Is voting pointless? Maybe you need to start voting with your money
Is voting pointless? What happens when you repeatedly vote for one thing and receive something very different?
Across the world there is a growing recognition that voting gives you only a limited form of control. You can change the people in office but not the people in the office deciding the direction and that is a serious problem when the state/government is heading off a cliff.
The UK case study: vote right, get left
Between 2010 and 2024 the United Kingdom voters elected a Conservative government four times on a platform of lower taxes, less spending and a smaller state. What they got was the largest expansion of the state in peacetime history.
2010: David Cameron won promising to close the deficit, cut inheritance tax and shrink government. The deficit was reduced, but the state was not. Spending was reshuffled, not cut.
2015: A Conservative majority campaigned on deficit reduction and low taxes. Within a year the party had removed its own leader over Brexit and abandoned the fiscal targets it was elected on.
2017: Theresa May delivered almost none of her programme, but in June 2019 she used her final weeks in office to write a legally binding net zero 2050 target into law by statutory instrument. It was one of the most consequential economic decisions in modern British history, passed with 90 minutes of debate and no general election mandate.
2019: Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority on “Get Brexit Done.” His government then:
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Imposed the longest and most expensive peacetime restrictions on private life and commerce in British history, with COVID support spending of roughly £310 to £410 billion.
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Announced a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 and a phase-out of gas boilers: the state dictating what citizens may buy and how they may heat their homes.
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Raised corporation tax from 19% to 25% and froze income tax thresholds, dragging millions into higher bands through stealth.
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Committed to a “Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution” built on subsidies, mandates and targets rather than markets.
2022 to 2024: Sunak spent tens of billions on energy price controls to paper over the cost of the energy policy his own party had created, and left office with the tax burden on course for its highest level since records began in 1948.
The result: a party that spent fourteen years telling voters it believed in free markets left behind a state spending 44 to 45% of GDP, five points higher than before the pandemic and the longest sustained period at that level since the Second World War, with a tax burden rising towards 38% of GDP, above the previous post-war record. In July 2024 voters punished them with 121 seats, the worst result in the party’s history. The state they built did not shrink by a single pound. Labour simply inherited the machine and kept it running.
Net zero: central planning by another name
Net zero deserves particular attention because it shows how a government elected on free-market principles ended up running a command economy in the one sector everything else depends on: energy.
Under net zero the state, not the market, decides which power sources are built (through contracts guaranteeing prices for decades), which are shut down (coal by 2024, North Sea licensing curtailed), what cars people may buy, what boilers they may install, and what price consumers pay through levies added to every bill. Energy companies remain nominally private, but the investment decisions, the product mix and the prices are set by ministers and regulators. That is not capitalism. It is state direction with private shareholders absorbing the political risk.
The results are measurable. In 2024 the UK had the highest industrial electricity prices of any IEA member country, including and excluding taxes. In 2023 British businesses paid around £258 per megawatt-hour, roughly 46% above the IEA average, higher than Italy, France and Germany, and more than four times the £65 paid in the United States. Nissan has described its Sunderland plant as its most expensive in the world because of UK energy costs. Britain’s last blast furnaces at Port Talbot have closed. Recently a child favourite of mine Denby pottery a 217 years old business shut down because of costs and taxes .A country cannot run a manufacturing base on the most expensive electricity in the developed world, and no voter was ever asked whether they wanted to try.
Brexit shows the same pattern from the other direction. In 2016 the public gave the clearest instruction it is possible to give in a democracy. It took three and a half years, two prime ministers and a general election to carry it out, and the version eventually delivered was shaped more by the civil service that wanted to remain in the EU and parliament than by the people who voted for it.
When political choices are diluted, delayed or reversed the moment they enter the machinery of government, people are right to ask whether elections are enough.
Half the country has already stopped voting
Many have stopped asking and simply walked away from the ballot box. Turnout at the 2024 general election was 59.7% of registered voters, the second lowest since universal suffrage in 1928, and a fall of nearly eight points from 2019. Between 1922 and 1997 turnout never dropped below 70%; it has not reached that level in more than a quarter of a century.
The registered figure flatters the picture. Around 19 million registered voters stayed home and an estimated 8.2 million eligible people were missing from the register altogether, meaning roughly 27.5 million people did not vote against 28.8 million who did. Measured against the adult population, only 52.8% cast a ballot. Labour’s “landslide” was delivered by 33.7% of those who voted, the lowest share of any governing party on record, which works out at roughly one in five adults.
Politicians describe this as apathy. It is more accurately described as a verdict. Nearly half the adult population has looked at the choice on offer, concluded that the outcome will not change what the state actually does, and declined to participate. The question is what those people should do with the influence they still have?
Try Lobbying?
There is already a second channel of influence: lobbying. Businesses, wealthy individuals, charities and trade associations spend heavily to shape policy between elections. That is legal and part of democratic politics, but it exposes a basic inequality. Most people cannot hire lobbyists, fund campaigns or maintain relationships with policymakers. Between elections, their voice is effectively zero.
