For most of my life, I've been pretty skeptical of democracy. My basic perspective was if three wolf and a sheep are voting on dinner, should the sheep legitimize their decision to eat him by voting for grass? In this analogy, the sheep would be the productive part of society while the wolves are the rent seekers, big and small.
The sheep analogy is flawed, because there are not just three wolves and one sheep. There are lots of sheep and lots of wolves. Who is a sheep and who is a wolf can change depending on the issue. While in many cases the sheep are vastly outnumbered it can still be close in other cases. If a sheep wants to have a chance of influencing other sheep and sympathetic wolves to oppose the wolves then they would be well served to have their actions and their words in alignment. The message "Don't vote for the wolves, and in fact it's so broken I'm not even going to vote" is not credible.
And if there is a group of wolves, and those wolves are beatable if the other sheep just recognize the wolves for what they are, then it makes even less sense to mix messages. Right now the group of newly exposed wolves is the rent seeking homeowners. People who own homes that vote to keep the supply of new homes restricted drive up prices of their homes at the expense of anyone looking to rent or buy a house. Anti-construction policies have driven real estate prices in the San Francisco Bay Area up to absurd enough heights that many people are starting to notice. And while the times that a couple of votes can swing a national election are few and far between, there are plenty of opportunities for small groups of voters to swing local elections.
So I voted. I looked at which politicians were pro-growth and gave them my support. I looked at which rent seeking organizations supported or opposed propositions and voted directly against their interests (Unfortunately, sometimes there are rent seekers on both sides).
While the act of voting individually might not be economically rational, there are things that make it slightly less costly. Earlier this year I filed some paperwork with the state government. The justice system figured out where I lived and put me on the list for jury duty, so the downside to registering and voting became really marginal.
Most people would end this post telling the reader to vote. I would like to make the more modest suggestion that if you are already being called for jury duty and like discussing politics, there is little downside to registering to vote before the next election.