Don Boudreaux on public choice

An essay of Mr. Boudreaux's that deals with some of the non-voting ideals:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/thought...

The idea that one has to completely approve of and support every aspect and position of a candidate is a bit of an impossibly high standard. Does Don say at parties, "I love my mate; having said that.." and go long on things he does not like about that person? What group efforts go far from such perfectionists?

"Medicare is going bankrupt. Most Americans support it today--concept called rational ignorance--because they don't really know what the situation is....... because the collective nature of what government does means that people don't know the full consequences of the nature of the programs that they support."
Don Boudreuax


Don just once you might consider that you might be the one who is wrong. Maybe most people DO know the situation and they see it as a choice between life and death, pain and suffering, homelessness and a secure retirement. Calling people ignorant who support life, who support treating the ill and infirm, who support not having the elder freeze to death or live off cat food during their finale years is itself ignorance in my opinion. This kind of thinking is the scary result of taking public choice concept too far. You neglect history and you neglect what your reality might look like given a chance in the real world. Maybe those of us who look to the other 35+ developed countries who overwhelming support their public health care systems and just shake their heads in disbelief over argument made like yours above are NOT the ones who are ignorant or irrational. Maybe we actually are the rationally informed pragmatic realist who have a pretty good grip of how the world works today and how it worked in the past.

Calling people ignorant who support life, who support treating the ill and infirm, who support not having the elder freeze to death or live off cat food during their finale years is itself ignorance in my opinion.

Don didn't call people who support those things ignorant. He called people who support a government program that purports to deliver those things but fails to do so ignorant. Moreover, he called them ignorant not because they support the program, but because they are unaware of the ways in which it is failing.

You're conflating criticism of a government program with disapproval of the goals the program purports to serve. That reasoning is invalid.

"That reasoning is invalid."

Stick around, you'll find he has more of that up his sleeve.

Medicare is going bankrupt, because it actually has a definite source of funding, theoretically, and it has predictably rising costs, and the former can't possibly keep up with the latter. Is Homeland Security or the DOD going bankrupt? Of course not, because these organs of the state don't have a definite source of funding, and their cost depends on which bogeyman the Orwellian architects of U.S. foreign policy decide to conjure up next. Just goes to show that honest accounting is a counterproductive policy in the District of Columbia.

You support life and warming the elderly, so the rest of us must support death and feeding eldercicles to the cats. Your ideology is comfortingly simple, but you obviously haven't looked at Greece lately. Economic fundamentals matter.

Greece is just one more causulty of market fundamentalism gone wild. It still does and will continue to provide health care to it's elderly in spite of the recent right of center governments blowing the budget. Recent elections have given power back to the left of center.

WHO ranks Greece 14th in providing its citizens health care. We are 37th. And they do it for far less than us.

Every evil under the sun is a casualty of market fundamentalism in your one-tracked mind. Population aging doesn't fit on your silly, left-right political spectrum. Demographic changes exist in reality, not in your political melodramas.

The corporatist, U.S. healthcare system is nothing to brag about, and a wholesale state takeover might even be an improvement, for a while, but the system we have now is to "market fundamentalist" what north is to south. They're opposite extremes, but the spectrum is not one-dimensional. You can't perceive the opposition only because you shove every idea somewhere along a simplistic, one-dimensional spectrum with state-dominated systems at both ends.

Jackass,
Greece is another Hong Kong. Yeah! right! http://www.heritage.org/Index/Ranking.aspx

Jackass,

Greece was a wonderful dictatorship until 36 years ago ( we are talking a couple of millenia here ), that dumbasses like muirgeo loved, and then market fundamentalists came to the seen and grew government spending and shrank government.

right of center governments blowing the budget.

Government got too small, is that the why budget got blown, you dumbass!

For once we agree. The goal of the modern libertarian should be to realize the non-utility of voting. The time that would be wasted in the voting process could be better utilized to inform and educate other libertarian, conservative and neo-conservatives the value of not voting. Please go forth and spread the word... that will show em... that will get the change you/we want. Great message. Absolutely love it.

As a side note, if you actually convinced 55% of the country to stop voting ... you would cease to achieve the end that you desire. That is, 100% of the voting public being in favor of big government.

If that many people gave up on government as a means to an end, it would cease to exist. People would stop paying taxes, stop paying attention to moronic government regulations, etc. You can't fit 55% of the population in prison.

"If that many people gave up on government as a means to an end, it would cease to exist."

Good point. It does take some educating to show people that they can better achieve their ends peacefully, rather than by using the guns of government.

People who are otherwise intelligent utter the most extraordinarily dumb things, like "But without government, there would be no roads!" Or, "But without government money, we'd collapse into a prehistoric barter system!" It is a programmed mental block that will take some intellectual work, much like deprogramming cult members.

To further clarify, government would lose the consent of the governed. I don't think that's the only way to restore government to its constitutional purpose. But it is A way to do it.

