Voting with your money

Yes, finally, here it is! A blogpost about voting and so also about the upcoming elections in The Netherlands, because those are in two days. I couldn’t resist to write a post about it, because I find voting seriously important. But don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a post about which party I think you should vote for, because well, that’s up to you. What I want to talk about is voting every single day, because everyone does.

Voting with Your Money

What I want to talk about is voting with your money. Because you vote every time you spend it, or when you specifically don’t. You vote for the world you want to live in by the way you spend your money. What products you buy (or invest in), determines what world you want to live in. You then automatically vote too when you eat (because that dictates which food you buy) and that’s at least three times a day! You don’t vote once every four years, no, you vote every single day. That’s why I find this sort of voting with money just as (or maybe even more) important than voting for the elections.

Good or Bad Votes

When you buy clothes at Primark, you vote for child labor because you invest your money in it. When you buy McNuggets at MacDonalds, you vote for animal abuse, because you invest in in. When you buy grey electricity you vote for climate change and air pollution, because you invest your money in it. But well, these are the bad kind of votes. Voting can also be done in a way that changes the world for the better! Let’s try again. When you buy organic groceries, you vote for a world without pesticides, because you invest in it. When you buy fair-trade groceries, you vote for a world without slavery (yes, modern slavery still exists unfortunately), because you invest in it. When you buy renewable energy, you vote for a future (because there might not be one because of climate change) and clean air, because you invest in it. Sounds good, right? You can make a change every single day, by the way you spend your money. So vote for the world you want to see!

The elections

I do want to urge you to still vote for the national elections, because I don’t think they’re less important than what I described above. Go and vote! We have the power! But even more importantly: do a test to see what party serves your values. I see a lot of people supporting certain parties because they like the spokesperson. That doesn’t make sense! You have to see whether they support your values by filling in an independent test (like this one), because parties might deceive you with their good words in public. Good luck!

Yours sincerely,
Romee