "it's someone else's job to get me a job," and who, when employed, wants to say "it's the unemployed people's fault"? But we don't want to say these things because they are hidden but pervasive values in our country, values that place single-employer job-holding above mishmash income streams and true entrepreneurial risk-taking. 

The most curious of these charts is actually the one I've ignored, the one in the middle. Only about a quarter of both groups -- the total and the unemployed -- think it's primarily employers who are responsible for solving unemployment. Think about it. That's outrageous from a logic perspective, like only 25% of people believing the trash man is responsible for picking up your trash. Put another way, most people who currently have jobs think that employers are doing everything they can to employ Americans and that the government has to make up the difference. Even stranger, most people who don't have jobs think that it's up to them to create a job, and not an employer!

These sort of twisted logic games can only come from a country that has structured its society around the notion of large-scale companies. Our primary taxation, health care, income, and identities are all tied to employers. The role of ourselves and our government in that equation is confusion. We expect the government to force employers to do the right thing (without doing too much itself), while believe it's up to us to convince employers to employ us. Companies get to sit in the middle, invisible, nearly blameless in political discourse.

If we didn't tie so many of our social programs to companies -- if we let the government be the government and the economy be the economy -- maybe there wouldn't be such confusion about how to solve this unacceptable level of joblessness. Government should tax activity, not income. Health insurance, if we're going to provide it, should be provided, not incentivized for employers to provide. Likewise, companies should take a hit -- socially and financially -- when they reduce workforces, not get a stock bump. Small employers should be incentivized to grow, not frightened by the complexity and expense of federal mandates on what employers must provide.

People say that capitalism is broken, and I agree, but not because of capitalism's fault. We've grafted a governmental state onto the back of it, mostly because a large portion of society is unwilling to accept that there's a role for a governmental state but somehow find no issue with private employers providing the same services. Let's go ahead and have a government. Hell, I might even be in favor of it being a fairly socialist one, so long as it keeps economic regulation to the bare necessities. But let's break free of this eternal cycle of equating jobs with work. People feel too much anxiety to get a job, because without one, they get no safety net, but all people really want to do is work. 

And that's a preamble to why I think every political compromise Republicans and Democrats have made since World War I has been wrong-headed, up to and including the recent health care bill.

I didn't vote yesterday, because I was provided with nothing and no one to vote for. When I see a pair of rival politicians willing to speak to adults as adults, and when I see an activist internet that's interested in governance instead of Christine O'Donnell and Rent Being Too Damn High sideshows, I'll get over this malaise. Until then, this cowboy who voted in every election -- federal, state, municipal -- between 1996 and 2009 is sitting on the sidelines and pouting with the other disillusioned idiots. I honestly don't know what else to do.

I know it's illogical, as illogical as the way people feel about unemployment. Of course more good comes from voting than not voting. Of course it's a sacred part of our representative democracy. Of course "not voting" is the new "drinking beer while pregnant." 

But voting is also an expression of inspiration. It's a wind to carry the sails of an idea, or a person with ideas. For most of my adult life, I've been a little Chinese paper fan. I've voted for candidates who barely get listed in the fine print of the next day's newspapers, and I've voted on ballot measures for reasons that had nothing to do with the pro/con campaign arguments (often because the pro/con arguments had nothing to do with the ballot measure). I don't feel any smarter than anyone else, just different in how I approach voting, and different in a pretty alone way. I used to disdain parties, but now I kind of long for one. I'm not voting because I'm reconsidering my stance on everything, and opening myself up to looking anew at what everyone's standing for these days. When I return to the ballot box, I want to be able to punch holes or tap touchscreens with confidence that I'm transmitting an opinion. 

The national scene is way too fucked up. I'm starting with Austin. By this time next year, I vow to know more about this city and this county, so that I can select school board members and councilmembers and understand bond issues well enough to make choices. I'll probably sit out anything bigger than that clear through the 2012 election. 

I was one of those unemployed-but-lookings who would have reflexively answered that it was workers who should solve unemployment, not employers. That reflex was born of some calcifying beliefs. I'm now an unenfranchised-but-looking voter who believes it's up to the political sphere to politicize me, just as it's up to employers to employ people. If I look into things with fresh eyes and find it all to be another form of mass entertainment, another series of bad ideas with poor rhetoric behind them, I'm sorry, but I can't see how slapping an "I voted" badge on my Facebook page is anything more than masturbatory citizenship rewarding what I actually believe are callow leaders and acceptable mediocrities. My non-vote yesterday was a blanket "no." I hope to find something to say "yes" to next year.