Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance?
2013-09-21 · Guest: Ilya Somin (Professor of Law at George Mason University) · 82:34
Voter ignorance and the impact on democratic governance
Bob Zadek interviews Professor Ilya Somin of the George Mason University School of Law to discuss the pervasive issue of voter ignorance and its impact on democratic governance. They explore why voters remain “rationally ignorant” and discuss potential solutions, such as decentralizing power to encourage “foot voting” over ballot box voting. Later in the show, Bob highlights a free speech incident at Modesto Junior College and examines a controversial eminent domain plan in Richmond, California.
Topics: Voter Ignorance, Democracy, Foot Voting, Federalism, Public Choice, Eminent Domain, Free Speech, Modesto Junior College, Richmond CA
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Ilya Somin: Professor of Law at George Mason University
- Caller (Chuck): Listener from Sonoma
Introduction and the Founders’ Skepticism [00:15]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. Glad to be back. I’m your host, Bob Zadek, every Sunday at noon—well, most Sundays at noon—on NewsTalk 910. Thanks so much for listening. I am back from a two-week vacation in the Czech Republic and Austria. Being on vacation means one special thing to me: I actually get to read books. I’m not allowed to read books in the United States; all I’m allowed to do is work. But when I travel on vacation, it’s an opportunity to catch up on my reading.
On this last trip, I enjoyed reading Richard Beeman’s book, Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution. It’s a book which tells the story of how the Constitution was negotiated and written. It’s a well-done book. What’s the relevance to today’s show? Well, I was reminded of how little enthusiasm our founders had for the concept of democracy. Most of us, when we think about our Constitution and the founders and what the revolution was fought for, we think, well, it was fought to bring democracy to America. It was so that people can engage in the political activity of self-determination, control their own lives.
Well, of course, that’s somewhat true, but the founders—most of them, maybe Jefferson to the contrary—but most of the important founders and those who drafted our Constitution were, at best, lukewarm about the concept of democracy. They had serious reservations about entrusting political decision-making to the everyday voter. If you think back to our system of government as originally drafted—it’s been changed a lot by constitutional amendment and by practice—but if you think back to the government after ratification in 1788, the only direct voter participation in the political process was the election of members of the House of Representatives, the “People’s House.”
Voters did not elect Senators; Senators were elected by the state houses. Voters, of course, did not elect judges—the judiciary. And voters did not elect the President; they elected electors who elected the President. So, the founders were pretty careful to limit the direct voter participation because they were uncomfortable with the process and with the ability of everyday people to make important decisions with the ballot.
Today, 240 or some odd years like that later, we experience in our country more direct voter participation than the system of government the founders designed. And we experience an incredible amount of political ignorance among everyday voters. Not only is there ignorance, but there is a substantial amount of apathy. Voters do not seem to care about the issues, and voters do not vote in particularly large numbers. And polls indicate that voters are remarkably uninformed about the issues that they need to know to make a decision.
So here we are, living in a world of more voter participation in terms of structural participation than the founders envisioned, and voters who, in surprisingly large numbers, haven’t got a clue about the issues they’re voting on. What does that tell us about where we are today in our political health and where we are going? How are we affected by political ignorance and what to do about it? There’s heady stuff for you. To discuss this with me, I’m delighted to welcome back to the show Ilya Somin. Ilya is a Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law. He focuses on constitutional law and property law issues. He’s the author of—and this will be the focal point of today’s conversation—he’s the author of Democracy and Political Ignorance, subtitled Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Ilya and I will explore the issue of voter ignorance. Is it an area of concern? Does that result in any to-do list? What does that tell us about our short-term and long-term political health? Should we even care? 800-345-5639 to join the conversation. Ilya, welcome to the show.
Ilya Somin: Thank you so much for having me.
Bob Zadek: Now, Ilya, the—I guess I am—my introduction, I trust, was reasonably accurate in describing how unenthusiastic the founders were at the prospect of voter participation in many of the political issues confronting America.
Ilya Somin: Yeah, I think that’s right. There were different views among the founders, but most of them were very worried about the problem of voter ignorance. They wanted some political participation, particularly as a check on the power of elites and the wealthy, but they also worried greatly about ignorance. That was one of the reasons why they significantly limited the role of popular participation in the government they set up. And also, many of them were extremely concerned about what they saw as ignorance-driven excesses in state governments in the 1770s and 1780s, which is one of the primary reasons why they wanted to establish the Constitution. Certainly, people like James Madison, Gouverneur Morris, and others among the founders believed that the public was often ignorant about politics and also irrational in the way that they evaluated the information that they did know.
Bob Zadek: And James Wilson as well, in Philadelphia, was unenthusiastic at the prospect of widespread democracy. And of course, the issue was that, as you said—and I want to make sure my friends out there grasp the importance of what you said—to the founders, democracy, that is direct voter participation, was not the end in itself, but rather it was a check, one of the checks and balances. It was a way to check the excesses of the government. It was merely a control device rather than the end in itself. It was simply a way to make sure that those in government knew, ultimately, if they didn’t behave in a way the voters liked, there would be retribution at the polls. But democracy was not the end in itself; it was simply a tool.
Ilya Somin: I think some of them probably did value some degree of popular participation in government as an end in itself—Jefferson, for instance—but that didn’t also prevent them from being very suspicious of it as well. And obviously, for at least some of them, its main point was just that they wanted it to check the bad behavior of government officials and other political elites, like you said.
Why Voter Ignorance Matters [09:23]
Bob Zadek: Now, with that as background, here we are in 2013, and you chose to write a book entitled Democracy and Political Ignorance. What caused you to select that topic as the focus for a book? What troubled you? What issues did you feel needed to be brought to the attention of the political audience in America?
