Dakota Beacon

Summer reading often involves considering books in my library that I've  read before, in some cases several times before. One such book sparked the idea for this piece. This is not a book review, but an inspiration pulling together a variety of personal views.

 "The Myth of the Rational Voter" by Bryan Caplan was published in 2007 by Princeton University Press. Caplan is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. (I suspect he was brought to the faculty when Professor Walter E. Williams was Chair of the Economics Department.) His book develops the central idea that voters are worse than ignorant. They are irrational -- and vote accordingly.

 Polls over the last twenty years confirm a disturbingly high level of cultural illiteracy among Americans. Young adults possess less cultural literacy than that found among naturalized citizens.
 

A 1990 Gallup survey for the National Endowment of the Humanities, a 1993 Department of Education survey, a 1999 American Council of trustees and Alumni survey of liberal arts universities, and continuing surveys by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, among others, point to an increasingly high rate of cultural illiteracy.
 

High school graduates and young adults know precious little about American history and its founding principles and have never read the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence even once in their short lives. Although English is the titular American "lingua franca," it is not the common bond it once was. Many young people have a nominal proficiency in spoken and written English and are generally not readers. Literature, especially classical literature, is foreign to them. As for such esoteric subjects as economics -- forget it.
 

Young people were raised in schools that make little distinction between "education," "indoctrination" and "training." Today's understanding of education is to prepare young people for the work force, an abstraction inherited from the former Soviet Union via UNESCO. Education for the purpose of producing functional, moral citizens is a forgotten concept. What passes for education places young people further behind their counterparts from second and third world countries in math and science. This is where "The  Myth of the Rational Voter" cued my interest.

 It is little wonder that less-than-rational voters fall prey to conniving politicians. Without firm grounding in constitutional principles and American history, young voters (and many older ones) allow their elected officials to do just about anything without challenging their proposals.
 Consequently, politicians and bureaucrats determine the kind of light bulbs we must use, the kind of cars we must drive, the size toilets we must flush and how many trillions of dollars of debt they can obligate the next generation to pay. All of this is smoothly phrased as "what's best for the country." And the voters follow like sheep.
 

As young adults in particular swallow political propaganda such as free markets are evil, big business is bad and big government is good they play into the hands of the political elite. As they vote for politicians who promote bad public policy there is little wonder that cities and states
 across the nation are going bankrupt. The federal government is following in quick pursuit.
 

Americans freely elect those they choose to lead them. Long-serving professional politicians drift upward in election after election to become the elite directing the lives of millions. Conditioned dependency upon government by each succeeding generation of young adults is very empowering to these politicians and their bureaucrat sycophants. Only in the aftermath
 of disastrous social and economic policies are "unintended consequences" rather than politicians held to account. In the wake of such disasters is faintly heard the excuse, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
 

Look around. Irrational adults are everywhere. And they vote. No complaints, please. In our democracy the citizen has the freedom to speak with ballots even if the intellectual understanding behind the vote is vacuous. Two quotes summarize alternative views and these views are not
 contradictory. H. L. Mencken once quipped, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."  Alternatively, Winston Churchill famously said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
 

Caplan concludes with his own observation. "In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets." If Caplan is right that the rational voter is a myth, then he admits that a great deal of published research based on a rational voter is wrong. Nevertheless, in my view it is better that the ignorant refrain from voting than that they vote and imperil the remaining culture with foolish policies imposed on the rest  of us.
 
 Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at P. O. Box 337, Stanley, ND 58784 or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).