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Wednesday, May 25, 2016

DENNIS PATRICK: ARE VOTERS RATIONAL?

Every four years during the presidential campaign season it is appropriate to review not only the candidates, but the voters. Polls over the last twenty-five years confirm a disturbingly high level of cultural illiteracy among Americans. Young adults possess less cultural literacy than that found among naturalized citizens.

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.

Too many high school graduates and young millennials know precious little about American history and its founding principles compared to earlier generations of comparable age. Moreover, although English is the American “lingua franca,” it is not the common bond it was once. 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.

Many people were raised in the academy making 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, literate and moral citizens is a forgotten concept. What passes for education places young people further behind their contemporaries in second and third world countries in math and science. This is where “The Myth of the Rational Voter” comes into play.

“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. (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. Professional politicians advocating bad policies are selected by voters influenced by fallacious reasoning, cognitive biases, and emotional appeals.

It is little wonder that less-than-rational voters fall prey to establishment politicians. Without firm grounding in constitutional principles and American history, voters (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 future generations to pay. All of this is smoothly phrased as “what’s best for the country.” And voters follow like sheep.

As voters swallow political pablum such as free markets are evil, big business is bad and big government is good they play into the hands of the political elite. No wonder protectionism, price controls and other foolish policies are so easily accepted. As they vote for politicians who promote bad public policy it is not surprising that cities and states across the nation are going bankrupt. Expect the federal government to follow in quick suit.

Look around. Irrational adults are everywhere. And they vote. 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. Continued 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 the politicians held to account. In the wake of such disasters the excuse is faintly heard, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

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. In any case, it is the wiser choice that the ignorant refrain from voting than that they vote and imperil the culture and the rest of us with foolish policies.

 

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at P. O. Box 337, Stanley, ND 58784 or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

 

 

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