Ilya Somin: So, I’ve been interested in this issue for at least 15 years now, since I was a student. And I think what really persuaded me over time of the importance of this problem is that it has an effect on almost all the other problems we see in government policy. If you look at almost every major issue out there that we discuss—whether it’s the spending crisis, or gay rights, or racial discrimination, or economic regulation, or environmental policy, or almost anything else—if you look at the survey data on what the public actually knows about that issue, most of the time you’ll find very substantial ignorance going on.
And that substantial ignorance, in turn, feeds back into government policy and often has negative effects. So, I think what interests me about this issue is that it has effects on almost all the other political issues that we care about. Because to the extent that public opinion influences policy, if the public is ignorant, often that influence will be a bad influence, or at least not nearly as good as it could be if the public knew more. So, it might be going too far to say, well, this is the problem that’s more important than any other in our democracy—there are unfortunately lots of contenders for that title—but it is at least the problem that has a significant effect on all the others, and it tends to make almost all the other ones worse than they otherwise would be.
Shocking Statistics on Political Knowledge [12:10]
Bob Zadek: Now, you cite a lot of this—the level of political ignorance has, of course, as you cite in your book, has been poll-tested. And it’s been poll-tested throughout our recent political history. You go back, I think, you even go back to the ’80s and spend a lot of—discuss a lot of polls in the ’90s and in the turn of the 21st century. Give us some examples, if you can, from your book or otherwise, about what you mean as examples of political ignorance.
Ilya Somin: Sure. Just looking at things that are going on right now, we have a big debate going on about the federal budget and what should be done with it. Most of the public has very little understanding of how the federal government actually currently spends its money. They greatly overestimate the amount of money spent on foreign aid. Most of the public thinks that at least 5 to 10 percent or even more of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid; in reality, it’s less than 1 percent.
On the other hand, the public greatly underestimates the amount that is spent on big entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. And so as a result, we get a public opinion which thinks that we can deal with the federal budget crisis perhaps by cutting things like foreign aid without focusing too much on the actual big spending items. Similarly, we now are having a big debate on Obamacare and its future. A poll conducted in April by the Kaiser Foundation found that 42 percent of the public doesn’t even realize that Obamacare is still the law.
Bob Zadek: 42 percent of Americans don’t realize Obamacare is the law?
Ilya Somin: Well, many people do, but 42 percent don’t. Oh my goodness. About a month or two later, they found that 79 percent say they’ve heard nothing or very little about the Obamacare exchanges, which are a central element of the law. That’s how a very large portion of the population would end up purchasing their health insurance in the future once Obamacare is fully implemented. So, this is fairly basic stuff that large portions of the population don’t know. You can say that knowing this basic stuff is not by itself sufficient to have a well-informed opinion on the issues, but even if it’s not sufficient, I think it’s certainly for most people necessary. Like, if you want to have an informed opinion on how the fiscal crisis should be dealt with, it helps to at least know the basics of where the money is currently going.
Misassigning Blame and Credit [16:15]
Bob Zadek: To just help you be a little bit more relaxed, I have done an informal poll, and 100 percent of my listener audience knows all of these issues backwards and forwards. So, would that we were a cross-section of America, your book need not have been published. Unfortunately, we are not—we being myself and my friends who are listeners. So, regretfully, the rest of the country is not a mirror image of my audience.
Now, I think you pointed out also in your book that not only is there ignorance about specific issues, but even more basically, about the function—how our government works. That is, if things are going wrong—and this is crucial to being an intelligent voter—if things are going wrong, who’s to blame? The executive branch? The one you voted for in the House of Representatives, or your Senator, or the judiciary? That there is widespread confusion, if not an absence of knowledge, about who to blame. And if you don’t know, if something in your life which the government can affect—if something in your life is not right and you want to punish somebody at the poll, you have to know who to punish. You can’t just rail—just wail at the moon and complain. And if you don’t know who to punish at the poll, how in the world can you vote? So, how—what about the basic operation of government? How widespread is the lack of knowledge about that?
Ilya Somin: It’s a pretty significant problem. A 2006 poll found that only 42 percent of the public can even name the three branches of the federal government: executive, legislative, and judicial. Perhaps even more importantly, the public often has trouble distinguishing between those events that happen for which we can give credit or blame to politicians and those for which we cannot.
So, for instance, various studies find that the public often rewards and punishes incumbents for short-term changes in the economy that they actually very likely had nothing to do with causing. On the other hand, they often ignore things that the incumbents did have more of an influence over. There’s even the case that if you look at local and state elections, incumbent politicians get a boost when local sports teams win championships. Even though obviously the incumbents, with rare exceptions, didn’t actually cause that.
And we also find that governors in farm states—if there’s a drought that reduces farm prices, the governors in the farm states tend to be more likely to be blamed for that, even though obviously they can’t control whether there’s a drought or not. And there are many similar examples. The fundamental problem is that, both in terms of figuring out how to assign responsibility and also in terms of learning lots of other things about the issue, there’s very little incentive for the average voter to spend more than the minimal amount of time and effort learning about politics and government. Because the chance that any one vote will actually make a difference in an election is infinitesimally small—maybe about one in 60 million, very roughly speaking, in a presidential election. It’s somewhat higher in other elections, but still very low. So, if you’re not a person who is inherently highly interested in politics, your only reason to acquire knowledge about it is to be a better voter. That turns out not to be much of an incentive at all. So instead, you work, you spend time with your family, you watch reality TV, but you don’t devote a lot of time and effort to learning about politics.
Rational Ignorance and Political Fans [20:33]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m talking with Ilya Somin. We are talking about political ignorance. Does it matter? What does it tell us about America today and, more importantly, America tomorrow? 800-345-5639 to join the conversation. So Ilya, the point you made just before I gave the audience our call-in number, the point you are making is really, really important. And that is to say, while I wake up in the morning and while brushing my teeth, I’m reading political blogs. And I will interrupt my day to sneak online—my workday—and see what’s happening politically. And I will talk with the person in front of me at the Molly Stone’s checkout counter about repeal of the income tax law and a flat tax. I live and breathe this stuff and spend enormous amounts of time doing it, let alone the time I spend learning so I can ask good questions on my show on Sunday. So I spend so much time to be, quote, a “good voter.” And you point out, under the discussion of rational self-interest, that I am totally Looney Tunes. I am wasting all of this time. And those who pay no attention whatever as to the issues of the day are, in this regard, far more rational than I am. So expand upon this concept of rational self-interest and why, in a manner of speaking, it makes no sense to be informed.
