Almost ten years ago to the day, I woke up in my hotel room in Bangkok and flipped on the TV; it was late, late in the evening in the UK, and the BBC News was broadcasting live coverage of the Brexit vote.
As the results slowly trickled in and it became clear that Brexit would prevail, the news anchors could not hide their shock and horror; the idea that British voters would actually choose to leave the European Union was, to them, incomprehensible.
A decade later, things like that which once seemed incomprehensible are now becoming mainstream. Britain is just the tip of the iceberg— it’s happening all across the west.
Earlier this month in Wales, voters elected the ‘Plaid Cymru’ party to its first majority ever; this is the party that has campaigned for decades to secede from the United Kingdom and make Wales independent.
The same dynamic is now playing out in Canada.
A decade under Justin Trudeau-Castro’s policies, which sacrificed the Canadian economy on the twin altars of climate religion and identity politics, has produced a country measurably poorer than the United States across the border.
In 2014 the per-capita GDP gap between Canada and the US was around 24%. Today it has grown to 43%.
And the OECD now projects Canada will rank dead last among developed economies for real GDP per capita growth through 2060.
So, on May 2, organizers in the province of Alberta handed-in over 300,000 signatures, more than 10% of Alberta’s registered voters, demanding a referendum on independence.
People have a breaking point. And when they reach it, they vote with with their ballots… with their wallets… and with their feet.
Take corporate America. For as long as anyone can remember, the standard practice for any serious American company was to incorporate in Delaware. And for more than two centuries, any serious financial firm was based almost entirely on Wall Street.
But in January 2024, the Delaware Court of Chancery rescinded Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla compensation package— a single ruling that told every public company in America that corporate law could be relitigated on a whim.
Tesla and SpaceX reincorporated in Texas. Coinbase followed them. Dropbox decamped to Nevada. Dell is redomiciling to Texas. One company after another is leaving Delaware for good.
It’s the same with Wall Street.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was blunt about the changing dynamic in his April shareholder letter: “Individuals vote with their feet. You can already see a fairly large exodus of people and jobs out of some states with high taxes and high expenses.”
In his own estimate, JPMorgan now employs 32,000 people in Texas, up from 26,000 a decade ago. Its New York headcount over the same period fell from 30,000 to 24,000.
The IRS migration data tells the same story one household at a time. Between 2019 and 2023, California’s cumulative net outflow amounted to $91.4 billion in Adjustable Gross Income; that’s a huge loss of their tax base.
Meanwhile, Florida’s cumulative net inflow came to $137 billion.
Hollywood is also instrumental.
One, the audience has voted with its wallets, hence the string of box office bombs. People don’t go to the movies to be lectured on social justice. They want to be entertained.
But for the past decade, Hollywood decided audiences needed to hear about racial injustice, gender identity, and climate change instead. Studios have racked up enormous losses as a result.
Second, no one wants to make films in Hollywood anymore because of the insane costs and regulations of doing business in California.
Instead, Atlanta wins because Georgia offers an uncapped 30% tax credit. Plenty of foreign countries offer far more. Plus production companies filming outside of California don’t have to deal with unions, taxes, or political hostility.
Consumers have been delivering the same lesson for years.
Bud Light decided in 2023 that its core demographic was, apparently, trans activists. American beer drinkers knocked the brand from #1 to #3 in the country and stripped more than $1 billion in lost sales out of its parent company.
Gillette tried it during #metoo, with a 2019 ad lecturing its male customers about how to be “the best men they can be.” P&G took an $8 billion write-down on the brand the same year.
Personally I have never bought a Gillette product since.
But think about the trend: a decade ago, almost none of this was thinkable.
Brexit was treated as a national psychotic break. A large voting bloc interested in in their province seceding from Canada was ludicrous. And why on earth would a serious company leave Delaware, any serious banker leave Wall Street, or any red-blooded American stop buying Bud Light?
And yet it’s all happened.
Frankly it’s a cause for optimism. The people running these institutions are finding out the hard way that everyone has a vote— at the ballot box, with their feet, and with their wallets.
Just imagine what another 10 years of this trend will look like.
