> Repeat: We are our only resource. Any decision we make is
> only real if all or most of us participate _actively_ in the
> implementation of that decision. It is that participation, not the
> formal decision, which is the real decision.
I haven't been able to follow the discussions here. So this is an entirely de-contextualized remark -- FWIW.
Last Thursday, I was just telling a small group of my public finance students that, when economic theorists use the term "decisions" or "choices," they mean exactly this -- i.e. "actions." The three words are synonymous in economic theory, as you can note by paging Stokey et al. or Mas Colell's books. A "choice" is not something that happens in your head alone. What happens in your head alone (an abstraction, because there's nothing that can only happen in your head alone) falls under the rubric of "preferences." What you actually do, which results from the clash between your "preferences" and your "opportunities" (two things that can only be separated by abstraction), that is your "choice" or "action." I'm under the impression that, for some reason that has to do with the history of our languages, when people talk nowadays about subjective activity, they tend to evoke purely mental activity without any consequence on the physical world, i.e. something impossible, as if the mind operated in a Platonic plane, detached from a body embedded in a physical world.
So, in partial correction of what Carrol says above, the "real decision" that people who vote but have no interest in implementing what is resolved by the vote is both to vote "formally" and then to be dispassionate about the implementation of the vote. It is an action aimed at accomplishing something other than what is voted on.