Ilya Somin: So, it makes very little sense to be informed beyond a minimal level if your only reason for doing so is to be a better voter, to try to improve the quality of government, because the chance that you will have an effect is so low. However, becoming a better voter is not the only reason why people might want to acquire political knowledge. Just as there are people like me who are sports fans and we acquire all sorts of knowledge about professional sports teams, not because we think we can influence the outcome of games, but because being a sports fan is fun and rooting for our favorite team is fun.
So, there are lots of people who are what I in the book call “political fans.” They enjoy following politics, they like cheering on their favorite party or their favorite candidate against its opponents, and so forth. And such people are only a minority of the population, but they certainly exist. And I think it’s not irrational by any means to learn about politics or even spend a lot of time on it if you actually enjoy it, as I think most of these people do, and as I’m betting you probably do.
Bob Zadek: I am consumed by it. I’m totally consumed by it. But I can’t explain why. And I, of course, live in a world which is a de facto support group because most of the people I self-select to socialize with are the same way. So we just talk about it together. But I would think, you know, in my world, everybody should do that because the country would be a better place. But of course, it wouldn’t be, and everybody is not going to do that. And it almost makes it almost hard to defend the act of voting, since one vote makes so little difference. I could ask my listeners out there: why in the world would you waste time voting? It doesn’t matter. Just get a life and never vote again. Now, that is a sort of an outrageous statement, but pretty darn rational. It makes no sense to vote.
Ilya Somin: So, voting is a little bit different from becoming informed because voting is an extremely low-cost activity. For usually, it’s maybe half an hour of your time at most. So, in the book, I go into this in more detail, but basically, it turns out that if you care about your fellow citizens and also if you think there’s a substantial difference between the two sides in terms of how good their policies are, it makes rational sense to vote because voting is an extremely low-cost activity.
On the other hand, it doesn’t make rational sense to acquire more than the minimal amount of political knowledge because that’s much more costly in terms of time and effort. So the equilibrium you get is what you actually see in the real world, which is large numbers of people voting, but most of them not knowing very much what they’re voting about.
I want to, if I may, for a moment talk a little about the people that you mentioned who are really interested in politics, or the “political fans” as I called them. I think it’s definitely true that those people know more about politics than the average person does. However, there’s another important problem that they suffer from, and that is that they often do a poor job of evaluating the information they do know. If your goal in acquiring political knowledge is primarily to enjoy the process of being a political fan and cheering on your side, you’re not going to be very objective or unbiased in the way that you evaluate the information that you get. You’re going to tend to overvalue any information that confirms your preexisting views and ignore or at least undervalue anything that cuts against it.
And that’s actually what lots of studies find. Ironically, the people who know the most about politics are some of the most biased in the way that they evaluate the information that they know. And for the individual, that is rational behavior because their main goal in learning about politics was to enjoy being a political fan or because they find it interesting, rather than to get at the truth. But in terms of the effect that it has on politics overall, you obviously get some bad results, and we can talk about sort of particular examples of that.
Bob Zadek: We’ll talk about that after the break. We have to go to our mandatory 90-second break. This is Bob Zadek. I’m talking with Ilya Somin. We are talking about political ignorance. Does it matter? Why vote at all? It makes no difference. 800-345-5639. More when we come back in 90 seconds.
The Failure of the Miracle of Aggregation [25:58]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at noon on NewsTalk 910. Thanks so much for listening. I am your host, Bob Zadek, glad to be back. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation with Ilya Somin. We are talking about Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya’s about-to-be-published book, subtitled Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Political ignorance, as Ilya points out, is rampant in America, perhaps in the world. People who exercise their right to vote are, as indicated by polls, remarkably ill-informed when they vote. People tend to make not much effort to become informed because why should they? By voting, you cannot very much affect your life in any way. Some people vote out of a sense of duty, but I would argue that’s perverse. If you’re going to be uninformed and vote, then your duty is not to vote. You never have a duty to vote—that’s absurd. But if you want to vote, you do have a duty to become informed. Voting when you’re not informed violates a duty, if you have one at all, to your fellow Americans. So there is no duty to vote. Indeed, if you’re voting and you’re not informed, you should be ashamed of yourself. And why bother? There’s no reason to vote if you’re uninformed about the issues.
Ilya, what about the concept that if you have a bunch of uninformed voters, they will zero each other out? A bunch of uninformed people voting Democrat will be offset by uninformed people voting Republican, and the informed people will therefore carry the day and that will be the majority. Do the statistics bear that out, or is that thinking just wrongheaded?
Ilya Somin: So, there are some important scholars who argue this—that it doesn’t really matter if people are ignorant because all the different ignorant people will offset each other and the small minority of informed people are the ones who will actually decide electoral outcomes. However, this is only likely to work if the errors in one direction almost exactly offset the errors in the other direction. So, those who cast uninformed ballots out of ignorance for the Republicans are exactly offset by those who do so for the Democrats.
And the data that we have on most issues suggests that this isn’t true—that in fact, on most issues, if you increase people’s knowledge, the distribution of opinion significantly changes. And by the way, it’s not simply a matter of, well, do you vote for the Republicans or do you vote for the Democrats? The choices that those parties put in front of us in the first place are heavily influenced by the fact that they know that they’re facing a mostly ignorant electorate. If the electorate were much more knowledgeable, we might see different candidates; we would almost certainly see different party platforms. So, it’s not just a matter of did the voters do a good job of choosing between the options before them; it’s also a matter of that the options themselves would likely be significantly different if the voters were better informed. Because the political professionals—they’re smart, they know the polling data, and they know that when you run to get the support of a largely ignorant electorate, you need a different strategy and a different platform often than if you’re facing people who are more informed.
