The town square was a sea of stickers. Everyone wore a small, circular badge that said “I Voted,” carryng it like a gold star from a second-grade teacher. The air was thick with the idea that the act itself—the mere physical presence at a polling station—was the highest form of virtue. People spoke of “voting your heart” and “making your voice heard,” as if the volume of the noise mattered more than the direction of the shout.

In the middle of this festive atmosphere sat Thomas Sowell. He wasn’t wearing a sticker. He was leaning back in a sturdy wooden chair, looking at the crowd not with anger, but with a sort of weary, academic curiosity. He had spent decades looking at data and human behavior, and he had a different perspective on this civic ritual. To Sowell, a vote isn’t a merit badge; it’s a high-stakes decision that requires a specific kind of labor.

The Duty to be Informed

Sowell’s first point is simple: showing up is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what you are actually doing. He compares an uninformed voter to someone who walks into a pharmacy and starts grabbing random pills to give to a sick neighbor. The person might have the best intentions—they genuinely want the neighbor to get well—but if they don’t understand chemistry or biology, they are more likely to cause a tragedy than a cure.

In plain terms, being a “good citizen” requires homework. It means looking past the thirty-second television ad and the catchy slogan on a yard sign. It involves asking:

• What does this policy actually do?
• What has happened in the past when people tried this?
• What are the side effects that the politicians aren’t mentioning?

Sowell suggests that if you haven’t done the work to understand the mechanics of a policy, the most responsible thing you can do is not vote at all. In his view, a blank ballot is better for the country than a ballot filled out based on a guess or a feeling. It is a humble admission that you don’t have the answer, which is far more helpful than providing a wrong one.

Logic vs. Emotion

The second hurdle is the battle between how we feel and how things actually work. Politicians are masters of the “Stage One” argument. They describe a goal that sounds wonderful—like “affordable housing” or “fair wages”—and we feel a rush of moral satisfaction. Our emotions tell us that if the goal is good, the law must be good too.

But Sowell points out that the world doesn’t run on empathy; it runs on incentives. A law that mandates lower rent might feel compassionate, but if it leads to landlords stopping maintenance or developers refusing to build new apartments, the very people you wanted to help end up worse off.

Logic requires us to look at “Stage Two” and “Stage Three.” It asks us to be cold-blooded about results rather than warm-hearted about intentions. It is humorous, in a dark way, to watch a crowd cheer for a policy that will eventually make their lives harder, all because the name of the bill sounded kind. Sowell argues that a citizen’s job is to ignore the “feel-good” marketing and look at the cold, hard machinery underneath.

The High Stakes

We often treat voting like a harmless expression of identity, similar to wearing a sports jersey. But the stakes are not academic. When a majority of people vote for a bad idea because it sounded good, the consequences are real. They show up in the form of higher prices, lost jobs, or failing schools.

Sowell’s point is that we aren’t just expressing ourselves; we are wielding power over our neighbors. If you make a bad decision for your own life, you bear the cost. But when you vote, you are making a decision for everyone. This makes the “quality” of the vote a moral issue. If you aren’t willing to put in the effort to understand the complexity of the economy or the law, you are essentially playing with other people’s lives for the sake of your own civic vanity.

The Trap of Sunk Costs

The most human—and perhaps the funniest—part of this process is what happens after the vote is cast and the policy fails. You would think people would say, “I made a mistake, I need to study more next time.”

Instead, most of us do the opposite. We double down. It is incredibly painful to admit that we were wrong, especially when we thought we were being “good people.” So, we stand behind our bad decisions. We blame “the system,” or the “other party,” or “corporate greed.”

Sowell notes that self-education is a grueling process. It requires reading boring books, looking at charts, and admitting that our favorite slogans might be wrong. Most people find it much easier to stay angry at an enemy than to sit down and learn how trade or inflation actually works. We stay “loyal” to our bad votes because it protects our ego, even while the results of those votes are making our lives more difficult.

A Different Kind of Citizenship

So, the Sowell version of a good citizen looks a bit different than the one on the posters.

• The good citizen might stay home on election day because they realized they didn’t have enough information to make a wise choice.
• The good citizen values a quiet afternoon of reading history more than a loud morning of marching in the street.
• The good citizen is more afraid of being wrong than they are of being silent.

There is no judgment in this. It is just a reminder that democracy is a tool, not a toy. If you use a tool without knowing how it works, you shouldn’t be surprised when the house falls down. Sowell’s challenge is for us to stop worrying about the “act” of voting and start worrying about the “thought” behind it.