It’s tough to be an informed citizen. Now we not only have to decide whether we want the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), we have to have an opinion on how well it’s being implemented. We’ve got to know what the federal debt ceiling is and whether it’s a good idea raise it, and we’re supposed to figure out who’s responsible for shutting down the government for two weeks.
Ilya Somin has the answer for this information overload:
Reducing the size of government could also alleviate the problem of ignorance by making it easier for rationally ignorant voters to monitor its activities. A smaller, less complicated government is easier to keep track of.
Somin is the author of Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter and a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. At the Cato Unbound website, Somin offers a summary of his book and frets about the “deep and widespread” ignorance of American voters. (Example: “They greatly underestimate the percentage that goes to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, and vastly overestimate that spent on foreign aid.”) He argues that effects of this ignorance are worsened by “the enormous size and scope of modern government.”
His solution is for us to make fewer decisions at the ballot box (i.e., ask the government to do less stuff) and to make more decisions by “voting with our feet.” In other words, if we think the government should do something, we should move to another state or city where the government already does it:
The informational advantages of foot voting over ballot box voting strengthen the case for limiting and decentralizing government. The more decentralized government is, the more issues can be decided through foot voting. It is usually much easier to vote with your feet against a local government than a state government, and much easier to do it against a state than against the federal government.
I haven’t seen the book, but Somin’s essay reads like a whispered call for solidarity among highly educated (which usually means high-income) Americans. The message is: Why let those people make demands on government when they don’t even know what government does? Shifting power to smaller and smaller political jurisdictions also has implications for the well-being of Americans who don’t live in affluent communities. Look at public schools, which in most states are largely funded at the local level. Our public education system allows for “voting with your feet,” if you’re financially able, by moving to a county or town with high property values. But in this case, “decentralization” is a legitimate-sounding way of banishing from your mind poorer neighborhoods just a few miles away.
As for the problem of voter “ignorance,” Somin takes note of “information shortcuts” that people use to make decisions at the ballot box. He’s not impressed by “opinion leaders” who put complex political issues in easy-to-swallow form. (“They are people like Rush Limbaugh or Jon Stewart, whose main asset is their skill at entertaining their audience and validating its preexisting biases.”) But in his Cato Unbound essay, at least, he doesn’t address the information shortcut that dominates politics in almost all functioning democracies: political parties. Look at polls and at granular election results (down to the precinct level), and it becomes obvious that the great majority of Americans vote for the same party from one election to the next. This is presumably because, as Yale University’s Heather Gerken writes in one of the three responses to Somin’s essay, “voters do know one big thing: the basic difference between the two major parties.”
In addition to the political parties, voters can also look to labor unions, trade organizations, churches, advocacy organizations (for women, seniors, gays and lesbians, etc.), and issue-based lobbies (the NRA, environmental groups). Often voters rely on the information from these groups because they share broad goals that require action from the government. Are their votes less legitimate than “smarter” voters who know what percentage of the federal government goes to, say, arts programs versus veterans’ benefits?
UPDATE: See related post, "The libertarians respond on big government and Obamacare."
Is Obamacare coming to get you?
Here’s another example of how difficult it is to stay informed about the ball of confusion known as Obamacare. In a post titled “You Can Keep Your Health Insurance Under Obamacare? Not So Much,” Reason’s J.D. Tuccille writes of Obamacare’s effects on people who already have coverage: “it doesn’t matter if you like your health care plan, since you probably can’t keep it.” He quotes from Kaiser Health News:
Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies.
The main reason insurers offer is that the policies fall short of what the Affordable Care Act requires starting Jan. 1. Most are ending policies sold after the law passed in March 2010. At least a few are cancelling plans sold to people with pre-existing medical conditions.
According to 2012 data from the Census Bureau, 31 million Americans were covered by directly purchased health insurance before Obamacare (in addition to the 171 million Americans who got health insurance through employers), so even hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters don’t translate to “you probably can’t keep” your existing plan.
And if you click through to the Kaiser Health News report, you can also read:
By all accounts, the new [federally approved] policies will offer consumers better coverage, in some cases, for comparable cost — especially after the inclusion of federal subsidies for those who qualify. The law requires policies sold in the individual market to cover 10 “essential” benefits, such as prescription drugs, mental health treatment and maternity care. In addition, insurers cannot reject people with medical problems or charge them higher prices. The policies must also cap consumers’ annual expenses at levels lower than many plans sold before the new rules.
So now we all have to get fancy-pants insurance that covers mental health! Hmm, I’m reminded that one of the arguments against gun control is that monitoring mental illness, not confiscating weapons, is the best way to prevent shooting massacres...
UPDATE: See related post, "The libertarians respond on big government and Obamacare."