Foot Voting vs. Ballot Box Voting [30:07]
Bob Zadek: Now, we’re going to get to the “voting with your feet,” which, Ilya, for you and I, is a favorite topic. And it’s a favorite topic for me because I live in California, where people are voting with their feet by leaving. And we’ll discuss in the last segment of the show the significance. But having done the work for your book, do you end up being pessimistic about America, pessimistic about America’s ability to—the electorate to make the right political decisions? When you finished doing your work and you put your mouse down and you sat and leaned back in your chair, what were you saying to yourself?
Ilya Somin: It’s a good question. One of my friends, an economist who studies these issues, likes to say that before he started looking at data on political ignorance, he always asked himself, “Well, why isn’t government policy better than it is?” After he started studying it, he says, “Well, now I ask myself, how come it isn’t even worse?”
So, in the short to medium term, studying political ignorance does make me more pessimistic because it suggests that even on a large number of policy issues where there are pretty good ways to improve things significantly, where even most experts agree that’s the way to go, we still won’t do it because much of the public is so ignorant and doesn’t realize that.
On the other hand, studying political ignorance does show a relatively easy way that things can be improved if enough of informed people understand that—and even some ignorant can probably understand it as well—which is that if we only make fewer of our decisions through large, complicated centralized government and more by voting with our feet, either in the market or when we choose to live in different state or local governments, then we can significantly improve the quality of decision-making in our society.
The key point is this: if you’re like most people, you probably spent much more time figuring out which car or TV to buy the last time you bought one than you spent figuring out who to support for President of the United States. Is that because the car or the TV is more important than the presidency or more complicated? Probably not. Unless you’re one of these people that truly lives through their car somehow, I think most people would agree the presidency is more important. But the reason why people spend more time and effort on the car or the TV is because they know the decision will make a difference.
And similarly, when you decide whether you’re going to live in California versus, say, Nevada, or whether you’re going to live in San Francisco versus San Jose, you put much more time and effort in learning about that than you do in deciding who to vote for. So, if we can decentralize government so that people can vote with their feet more often between jurisdictions, and if we can limit the scope and complexity of government more generally, I think more of our decisions will be made with better information and also people process that information on average in a more unbiased way.
I’ll end this particular point with this: that there’s a social norm which says you shouldn’t argue with people about politics, right? If you’re like me, you’re the kind of person who does start arguments about politics, people often get annoyed. And they get particularly annoyed if you point out that they made some error in their analysis. Even if you’re completely right and their argument is stupid, they’ll still be very angry.
On the other hand, people are much more attentive if you do something like point out that they’re missing out on a bargain on a car or a TV. Why the difference? It’s because people get annoyed about being criticized about views on subjects where, realistically, even if they had a better view, it probably wouldn’t make much difference. So they just have the cost of having their opinions questioned without getting much benefit. On the other hand, on subjects where knowing the truth will actually help them make better decisions that really do make a difference, people are much more open to new information. Not completely open—they do make mistakes—but on average, they do a better job.
The Complexity Problem and Expert Consensus [34:36]
Bob Zadek: You know, in your book, you mentioned the 2010 midterm elections, where you pointed out that maybe the most important issue—probably the most important issue—was economic policy. The recession had been going on, the so-called Great Recession had been going on for three years or more, and Obama’s stewardship over the economy was being called into question. And that was the issue.
Now, for voters to vote—and let’s say voters were voting on the economy and on the Democrats’ handling of the economy—economists with doctoral degrees profoundly disagree. Now, you and I will agree on which economists are right, probably. But economists who spend their life worrying about such things are in honest disagreement as to the proper economic policies to follow. How in the world could voters vote on such an issue? How could they acquire a lifetime of economic knowledge which would be required to decide whether a Keynesian approach of heavy government spending to boost the economy or an approach which is less regulation, lower taxes, give more money to the private sector, let the economy take off—those are complex decisions. How can you possibly, if not knowing about the economy evidences voter ignorance, we have to have voter ignorance. Nobody could ever—forgetting about motivation—nobody could ever acquire enough knowledge to really vote in effect for the right economic policy.
Ilya Somin: So, I think it’s certainly true that it’s impossible for voters to know as much as economists do. But what we see in the data is that they don’t even know extremely basic things that even non-economists can easily find out or understand. So in the 2010 election, two-thirds of the public at that time didn’t realize that the economy was actually growing as opposed to shrinking at the time. That by itself is not perhaps enough to tell you what the right economic policy is, but is at least a very valuable piece of information to help understand that debate.
It’s also true, of course, that there are some issues that even the most sophisticated experts disagree about. But it’s worth knowing that majority public opinion is often wrong about a wide range of issues where even most experts, both liberal, conservative, and otherwise, tend to agree. So for instance, economists overwhelmingly agree that free trade is good for the overall economy. But the voters, not quite as overwhelmingly but still a majority, historically almost always disagree and tend to be protectionist.
Similarly, the voters in many surveys tend to be very pessimistic about the impact of technology on the economy. They worry that new technological developments will harm the economy because they throw people out of work, whereas economists on both the right and the left overall have almost the opposite view—that technological development actually is enormously good for economic progress. And there are many other examples like that where there are issues where experts have a pretty high degree of agreement on—not universal agreement, but a pretty high degree—and the voters don’t realize that.
So, there are going to be some issues that even if the voters were extremely knowledgeable, it would be very hard to say whether we can handle them correctly or not because the correct answer is extremely uncertain. But there’s a wide range of other issues where the fact that voters don’t know even very basic things about these areas of policy, it essentially means that we’re leaving not just quarters on the sidewalk, but often $20 bills or $100 bills are lying on the sidewalk that we could pick up, but that we don’t pick up because the voters don’t realize that the opportunity is there.
