Reply to Are you voting yes or no on the APS school bond?

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Reply to "Are you voting yes or no on the APS school bond?"

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[quote=Anonymous]I see a lot of people in this thread talking about how they have no choice but to vote yes because the alternative is worse. I will relate here some advice my father once gave me:

All your life, he said, people are going to try to control you. They're going to do it by controlling the alternatives you get to chose between. Usually this means a "good" choice, and a "bad" choice. The "good" choice involves a bit of a raw deal for you, but it takes care of your essentials. The "bad" choice is objectively worse for you, but only because the people in charge made it that way. The "good" choice will be a budget with tax increases they claim are necessary (but which also protects their pet projects and personal fiefdoms). The "bad" choice will involve cutting police and firefighters because gosh there's just no where else to find efficiencies. Alternatively, (my father was a union guy) management will offer a sub-inflation COLA for next year despite record profits, because they know a strike would be more expensive than the additional salary increase the union wants.

This is what people do when they [i]need[/i] you but they can't [i]control[/i] you. They think that if they can just control your choices then you will act perfectly rationally every time and make the choice they want you to.  They want you to accept their cr@p sandwich every time rather than go hungry. But what you have to remember is that the "bad" choice hurts them as much or more than it hurts you. That's why they try so hard to stack the deck against it.

So every once in a while you have to take the objectively "bad" choice, just to remind the people in charge that they still [i]need[/i] you to get what [i]they[/i] want. Sometimes you have to be willing to accept a bit of pain or misery just to remind them that next time, the most rational thing is to give people better choices rather than stack the deck. [/quote]

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