“Vote with their feet” is the concept, discussed repeatedly on The Bob Zadek Show, that individuals and businesses express preferences about governance by moving — from one state, locality or country to another — rather than by casting ballots. On the program the phrase covers both interstate tax migration and the broader claim that mobility is a superior mechanism of political choice to the ballot box.
The marketplace for governance
In the 2013 episode “Where is Everyone Going?”, Bob Zadek framed the fifty states as a marketplace for forms of political governance, in which each state is more or less free to determine, by the will of its people and its elected officials, the nature of its government and the level of taxation it imposes. He described this marketplace as just as harsh and just as cruel to the losers as the economic marketplace or the marketplace for candidates, and said that one can tell whether a concept for state government is successful not by pricing but by the taxpayers and citizens who can and very often do vote with their feet Where is Everyone Going? (2013).
Zadek said that one can tell by seeing the collective taxpayers voting with their collective toes what they support and what they do not support. He cautioned that figuring out what the movement is, where it is to and where it is from requires an understanding of statistics and the ability to read and synthesize a lot of data. He introduced his guest, Travis Brown, as having done that analysis and as sharing what he had learned about which forms of state government seem to be working and appealing to taxpayers because they move there, and which are unappealing because taxpayers are moving from there Where is Everyone Going? (2013).
Free cities and the customer relationship
In the 2016 episode with Mark Lutter on proprietary cities, Zadek called the concept of voting with one’s feet crucial to the Free City Movement. He argued that a vote at the ballot box is relatively meaningless and does not cause change very often or very much, whereas when people or companies move with their feet — moving overseas or moving their headquarters — they say, “I’m out of here,” and that sends a message that is very powerful Mark Lutter on Proprietary Cities (2016).
Zadek described the concept of the Free City Movement as being that as cities experiment, the population, which is what they need to function, will vote with their feet, so that very quickly cities that provide what the customer wants will be distinguished from those that do not, and those that do not will change to conform to those that do. He said this has a very small-d democratic effect as well Mark Lutter on Proprietary Cities (2016).
Lutter agreed, saying that the ability of any free city to attract residents, to attract businesses and to create jobs will require a good legal environment to ensure that businesses want to do business there, a nice downtown, and a livable city that provides the necessary amenities for residents. He said this changes the typical dynamic of cities by treating residents and businesses as customers and providing services they want, which is a little bit different from the traditional conception of cities Mark Lutter on Proprietary Cities (2016).
Zadek asked the audience to share his goosebumps at the thought of a city that treated its residents as customers, one who they had to satisfy lest the resident move his business elsewhere, rather than as a captive audience who could not leave but had to buy the service Mark Lutter on Proprietary Cities (2016).
Foot voting versus ballot voting
In the 2020 episode “Foot Voting > Ballot Voting,” Ilya Somin gave two major advantages of foot voting over conventional ballot box voting. The first is that when a person votes at the ballot box, the chance that his vote will make a difference to the result of an election is extremely small — maybe about one in 60 million in a presidential election — whereas voting with one’s feet is a choice that actually has a high likelihood of making a difference Foot Voting > Ballot Voting (2020).
The second advantage follows from the first: precisely because voting with one’s feet is much more likely to make a difference, people on the whole are more informed when they vote with their feet than when they vote at the ballot box. Somin said lots of evidence indicates that most voters know very little about the issues at stake and often do not even know very basic things about how the political system works, such as which officials are responsible for which issues. By contrast, when people vote with their feet they take the decision much more seriously and acquire more information because they know it will make a difference Foot Voting > Ballot Voting (2020).
Somin illustrated the point by comparing consumer decisions with electoral ones: most people probably spent more time seeking out information the last time they decided what car or what smartphone to buy than the last time they decided who to vote for for president, because they knew the decision about the smartphone would actually make a difference Foot Voting > Ballot Voting (2020).
Decentralization, zoning and licensing
In the 2022 episode with Somin on the Libertarian Dream Team, the discussion returned to foot voting as the part of the report with the most libertarian flavor, the part Somin said he had the biggest hand in writing. Somin said that because of the problem of voter ignorance and the problem of excessive centralization of power, what would be desirable is to decentralize more authority to state and local governments and also to the private sector, thereby empowering people to vote with their feet — for example, to decide what state or local government they want to live in based in part at least on its policies, or to make choices in the private sector such as private school choice The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Somin repeated the consumer comparison, saying that people have much better incentives to be informed when they make decisions like that, because they know their decision about a television set will actually make a difference — the one they pick is the one in their living room — whereas the chance they can affect who the president is or what their policies are is very low The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Somin also argued that expanded foot voting and decentralization can help reduce polarization, because part of the polarization has occurred because so much power is concentrated in the federal government and in particular in the hands of whoever is sitting in the White House, making it scary to have that power held by a member of the opposing political party, which in turn stimulates partisan conflict and even efforts to overturn elections. If things were more decentralized and people had more opportunities to vote with their feet, he said, there would be less fear of the White House or Congress being controlled by political opponents The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
On the question of what guardrails would encourage foot voting, Somin named two categories. The first is limiting and decentralizing more functions of government so that fewer are in the hands of the federal government and more are with states, localities or the private sector. The second is breaking down barriers to foot voting and interstate and other interjurisdictional movement. The biggest such barrier, he said, particularly in California, is exclusionary zoning, where tight restrictions on building new housing make it almost impossible to build new housing, especially new cheap housing, in response to demand, literally blocking millions of people from moving to places where they could find opportunity and better education. He named state-by-state occupational licensing as another barrier The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Somin noted that in some cases people can vote with their feet without physically moving or without moving very far, particularly if they can choose between different local governments as well as state governments, or if they can choose in the private sector — for example, if there were more school choice, a parent could send a child to a different school without changing address or buying a new house The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
On the national minimum wage, Zadek argued that eliminating it would open up mobility by letting states and businesses compete for wages and for workers on a marketplace system rather than through minimum wage laws that he characterized as federal price fixing. Somin said he generally agreed that a national minimum wage is a bad idea, noting that it had not been raised in 13 or 14 years and stood at $7.25 an hour, making it probably only a modest constraint on mobility because relatively few jobs would open up below that level. He added that many people, particularly in the Democratic Party, would like to raise it as high as $15, which would be a much more serious constraint on mobility and would put many people out of work, and that even the $7.25 wage destroys some jobs, particularly in relatively poor states and for workers with relatively weak credentials trying to enter the marketplace The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Across episodes
The topic recurs across four episodes spanning 2013 to 2022. The 2013 episode treats foot voting as an empirical market test of state tax-and-service packages, with Zadek introducing Travis Brown’s data analysis. The 2016 episode with Mark Lutter applies the concept to the Free City Movement and the idea of residents as customers. The 2020 and 2022 episodes with Ilya Somin shift the emphasis from measuring migration to theorizing why foot voting outperforms ballot voting, adding the arguments about voter ignorance, incentives to acquire information, polarization and barriers to mobility such as exclusionary zoning and occupational licensing. The later treatment is more systematic and more explicitly tied to a decentralization agenda; the earlier treatments are framed around the marketplace metaphor and the free-city experiment.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any specific migration study, the identity of the report Somin refers to beyond its being a team product, or the names of any statutes, cases or amendments bearing on foot voting. They do not give the founding date or full platform of the Free City Movement, nor any city that has adopted a free-city arrangement. The 2022 episode’s section on reforming the Electoral Count Act is introduced but the excerpt breaks off before any content, so nothing about that topic is recorded here.