Smaller Government as a Cognitive Solution [39:12]
Bob Zadek: Now, the good stuff, Ilya. Your subtitle of your book: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Which is really the takeaway, and that to me is a political approach that would both produce automatically more informed voters because of what they are voting on, besides accomplish lots of other public goods. Indeed, it would be back to the future and give us back the country the founders first gave us, which was a federalist, two tiers of government: states on the one hand, federal on the other.
The issues like the economy are, of course, highly complex, and it’s very, very difficult for voters, given the amount of time demands on their time, to really become informed on not only the economy but on all the other issues, whether it’s chemical weapons in Syria, or whether it’s the effect of affirmative action on the quality of education, or late-term abortions—whatever it is. And putting aside the emotional component, just to acquire rational knowledge, it’s more than one could expect.
So, one of the solutions is if you reduce the power of the federal government to affect our lives and move that power back to the states, and from the states to the counties, and from the counties to the towns and villages and cities, then voters are more able to vote intelligently. In the small town that I live in, north of San Francisco, every issue that comes up, it’s modest in size and I can vote with incredible clarity and confidence that I know what I am doing. I understand it because it is local. And to the extent that you can devolve this power back to a smaller, more local government, then the quality of the decision-making by the voters increases profoundly. And I guess that, Ilya, that’s the subtitle of your book and perhaps the optimistic takeaway.
Ilya Somin: Yeah, I think the takeaway is not so much that voters do a better job of voting in local elections as they do in national elections, as that when an issue is controlled by local or state governments, voting at the ballot box is not our only option. We also have the option of voting with our feet. So, if you don’t like the government policies in San Francisco, you can move to lots of other communities in the Bay Area. If you don’t like the policies of California, it’s a bit tougher to move out, but huge numbers of Californians have in fact moved to places like Nevada and New Mexico and Texas over the last few years.
And when we vote with our feet, we have a much better incentive to be informed than when we vote at the ballot box because our decision on where you’re going to live actually makes a difference. The same thing is true when we devolve government power not just to state or local governments, but just to private individuals who are deciding things in the market or in civil society. If we do that, then people also have much better incentives to be informed, as we discussed before when we talked about comparing your decision to buy a car versus your decision who to vote for for President. Most people pay a lot more time and effort figuring out the car than the presidency.
And finally, there is this: as you noted, modern government is enormously large and complex. Today, government at all levels spends nearly 40 percent of our gross domestic product. So, even if the voters followed politics more closely than they do, they still wouldn’t be able to have even a minimal understanding of many of the issues that current government actually addresses. So, given that voters are only going to devote a relatively small amount of time to studying politics and government, if there was less politics and less government to follow, if government were responsible for fewer issues, they would have a better chance of understanding how those issues work.
So, by reducing and decentralizing government, we enable people to make smarter decisions by voting with their feet, but also on those issues which still would be decided at the ballot box, they would have at least a better chance of understanding them because there would be fewer of them. I emphasize, I’m not saying, well, this proves necessarily we should decentralize all functions of government or we should be complete libertarians. There are obviously other issues that you have to consider besides voter ignorance in answering those questions. But ignorance, I think, is at least a big part of what we should consider, and it’s too often ignored in debates over the role of government in society today.
Bob Zadek: You know, in hearing you speak, just what jumped into my mind—and because it’s an issue that is in the news all the time—is the debate going on nationally about the federal government’s control over school curriculum called Common Core. And there was a time that curriculum was determined at the school district level, if not the actual choice of textbooks. And that’s being more or less federalized. So that it’s very hard for voters to affect the curriculum in their local school district if, through the incentives of money—which is always the incentive, that’s the weapon of choice that the feds use to force their will upon localities—is that if a parent were going to a local school board to participate in selecting curriculum and textbooks, that’s all very, very local. But once it’s national, there’s no reason, there’s no way a voter can express their will. And once again, there is this devolution of power and total loss of control. Because once the decision is made so far away, the dilution of one vote is so profound, we totally lose control over that part of our life where we had a high level of control when it was local. And there’s another example where voting with your feet cannot work. You have to move to Canada or to Mexico or somewhere else to get away from a curriculum that you disapprove of. And that’s just one example that came to mind of Ilya’s point about voting with your feet is a very substantial and direct way to express your disapproval with the policies of the elected officials.
Ilya Somin: Yeah, I think it’s definitely true—much harder to vote with your feet against a national policy than against a state or local one.
The Limits of Education and Knowledge Tests [44:39]
Ilya Somin: I think the issue of education is also important here because many people, including perhaps some of your listeners, might ask, “Well, why don’t we just solve the problem of political ignorance through education? Why don’t we just mandate that people learn more about politics in high school and the like?” And I think that’s a reasonable question, but the problem, as I discuss in the book in more detail, is this: first of all, education levels actually have risen enormously over the last 50 or 60 years, yet we have seen little or no increase in political knowledge during that time. So just giving people more education doesn’t seem to increase their knowledge.
Secondly, when governments run schools, it’s often not necessarily in their interest to actually increase people’s levels of political information. Rather, often governments instead prefer to use the public schools either to indoctrinate people in their own preferred views or those of interest groups of various kinds that have an influence over government education policy, both conservative and liberal groups. So, in theory, you can imagine a situation where government really does make a strong effort to use public education to increase people’s political knowledge, but in practice, it doesn’t work out that way most of the time, in part precisely because the public is ignorant and therefore is not in a good position to monitor education policy such as to make sure that they really are increasing political knowledge as opposed to indoctrinating or engaging in other activities that waste the students’ time rather than increase learning. So, it’s really amazing that since the 1940s and ’50s we have a massive increase in average education levels, but very little increase in political knowledge levels, which strongly suggests that sort of investing more money in education and raising the overall level of education, while it may have other good effects, it doesn’t seem to increase political knowledge very much.
