Business: The Perpetual Election

I think I'd be hard pressed to find any American citizens who feel that our political system has accurately spoken for them.

We elect leaders once every few years who almost exclusively fall squarely under one of two labels, and these labels, in combination with various monetary and personal motivations, seem to have the largest impact on those leaders' subsequent actions.

Unfortunately there's not an easy fix for this; our democratic system of government doesn't prevent us from remedying the problem, but to do so would require widespread re-evaluation of our pre-existing notions about political parties and our own beliefs, and unfortunately I think we're a long way from this. Most people "know" that we'll only ever elect a substantial number of Democrats and Republicans, so they choose what they see as the lesser evil of the two. If we could systematically convince citizens to vote for leaders who accurately represented their voices we could completely revitalize our government, but for the time being: Partisanship is a tomb of our own construction.

So, let's assume away the ability for an individual to make effective change in our country through his or her vote. What remaining course of action do we have, if any?

A topic that has recently been at the forefront of my attention is the value of our money as consumers. In a world of massively powerful corporations who have just as much to say in Washington as individual voters do, we often see these new "citizens" as uncontrollably powerful (WalMart, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, etc..), but I believe we are too quick to forget that the fuel of these corporate engines is still ultimately our dollars and cents. Yes, they can buy politicians, but the money to do so comes straight from our wallets.

We should count ourselves fortunate that we have an economy in which the "best" businesses are the ones that survive, where we are able to define "best" in any way we like. But for this system to result in anything positive requires us to acknowledge our role as participants in a continual election, where every dollar we spend at a store, in a restaurant, or for a service is a vote for that company / individual, a contribution and a condonation of that entity that says "Yes, I support you - you deserve this money."

We can complain all we want about the way WalMart treats its workers, but when we buy toilet paper there for 5% less than the Mom-and-Pop shop down the street, we're saying "I'm OK with that, for 25 cents off my purchase." When we go to wash our hands before eating at Chipotle and they don't have soap in the bathroom, and we just say "meh", we're saying "I'm OK with this restaurant foregoing cleanliness, the burritos are still pretty good." Those small moments of indecision or objection appear in our minds but not on the balance sheets of those establishments, and as long as they remain unspoken and unenforced, the conditions inducing them will remain unchanged if not worsened.

In a struggling economy there are so many companies and individuals who would gladly construct the businesses of our dreams, if only they knew that our hard-earned money would avail itself of our preference. We can insist on a phenomenal amount of change by indicating to complacent companies that our business cannot be taken for granted, that we're noticing those who strive for excellence and those who slip.

Not only does our economy permit this extraordinary level of feedback, but we live in an incredible time to encourage widespread overhaul of our power as consumers. With social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, we can now voice our appreciation and frustration with businesses in an immediate and massively accessible way. Imagine a world where McDonald's' revenue was proportional to the number of its positive mentions in a Twitter feed; we could form as fresh, green, healthy, and/or socially responsible of a fast food chain as we wanted. If McDonald's didn't respond to concerns and people paid attention to social media feedback, another chain would gladly rise to fill those needs and McDonald's would fade into obsolescence.

With this critique I don't want to imply that I think myself a perfect consumer; I have plenty of improvement to do on my own spending habits, but I think we would all be amazed at how dramatically we could change our country with just a little more diligence in our choices of where (or, whether or not) to spend our money. We should be eager to publicly mention positive or negative experiences with companies on Twitter or Facebook; try it and you'll quickly see which ones are listening and which ones don't give a rat's ... well, you know.

So, instead of trying to pick out which politicians will be least awful in 2012, let's think about ways that we can be proud of where our money is being spent today. Ultimately, whether you're looking at wars, sustainability, health or the debt ceiling, it's just business after all.

2011-07-25 EDIT: s/Bipartisanship/Partisanship/ :-P