"other libertarian, conservative and neo-conservatives"

You think only in terms of these nebulous political blobs. Never mind that libertarians and neo-conservatives are often bitter rivals. They're both "not you", so they might as well be allies. We're with you, or we're with the terrorists. No room for compromise in that skull of yours. No wonder "the left" is laughably impotent beside the military-industrial-financial-Congressional complex.

Yeah I understand there are differences but I just think it's important for each of those groups to understand what a waste of their time it is NOT voting.

Voting is always a waste of time. Political ideology is irrelevant. On some scale, the blob of public opinion is homogeneous. Statesmen do whatever they like while stroking the public like a placid dog. At that point, you learn nothing about the course of the ship of state by polling the public. You might as well consult an astrologer.

Excellent podcast. I had the sinking suspicion that Russ and Don were thinking of a certain someone contributor here, when they were talking about angry emails.

"Voters are morons." Best part of the whole podcast in my book.

I implore you Russ, get Dr. Sowell about Hayek and Intellectuals and Society on there!.

Very good podcast.

Markets and governments both being imperfect, to which direction should we lean?

Seems obvious to me to go in the direction where the least amount of power is concentrated.

Odd that those who worry about the "power" of the market trust many of the very same men once they've assumed a bureaucratic position.

I think you need balance between government power and markets. Past and recent history makes that clear to me. Who has more concentrated power JP Morgan or Marcus Goldman or FDR or Barack Obama. Unbridled markets concentrate power far more than our democracy does.

Apparently you don't think the US federal government constitutes a concentration of power.

Barack Obama. He bailed out JP Morgan and Marcus Goldman. Ain't that clear dumbass?

I enjoyed the podcast very much!

I hope Mr. Boudreaux will some time go into further detail about his justifications for not personally voting. He obviously cares very much about policy and swaying opinions, given his prodigious letter-writing and academic work, but as it stands now, he believes that good policy should come from lawmakers who are elected by sufficiently large groups of other people who can spare the time to participate.

I mean, why not at least get an absentee ballot, and write "Ricardian" on the reason for the exemption?

Why do you care what I'd write on my protest ballot, and why would I care to tell you? Do you want to know my personal ethics as well? My religious faith? My sexual preference? The breed of my cat? The color of my car?

Majoritarian plebiscites are not democratic at all in my way of thinking. Democracy is the rule of people by themselves, not the rule of minorities by majorities. Freedom of conscience and speech, with total impunity from any central authority, is democratic. Free association is democratic. The market is democratic.

Insofar as people live in a community governed my common standards, like property rights, establishing the standards might involve a majority vote, among other processes like common law and trials by jury, but democracy implies a right to leave such a community and form another with more like minded individuals, not an ever growing collection of people ruled by an ever more powerful central authority elected in ever more platitudinous plebiscites. Such an unchecked majoritarian system is just another form of tyranny.

| Why do you care what I'd write on my protest ballot, and why would I care to tell you? Do you
| want to know my personal ethics as well? My religious faith? My sexual preference? The breed of | my cat? The color of my car?

I do not understand what you are saying, nor do I understand what you think I am saying. Mr. B wishes to influence policy (and even a goal of less govt involvement is a policy), and does so by writing. He may influence lawmakers, he may influence voters, or the people who influence lawmakers and/or voters. Good on him. But I believe that his not voting (or, more importantly, other people hearing that he does not vote) might influence other people to not vote (whether the Ricardian math works out that way for them or not), and those non-votes might give the wrong lawmakers aid and comfort.

As for your protest ballot, rest assured I am not interested in anything you might write on it, nor your characteristics. I hope the right people get the right message from your ballot, who and whatever that might be. I am not optimistic.

Here's another vote for not voting.

Justin Wolfers (at Freakonimics blog) is very critic with the inclusion of Hayek in high school curriculum:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/1...
His criterion to evaluate authors to be included in high school books is misguided. Mentions in scientific papers is not a measure of the educational aspects and social influence of an author. This is specially true in social sciences such as economics.
Any of your insightful comment from Don or you about this issue?
Thanks,
Raul.

Can't take Wolfers seriously at all here. A similar search would probably find many more references to Galileo than to Kepler, but Kepler is the more important scholar from a scientific perspective. Galileo is more celebrated for many reasons other than his scientific contributions. Kepler is less celebrated, but we wouldn't have Newton's Gravity without Kepler's remarkably elegant laws of planetary motion. What did Galileo contribute?

Simply googling "Galileo" and "Kepler" yields three times as many hits for Galileo, and of course, "Elvis" dwarfs them both.

How many JSTOR hits does Pareto get? How about von Neumann? Comparing Hayek to these scholars makes a lot more sense than comparing him to a political celebrity like Marx.

Needless to say, I don't want a political board filtering scholarship in Texas or anywhere else.

"Needless to say, I don't want a political board filtering scholarship in Texas or anywhere else."

Can't agree with you more. Unfortunately, politics and education go hand in hand in the US. The educational system in the US is geared to it, thanks to the union/government link that really control the US educational system.

well...