Bob Zadek: We have a couple of minutes left. You didn’t mention this in your book, but is there a case to be made—and this is going to sound inflammatory, I certainly don’t intend it to be—is there a case to be made for some kind of a test, minimal knowledge test? Think the test you have to pass to become a citizen if you’re naturalized foreign-born. Is there an argument to be made for some form of testing as a qualification to vote? Thinking about the Jim Crow past, I don’t want to open up that unpleasant hornet’s nest, but a well-done, sincerely drafted test as a condition of voting. Is there an argument for that, or is that just too much off the rails?
Ilya Somin: There is an argument, and I actually do discuss it in Chapter 7 of the book. You could certainly argue that just as we take a test to be able to drive because bad driving poses a threat to other people, so similarly bad voting poses a threat to other people. The problem is this: you said, well, we can have an honest and sincerely drafted test. The problem is that I’m not convinced that government could be trusted to be honest and sincere and unbiased in drafting the test. Whoever was in power at the time the test was established would have a very strong incentive to try to skew the test in favor of their party’s supporters and against the other party. And that’s even setting aside questions of sort of racial bias or other kinds of bias of that sort. Even if the party’s goal is just to win elections, they still would have a very strong incentive to create a test that, if it’s the Republicans in power, it’s biased in favor of the Republicans, or if the Democrats, in favor of their party. So, in theory, I think there is a case to be made for it. The problem is that I’m very skeptical that such a test would be unbiased in practice, and the history of these kind of tests strongly suggests that it wouldn’t be.
However, not in the book but in a future article I’m planning to write, I have kicked around the idea of possibly letting children vote if they could pass a test of political knowledge. Currently, we exclude children from voting because we think they’re ignorant, and most of them probably are. But if there’s a minority who are more knowledgeable than the average adult voter, then by letting them vote, we could improve the overall quality of the electorate and without taking away the vote from anybody who currently has it.
Bob Zadek: Now, you didn’t suggest it, Ilya, but how about a system where you and I are the only two voters? That might work.
Ilya Somin: But you didn’t suggest it in the book. Perhaps that’s—well, I might disagree with you on some issues. So, but notice that when we act in the private sector, for a lot of decisions that you make in your life, you are in fact the only voter. Or if you’re married, it might be you and your wife or husband. So, if your goal is to get greater control over things going on in your life, then there is a way you can be the only voter, so long as you’re also willing to let a lot of other people have that privilege for themselves.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’ve had a wonderful hour speaking with Ilya Somin. We are talking about Ilya’s new book, about to be published, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Ilya, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time on this Sunday afternoon. I’ll be back in 90 seconds. We are discussing the criminalization of the Constitution. Modesto Junior College is in the crosshairs. And the eminent domain taking of mortgages by the city of Richmond, California. I’ll be back in 90 seconds. 800-345-5639. Thanks to Ilya. I’ll be back shortly.
Free Speech Suppression at Modesto Junior College [56:09]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at noon on NewsTalk 910. Thanks so much for listening. I am your host, Bob Zadek, glad to be back. It sure is good to be back from a short vacation in Central Europe. I visited the Czech Republic and Austria. The Czech Republic was quite an interesting visit. I had a chance to speak with a lot of citizens of the Czech Republic who had the experience of actually living under communism. It was quite interesting. I simply never had that experience before, and just to learn firsthand about what it was like when Czechoslovakia—which was what the country was called before it became free of the Iron Curtain and the newly independent Czech Republic—it was interesting to learn about life in Czechoslovakia under communism and how oppressive it was.
And what was most interesting to me—surprising, maybe it shouldn’t have been, but it was—was that in speaking to some politically informed folks, about 30 years old just to put it in perspective, I asked this young man, “Were there people in the Czech Republic, having lived under communism, who missed it, who wished it would come back?” And the answer was a surprising yes. That perhaps a quarter of the population would welcome communism back, despite the deprivation, the total loss of freedom, the inability to improve one’s life economically. There were a decent percentage who would want it back as opposed to the political and economic freedom that they enjoy today in the Czech Republic. I sort of found myself feeling pessimistic if there was a portion of the population who have experienced both forms of government and could want—be willing to give up freedom and go back to communism. I just didn’t understand that and found it to be quite interesting and surprising.
September 17th. September 17th is, in our country, Constitution Day. Since 1994, I believe, Congress declared that September 17th, sometimes called Citizens Day, shall be called Constitution Day. The reason September 17th was picked is that it was on September 17th in 1787 that the Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution, having been worked on for about four months from about May 25th, 1787, through the middle of September when their job was done, at which time the Constitution was sent out to 13 constitutional conventions for ratification. So September 17th is and has been since 1994 Constitution Day.
When the Constitution was passed, it did not have a Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights, as most of you know, was added later. But Virginia and other states only agreed to ratify on the condition, the understanding, that once ratification was completed and the Constitution became the law of the land, the Bill of Rights would be added. And many states, Virginia being in the lead, were uncomfortable about ratifying a Constitution which didn’t have an express Bill of Rights.
With that background, I remind us of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, assured us of free speech. Free speech has been part of our political life since the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. Somebody didn’t tell the administration of Modesto Junior College in California. What happened on September 17th is a student at Modesto Junior College named Robert Van Tuinen wanted to celebrate the signing of the Constitution and went on campus—he’s a student there—and started handing out to those who wished it little pocket-sized versions of the Constitution for free to students.
He was approached by campus police and he was told he couldn’t do that. He said, “I can’t do that? I want to just hand out a Constitution. It’s Constitution Day. I’m celebrating.” And the university said, “Well, no, you can’t quite do that.” And Robert said, “What about my free speech rights? I have this Constitution in my hand. It affords me free speech rights, First Amendment.” And he was told, “Yes, you have free speech rights on this campus. However, we have something called the Time, Place, and Manner Rule. And under our Time, Place, and Manner Rule, you only can pass out literature in the, quote, ‘free speech area.’”
