The myth of the rational voter

Re: The myth of the rational voter


I see this as nothing more than a call for plutocratic autocracy.

democracy is the same as any other form of government. It fails because of human greed. Greed is the reason no government will ever be "perfect"

Now all he has to do is convince everyone in the world that he is absolutely correct and that they should vote IOW his theories.

But that's where he fails, IMO. While every single word he's written might be absolutely correct, he ignores the fact that people don't trust each other.

Protectionism is bad. I don't know anyone that would disagree with that. So which country is going to be the 1st to drop any/all protectionist measures and accept the concequences while waiting around for other's to follow suit?

People don't vote for protectionism because they like the idea. They vote "irrationally" (at least according to him) because they don't trust that other countries are going to do the same and they have no interest in bearing the economic brunt of it while the economists hold their collective breath waitng for everyone else in the world to become rational.

I don't think I trust fishin's opinion.

*imposes a protectionist 15% "thought tax" on all thoughts imported from Cambridge, MA*

Oi!

Re: The myth of the rational voter

I see it as something of a contradiction. Caplan's main point is that voters make systematic errors about economic issues, which lead them to make irrational decisions about politics. His solution to this problem is to "rely less on democracy and more on markets." But if voters are making systematic errors about economic issues, why should we expect their economic decisions to be any more rational than their political ones? I don't understand why Caplan has more faith in the market than in democracy if the masses know as little about economics as they do about politics.

I find this incredibly difficult to believe. I have never -- and I mean never -- heard anyone say that he or she thought protectionism was bad economic policy, but supported it nevertheless because other nations also adopted protectionist measures. The politicians who criticize NAFTA (mostly Democrats), for instance, aren't complaining about Mexico and Canada adopting protectionist trade policies -- after all, NAFTA eliminated a lot of those trade barriers. Instead, they criticize NAFTA for failing to protect American jobs -- a position which Caplan would label "irrational." Indeed, for a free market libertarian like Caplan, it doesn't matter if only one nation adopts free trade while all the rest are protectionists, since the law of comparative advantage will still work in favor of the free trader. Protectionism, in other words, is always irrational.

bm

The last time trade issues and tariffs really meant anything to American voters was before the Civil War. No one ever succeeded in making NAFTA an issue with American voters. At the most, it might have made a slight difference in traditionally conservative districts in which a candidate was successful painting his opponent as uncaring and cynical about American jobs. As for the author of the piece, if he wants to believe in "free trade," he many help himself--but it's a delusion, there never has been anything such as "free trade" or "free markets" in history. The closest anyone can come is in eliminating tariffs altogether. While it is true that this will eventually work to the advantage of a coterie of capitalists, that is not evidence that anyone will necessarily be better off. The Corn Laws in England destroyed small agriculture, and worked only to those with sufficient influence to get enclosure bills passed in the Parliament so as to be able to practice economies of scale, and to the "vested-interests" warehousers and importers, who could hoard grain, and profit whether it were grown in England or imported. The effect on the general population was to kill off small farmers and to throw hundreds of thousands of agricultural laboring families onto the parishes and the roads.

Capitalists seek their own, personal advantages, and they will practice any trick or deceit they can get away with, whether or not it is legal, to attain their ends. Capitalism is useful, but there is no reason to leave it unregulated. We regulate nearly everything else in society, but the capitalists, who write the big checks for political campaigns, whine about regulation and an anti-business climate, and their paid political hacks in the fifty legislatures and the Congress scurry off to write legislation which will cater to their desires. Capitalists have complained that they couldn't do business if they had to abandon paying piece work to familes of man, woman and children, but that proved to be a lie. They complained that they couldn't do business if there were no child labor--it was a lie. They complained that they couldn't do business if there were trades unions and collective bargaining--it was a lie. They complained that they couldn't do business if there were floors on wages and ceilings on hours--it was a lie. They complained that they couldn't do business if there were occupational health and saftey regulations--it was a lie.

Appeals to free trade mean that jobs bleed away from this country, and it isn't likely to equalize in the next several generations without significant debt readjustment for the "third world." Even with that, it could be a century before wages and standards of living were equalized right around the globe, and that only with massive debt forgiveness or "restructering" and reliable adherence to no-tariff policies. Capitalists habitually kill the geese which lay their golden eggs, shipping jobs and operations overseas to produce consumer goods which the citizens of their nations are increasingly unable to afford.

Voters don't vote trade policy, they vote public relations success. They voted Clinton into office twice, and Clinton's biggest achievement was to bury the memory of Tienamen Square and to make nice with the Chinese, who donated heavily to his political coffers. Now the Chinese dump heavily in our markets while excluding our products from their markets. But people didn't vote for or against Clinton based on NAFTA or his China policy, they pondered whether or not he looked good, convincingly played the saxaphone, or whether or not they were bothered by the thought of him getting a blow job in the Oval Office.

Elections, except perhaps at the lowest levels, go to the highest successful bidder who most carefully exploits the tool of the focus group. Economic and trade policy mean nothing because no politician bores the audience with either reality or details, and doesn't bother to keep promises which most of the population forgets and the rest don't expect to be kept in the first place.

OK, i feel better now.

No, i'm not quite better.

If voters took the trouble to inform themselves on the issues, why should they, if they truly were being rational, vote for people whose policies will benefit a tiny minority of capitalists, and which very well may beggar those same voters?

You seem to have forgotten about the one candidate in recent history, that told the truth as he saw it.

Perot would have been a huge disaster.

Perhaps; but Set's point was both Democrats and Republicans are for sale and in turn sell things to the public like NAFTA (which they did with bi-partisan support). Ross, who hadn't said boo for a while came out of hiding to loudly protest and coined the term "Giant sucking sound". Who's side was he on? Was he telling the truth? (As it happens, this is one of the things I disagreed with him on; favoring more work for people instead of just US-Americans, but that doesn't mean Set and Ross are wrong about NAFTA from the US worker's perspective.

Nonsense. I worked hard for the one candidate i've seen in my lifetime who not only spoke the truth as he saw it, but offered a rational plan to deal with the substantial economic woes of his time, and predicted the likely consequences of the plan offered by Reagan--and his name was John Anderson.

Perot lived in fantasy land. Having enriched himself at the expense of the taxpayer, he ran two imperial Presidential campaigns, with a "Party" organization which he expected to behave like robots and parrots, and offered no more realistic bromides that were offered by the other other candidates, who might reasonably have been said to be at least as sincere as he was.

The fact that representative democracy does not live up to some people's expectations should not come as any great surprise given most voters do not understand nor educate themselves on the matters at hand. Nevertheless representative democracy can give a better potential to moderate the effects of blatant corruption as compared to other governmental systems, if only because voters have the chance to kick people out more easily than with other systems.

I'd like to see a far less representative democratic government and far more democratic polling (via the internet). It's not so much that I think more direct voter input via polling would make for more fair and educated decisions but that it might moderate the ability of politicians to act in their own best interests.

Re: The myth of the rational voter

Because dollar votes, unlike ballot votes, give voters feedback about the rationality of their vote, as well as an incentive to act on this feedback. Caplan, writing for a libertarian think tank, may have found this point too obvious to point out to his readers.

In essence I see the problem more as the myth of representative democracy versus true democracy and not the myth of the rational voter. And I'm with Thomas, people vote with their wallets more keenly than they do at the polls.