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Ilya Somin's new book
On Amazon, here. "Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter " is the title and the theme. It revolves around "rational ignorance." We cannot know everything about every subject, and rationally focus on those where we can make a difference. In a democracy, the odds that your vote in an election will be the deciding vote are virtually zero, therefore it makes sense to spend little thinking over, and learning about, the issues. The result is that most voters have little grasp of major issues, and none at all of minor ones. Even in Congress, we have appeals to pass legislation so they can learn what's in it.....
I thought of a parallel point. The Framers were the most intelligent men of their age, which (outside the sciences) may have been the most intelligent age of US history. They put a LOT of thinking into the Constitutional Convention, and at least a fair amount into the Bill of Rights. Does it not make sense to give a lot of deference to that thinking, as against decisions made by rationally ignorant legislators chosen by a rationally ignorant electorate?
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So, it's better to bite our tongues and remain silent on a point that makes a valid argument for smaller government?
I don't know if we should bite our tongues about the wasted time of voting. If you think there is a significant chance that mentioning it will result in an important change in policy, then perhaps you should mention it. If the chance it will result in valuable change is negligible, then probably you should bite your tongue. I don't know, it's just something to consider.
Smaller government might be smarter, but if you wanted bigger government, wouldn't rational ignorance be easy to exploit? I think that was the same basic argument that Alexander Hamilton advocated to limit suffrage to property owners, and male ones at that.
It makes sense to spend time poring over the thinking of the Framers, not only because they were intelligent, but because they wanted to set up a system whose separation of powers, and checks and balances would diffuse the shifting sands of majority whim (democracy) and instead, institute a rational, logical, and reasonable structure for the legislative process. Having recently emerged from a bloody war, I’d bet that they were thinking of us, their remote descendants, and doing everything in their power to ensure that we would never be faced with the same ills.
I believe one of the most important thing to realize about the Founder's vision for their 1787 Constitution is that it had scaling issues that probably are insurmountable but which were cemented in dysfunction in 1911.
Going by the numbers from the first Census, and assuming the "Free white males of 16 years and upward, including heads of families" which provided the pool of possible voters was reasonably evenly distributed, each House member and Electoral College slot represented less than 7,700 men. (Members of the Senate were elected by their state legislators, which was of course nixed by the goo-goo (good government) Progressives a century ago.)
So we had something of a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon system, where if you didn't know someone running for your House seat, you almost certainly knew someone who knew him or thereabouts. Similar for Presidential candidates, you were less likely to know them, but their local Electoral College representatives knew him or were in their position because they knew someone who knew him, and your knowledge of them was akin to that of House candidates and members.
Even ignoring the theoretically good intentions of the Progressives that ended up destroying a lot of good and important things, I can't think of any way to make this part of the Founders' vision scale up to a nation of 100s of millions of people.
Haven't tried to run the numbers, but I seriously doubt they'd work even if we took back the right to vote from all but those men with land or willingness and ability to pay a poll tax (and boy would that create some seriously rotten boroughs, anathema to Progressives like corrupt state legislatures "electing" Senators were). Reversing radical democracy is not feasible this side of a revolution or another general central government Articles of Confederation type failure that lead to our current Constitution, and we should be so lucky to end up with something that benign on the other side.
Telling the people that listen to you and respect your opinion, that they are wasting their time voting, may hurt your influence and cause more harm than good.