Free speech area? Free speech means free speech. University said, “No, not here. You have to—” and the free speech area is this little cement area about three yards square in front of the student center. And you have to go to the free speech area if you want to enjoy your free speech rights. But on the rest of the campus, you don’t have any free speech rights. Astonishing. And he protested. He said, “I have free speech rights.” And he had a run-in with this administrator, Christine Serrano, who told him, yes, he could make an appointment and he could reserve the cement area in front of the student center, but it was pretty much taken for the next couple of weeks. But if he filled out a bunch of forms, he could perhaps get time to hand out the Constitution. This is America on Constitution Day? Unless you think I’m making this up, Raymond, if we can play that clip. The clip you’re going to hear is part of the confrontation between Christine Serrano, this bureaucratic genius at Modesto Junior College, trying to explain to a student who wanted to hand out the Constitution what the free speech rules are. It’s about 40 seconds long. Raymond, the clip.
Christine Serrano: It’s a Time, Place, and Manner. That’s what it’s called. And that’s the free speech area. And the free speech area is over there in front of the student center, in that little cement area. That’s the Time, Place, and Manner free speech area for anybody that is going to be on campus, which comes through my office. And they would need to fill out an application, and I would need to have a photo of your ID. You can read these guidelines and procedures. No problem. We’re not telling you you can’t; you just need to follow the—
Robert Van Tuinen: Well, you’re telling me that I can’t engage in free speech with my fellow students.
Christine Serrano: No, I’m not telling you—no, I’m not telling you anything. I’m just sharing with you that in order to be in the free speech area, the Time, Place, and Manner, you would need to fill out this so that way I can put you in the—
Robert Van Tuinen: So I can’t engage in free speech on my own with my fellow students?
Bob Zadek: Can you believe Christine Serrano? For shame. For shame, explaining to a student that he cannot hand out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day. And by the way, by the way, Congress mandated that, quote, “all publicly funded educational institutions provide educational programming on the history of the American Constitution on Constitution Day.” And that rule, which Congress enacted, applies to, quote, “any school receiving federal funds of any kind.”
Well, fortunately, fortunately, one of my very favorite nonprofits called FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which defends educational rights on college campuses, wrote a letter to the school bitterly complaining about the abridgment of this student’s First Amendment rights. And the college has, to some degree, backed off. They explained somewhat weakly that they wanted to assure free speech rights and this student was being disruptive and perhaps they overreacted. The point being that American colleges have, to a large extent, free speech rights. There are things called speech codes, which tell you what you can and cannot say and where you can say it. This is what is happening to American higher education. This is the way students are prepared to participate in our political society. Shame, shame, shame on Modesto Junior College.
Ancient Greece and Knowledge Shortcuts [65:41]
Bob Zadek: We have a caller, Chuck from Sonoma. Chuck, good afternoon, and what’s on your mind?
Caller (Chuck): I agree with your guest, and I agree with very many things he said, and I’m going to investigate him further. I wanted to ask you your opinion. Throughout history, we have an awful lot of societies that have practiced democracy, and my example is the ancient Greeks, who elected everyone from government officials to the army officers who led them into battle. And they seemed to do quite well at that. I’m wondering what your comment is and whether that’s relevant to the argument today, if there’s anything to be learned.
Bob Zadek: Actually, Chuck, it’s a very interesting question, and I’m quite glad—I’m happy you’re listening and I’m quite glad you raised the question. Ilya actually discussed the ancient Greek political society in his book. And Ilya points out that the demise of the Greek society, in part, is attributable to voter ignorance because there was a time that the Greek population had to vote on launching a political campaign against, I believe it was the city of Syracuse. And the Greek population was grossly misinformed about the strength of the city-state of Syracuse. And based upon that misinformation, they voted to declare war and to start this campaign, which Greece lost, and it substantially weakened the Greek Empire, and many historians believe it led to the demise. So it’s interesting, Chuck, that you picked that example, which Ilya mentioned in his book. So that he mentions that specifically as an example of how political ignorance can have a profound effect upon the future of our country.
And Chuck, as Ilya and I mentioned on the show, the economy today is another very good example. You and I were required, basically, in the 2010 election, to vote on whether John Maynard Keynes is correct or whether Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other more laissez-faire economists are correct. Whether Paul Krugman is correct or whether Arthur Laffer is correct. Now, Chuck, you and I have never met. I have no idea whether you are a disciplined economist; I’m assuming that you’re not for no reason. But in effect, we had to vote on that basis, with that knowledge. Well, we don’t have it.
Ilya mentions in his book something which is called “knowledge shortcuts.” I do the best I can to be informed; I overcompensate, I read perhaps too much. But what a lot of Americans do is they will select wise men, often pundits and columnists, who they believe have done the heavy lifting and perhaps are more informed and are rational, and follow their advice. I would pick as a personal example for myself George Will. George Will strikes me—not strikes me, he is—very smart and very informed, and I somehow make an intellectual conclusion that he makes sense to me. So often, I will read his column and take his advice because I haven’t got the time. And using shortcuts is not bad per se, so long as you’re selective. Now, another example of a bad shortcut is political party labels. Many people just vote party labels. That’s nothing other than a shortcut. That’s saying, “I assume Democrats or Republicans seem to know what they are doing or seem to make more sense than the other side, and therefore I’m just going to use the shortcut of party labels.” Probably not a good idea, but that’s what people do. So Chuck, I hope I’ve answered your question as best I can on the subject of Greece and on how ignorance can have profound effects upon the future of our country.
Caller (Chuck): I appreciated it, Bob. Thank you very much.
Bob Zadek: Chuck, thanks so much for the call.
Richmond’s Eminent Domain Mortgage Seizure [70:57]
Bob Zadek: In the news as well is the city of Richmond, California. Richmond is a city across San Francisco Bay, across Richardson Bay from Marin County. It’s a bit north and east of San Francisco, and it is basically a city under profound economic pressure. Richmond is, in parts, a blighted community. It is struggling. It is heavily minority-populated, suffers from high crime—not that the two are related, those are just two facts I’m sharing with you. And Richmond has a large number of mortgages, home mortgages, that are underwater. Underwater means the house is worth less than the value of the mortgage. So there’s no equity for the homeowner.
