By Matt Morgan, Editor at The Daily Bell:

Voting, we are told, is choice. It’s a sacred choice… The kind men died for. And because it is sacred choice, the system built on it must be accountable to you, the chooser. That is the belief. Hold it up next to the choosing you do the rest of the week.

One bundle, every four years, no returns

A typical supermarket carries more than 30,000 products. You pick item by item, any day you like, and if the yogurt disappoints you switch brands tomorrow without asking permission from the other shoppers. That is what choice means everywhere money changes hands: unbundled, continuous, individual, reversible.

The ballot inverts every one of those properties. You get one bundled package, foreign policy stapled to tax policy stapled to the price of insulin, offered once every four years. You cannot take the parts you want. You cannot return it if it disappoints. And you do not even get the bundle you picked. You get the one your neighbors picked, and so do the people who chose neither. Imagine a grocery store where the whole town votes on a single cart, everyone eats its contents for four years, and the store calls this consumer sovereignty.

The customers have filed their review

The American Customer Satisfaction Index scores the federal government with the same survey methods it uses on airlines and banks. The 2025 federal report celebrates a score of 70.4, the government’s best in nearly two decades. The national average across the private economy is 76.9.

The institution you choose through the sacred method, at the peak of a four-year winning streak, still scores below the ordinary run of businesses you choose through the profane one. The companies you can fire on a whim treat you better than the one you can only outvote.

Conclusion

None of this is an argument against choosing. It is an argument that you already know which kind of choosing works, because you use it every day and it feeds you. Exit disciplines a seller the way no ballot disciplines a state: instantly, individually, without needing 51 percent of your neighbors to agree the yogurt was bad. If voting were introduced today as a consumer product, one selection, every 1,460 days, majority picks for everyone, no refunds, you would laugh it off the shelf.

You honor it only because it arrived wearing a flag.

Choice is your standard then apply it.