Can Your Vote Be Bought?

While you might not wake up with a pile of crisp $100 bills stacked at your doorstep, we should hold no illusions that politicians attempt to buy your vote. They make promises that they will give you something for “free” or disguise this attempted bribery using key words like “assistance, grants, or relief.” These same politicians use the very human emotions of envy and jealousy to pit one class of citizen against another; the “haves” versus the “have-nots” has been a political question ever since we heard of Cain and Abel. The questions we need to ask ourselves are not just how our vote is attempting to be bought but also what is the true price of that carrot?

One of the most blatant political kickbacks of this election season is the Harris campaign’s attempt to “help” first time home buyers and to make rent more affordable. While there are many policy positions that would actually achieve this, ideas tend to be much less concrete than the promise of $25,000 of down payment assistance. If we ignore the mechanics of how she would actually achieve that “promise,” what would this infusion of money actually do to the economy? The beautiful part of this political farce is we have actually seen what happens when the government injects “free” money into the economy. We not only saw record levels of inflation after Trump and Biden pumped the economy full of relief money, but also as soon as government got involved in higher education with loans and grant money, the cost of higher education started skyrocketing. How would home prices not do the same? How does the price of a home not immediately jump $25,000? Or worse, what if it jumps even more because our politicians do not understand the basic economic principle of supply versus demand?

Speaking of supply and demand, the Harris campaign is yet again trotting out the fake boogeyman of price gouging and price control. Despite over a thousand years of evidence that price controls do not work, Harris is again waving a fake carrot in the face of voters hoping that the allure of money will help her into office. Even if her intentions for price control are 100% genuine, the worst part about her policy proposal is the learned ignorance about the effectiveness of price control (pro tip: has never and will never work). On top of that terrible policy proposal, she is now using the term “price gouging” to, yet again, try to convince the voter that she has their economic best interest at heart. While we would need a whole separate article to discuss what price gouging is or isn’t, quite simply we can boil it down to Econ 101: when the demand vastly outstrips supply, the price of an object significantly increases. This encourages more supply, at which point the price decreases. Just to prove this: is the price of gas still at $10 per gallon in any past or current disaster areas or has the price normalized? She is using fear and the boogeyman of fake corporatism to ignore basic economics, and also to attempt to, yet again, mislead the American voter with their very strained bank accounts.

The worst of all the political bribes is the newest initiative by the Harris campaign of using race as a cudgel. The blatant racism and clearly unconstitutional attempt to shore up the black male vote is on clear display by her “opportunity for Black men.” By singling out a single race and sex and offering them forgivable business loans and apprenticeship opportunities, Harris has fully realized the progressive grift of dividing up society and bribing each of them separately. The poll numbers have not been favorable for the Harris campaign in the black male demographic, so she immediately offers them money. Black women entrepreneurs? Sorry, seems as if she already expects your vote so there will be no new initiatives for you. Mexican, Chinese, or any other race (other than white obviously), clearly are not a worry for Harris because they do not have their own promise of money (yet). This obvious, unconstitutional racism exposes her campaign for what it truly is: get into office by whatever means necessary including bribery, fake promises, racism, sexism, demagoguery, and flat out lying to the voter.

While we have not even touched on other (but not less notable) grifts to buy votes such as the fake promise of reparations, the fact remains that despite promising free money to the voter, Harris’s America will look much worse than the Biden America. The true price of a vote for Harris is not more money in your pocket, but less. Inflation strips away the power of the dollar in your bank account, and pumping money into the economy only increases the cost of goods and services. While you may see tangible figures like the $25,000, what is intangible, yet undeniable, is the massive loss of buying power all Americans will experience. Despite promises that she cares about the poor and middle classes, Harris’s bribes will only make life for them worse. If your main reasons for voting for Harris are any of the above, then please know that you will not be in a better economic position after voting for her but a worse one. One has to ask, “Why is she so desperate to buy your vote?” History begs you to really think twice before voting for the Harris ticket, because history is not on the side of politicians (or dictators) that are willing to beg, lie, steal and cheat to get into power. Let’s prove ALL politicians and bureaucrats wrong this election cycle by showing that the American people cannot be bought and that liberty is priceless.