And what happens in communities that suffer from a large number of underwater mortgages is that there’s no reason for the homeowner to remain because they’re not building equity; they’re reducing the deficit, but they’re not building equity. So the danger is these homeowners with underwater mortgages start to leave. The houses become vacant, they get boarded up, neighborhoods are destroyed, and the value of the houses of people who remain decline in value because of the boarded-up homes. And cities around the country are struggling as to what to do about this problem, how they reverse the tide.
Well, a company called Mortgage Resolution Partners has come up with an interesting—and to show my own bias, offensive, but intellectually interesting—solution, using two words that I almost cannot speak without getting apoplectic. The two words are “eminent domain.” Eminent domain is a very old concept. It predates the founding of our country. Under the doctrine of eminent domain, embodied in our Constitution in the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights, under the doctrine of eminent domain, a government may seize private property, may take your property. Now, that seems un-American, but it’s the law. The government may take private property under two conditions: the property has to be taken for a “public use”—remember the word “use”—the property must be taken for a public use, that is building a highway, a school, a prison, some public use. And the person from whom the property is taken must be given, quote, “just compensation.” A government cannot just take your property; they’ve got to pay you. But the important point is they can take your property if there is a public use.
You may remember we’ve discussed on the show years ago the Kelo decision. Supreme Court case comes out of New London, Connecticut. And the Kelo case, when we discussed it on the show, was significant because property was taken from Mrs. Kelo—her home—in a down-at-the-heel area of New London. But it was not taken for a public use. It was taken, together with a lot of other homeowners’ property, in order to give it to a private corporation so that the corporation can build a casino and high-income housing. This was a first in America. The city of New London argued that there was no public use; they wanted to just take Mrs. Kelo’s property and give it to this real estate developer. Take property from one private person and give it to another. They were going to pay Mrs. Kelo, but she said, “I don’t want your damn money, I want my house.” And they said, “You don’t have the choice. You’re out of here. We’re taking your property to give it to somebody else.” Now, the pretense was that by developing the property with a casino and high-income housing and expensive housing, the developer would be paying higher taxes to the city of New London and everybody would benefit—except Mrs. Kelo, who’s homeless, who gets a check for the low value of her house, but it’s her home. She didn’t want the money. But the Supreme Court said this was okay. There was a backlash. Okay, that’s all background.
What’s happening in Richmond? Mortgage Resolution Partners is suggesting a program where the city of Richmond take by eminent domain not the real property, but the mortgages from the banks. It says to the banks—it says to JPMorgan Chase, it says to Wells Fargo—“We are going to foreclose by eminent domain the mortgages you hold on all the communities, on all the houses in Richmond. We’re going to pay you just compensation. You have a mortgage for $200,000, the house is worth $160,000, we’re going to give you $160,000. So Chase, you can’t complain because if you were to foreclose, you’d only get 160 anyway.” So now the city of Richmond is going to take these mortgages from the banks, and it’s going to then go to the homeowner and say, “Homeowner, stay in your house. We’re not going to foreclose. We’re going to rewrite your mortgage for $180,000 or $140,000. We will give you equity. Now you have an incentive to stay in your house.”
In other words, using eminent domain to take mortgages away from the banks and give a windfall to the homeowners. So a homeowner who’s living in a house worth 160 with a $200,000 mortgage wakes up one morning and finds all of a sudden his mortgage, instead of being 200, is 140. And he’s given equity; he’s given a gift by the city of Richmond through eminent domain. Does that sound right? As a matter of policy, putting aside the fact of whether this is the proper use of eminent domain—and this is hardly a case of my pleading that you’re going to adversely affect Jamie Dimon, the president of JPMorgan Chase, you’re going to affect his bonus—this is not about harming the banks. It’s about is this good policy to make a gift to a homeowner with taxpayer money? Because in effect, the city of Richmond is in effect taking a hit on these mortgages and doing so to keep homeowners in their houses. Is this the proper use of eminent domain, or is this simply increasing moral hazard? Because now a homeowner who got himself in a jam wakes up one morning and gets a gift from the city of Richmond.
Now, additional background: this approach was attempted to be sold to the city of San Bernardino, which is in bankruptcy in California, also in California. And the city of San Bernardino turned it down. If it works in the city of Richmond, it’s going to be offered to other cities around the country. The banks are—it’s interesting because the banks are threatening. The banks say, “Hey, city of Richmond, if you do this, we can’t make mortgages to the city of Richmond anymore, and we’re just not going to lend to your residents.” Now, whether that’s an empty threat or not, who knows, but the banks are not very happy. Wells Fargo has publicly threatened not to make any more loans in the city of Richmond. What’s also interesting is this process of taking mortgages by eminent domain was pushed by and encouraged by the Occupy movement. Remember them? We haven’t heard much about them recently, but the Occupy Richmond movement has encouraged this to happen. And a bunch of other cities in California are looking at this, depending upon what happens in the city of Richmond. So this goes on our “let’s watch it” list to see what’s going to happen. But it sure strikes me as being a misuse of the process of eminent domain.
Next week, we will discuss a subject you’re going to love. We’re going to discuss libertarian populism. What is that, you ask? Well, my guest will be Timothy Carney, a reporter for the Washington Examiner, who will explain how libertarian principles have a way to hit mainstream America and to siphon off voters and supporters from both the Democrats and the Republicans and to become a powerful force in the 2016 election. You won’t want to miss this discussion next Sunday on libertarian populism with my guest, Timothy Carney. Thanks so much for listening. It’s been a wonderful first day back. I sure miss talking to all of you and hope to join you again next Sunday at noon. This is Bob Zadek, so long for now.