One of the books whose publication I await most eagerly is Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Due out in early October, Ilya’s book promises to be a compelling and creative explanation of how public-choice analyses – not least those of Bryan Caplan – reveal as misguided the modern notion that democracy discovers and enforces some vague phantom called “the will of the People.” Put one way, science exposes as superstition the belief that big, centralized government will ever serve as a positive force in making society more prosperous and more civil.
Many Cafe patrons know Ilya, a professor of law at GMU, from his blogging over at The Volokh Conspiracy. Here, for example, is Ilya’s recent take-down of a truly awful essay by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry entitled “The Libertarian Case for National Military Service.”