Your money is a vote
There is a third form of influence available to almost everyone: economic choice. Where you spend and where you invest. One person’s decision changes little. Millions of people making similar decisions move markets, and markets are the thing governments ultimately depend on.
This is what it means to vote with your money. It does not happen once every five years. It happens every day. If consumers stop buying, businesses respond. If investors withdraw capital, companies and governments respond. Unlike a ballot, an economic decision cannot be reinterpreted by a committee.
Someone with millions invested decides which companies to own and which countries to hold assets in. When a government makes itself unattractive to capital, capital leaves, not as a protest but as a rational decision. Collectively, that decision can send a message no election result can like Stop doing X or you won’t get Y.
Voting with your feet
The largest expression of this is leaving. People move countries, businesses relocate, entrepreneurs incorporate elsewhere, investors change where their capital sits.
Britain is now the clearest example on earth. According to Henley & Partners, the UK lost a net 4,200 millionaires in 2023, 10,800 in 2024 and was forecast to lose 16,500 in 2025. That is the largest net outflow of wealthy individuals from any country since records began, more than double China’s, and roughly £66 billion in investable assets. For the first time in a decade of tracking, a European country led the world in millionaire departures. London is one of only two cities in the global top ranking to have lost millionaires over the past decade; the other is Moscow literally at war. The top destination was the United Arab Emirates, a jurisdiction with no income or capital gains tax. Nobody voted for that outcome. It happened because enough people made the same private decision at the same time importantly its clear that they tried to vote for change first and have now given up.
The non-doms did not just leave. They took their capital with them, and then stopped investing. The 74,000 people with non-dom status paid £8.9 billion in tax in 2022/23, before the Conservatives began dismantling the regime in March 2024 and Labour finished the job, extending 40% inheritance tax to their worldwide assets. An Oxford Economics survey found nearly two thirds planned to leave within two years, that each had invested an average of £118 million in the UK, and that more than nine in ten would reduce their UK investment if they left. Tax advisers reported new-client enquiries had halved. The Treasury’s projected gain from the policy has already been revised to a likely net loss of around £1 billion a year.
This is the part governments consistently miss. A departing entrepreneur does not simply relocate a tax return. The business goes, the next business is started somewhere else, the capital is deployed in another country, and the family, the advisers and the network follow. Many British citizens who have left in the same period report the same conclusion: they will not buy UK property, hold UK shares or fund UK ventures again until the direction of the state changes.
Not every departure is a political statement. Taxes, regulation, opportunity and quality of life all play a part. But when large numbers of productive people and businesses reach the same conclusion, governments eventually have to ask why. A government cannot indefinitely assume that people will accept policies that damage their prosperity because they have nowhere else to go though the call for an exit tax has been getting loauder.
Starving the beast
You do not have to emigrate to withdraw your consent. The state runs on two things it cannot compel: the capital it borrows and the investment that generates the tax it spends.
Britain’s national debt is now around £2.8 trillion, close to 100% of GDP, and the government spends more than £100 billion a year on interest alone, more than on defence, and more than on every department except health and pensions. Roughly 28 to 30% of that debt is held by overseas investors, and the rest largely by British pension funds, insurers and, increasingly, retail savers who are actively encouraged (coerced) to buy gilts.
Every gilt bought is a vote of confidence in the government’s ability to keep taxing and spending. Every gilt not bought raises the price the state pays to borrow. The market demonstrated the power of that vote in September 2022, when it took less than a week to end a prime minister’s economic programme, something four general elections had failed to do.
The same logic applies to UK equities, UK property and UK-domiciled funds. Individuals cannot move markets alone, but pension savers who choose global funds over UK ones, investors who hold assets in jurisdictions that respect capital, and consumers who direct spending to businesses aligned with their values are collectively telling the state something it cannot legislate away. When the people who fund the state stop funding it, the state has to change, regardless of who wins the next election.
Causevest Coin is a voting tool
This is one of the reasons Causevest exists. Political participation has been narrowed to a single act: choosing a candidate on election day. The UK shows how little that act can be worth once the state has decided what it wants.
Causevest is building a way to give people direct control over where resources go, towards causes and contributions they believe are worth supporting, rather than leaving allocation entirely to governments that have repeatedly shown they will not honour the mandate they were given. The philosophy is simple: if you care about something, you should be able to put resources behind it directly, transparently and without asking permission. Causevest’s model connects economic decisions to causes, rewards and measurable outcomes so that participation is continuous rather than quinquennial.
Beyond the ballot box
None of this means people should stop voting. The ability to remove a government peacefully is awesome. But the ballot should be the beginning of civic participation, not the end of it. My conclusion is that voting still has a lot of value but its changing very fast.
If you believe a government is taking your country in the wrong direction, vote against it but vote with more then just the ballot box.
