The policy proposals of Bryan Caplan’s (of EconLog fame) new lead Cato Unbound piece to adjust for voter irrationality are practical to the point of being machiavellian, but they seem to be based on principles somewhat contrary to libertarian ideals, which worries me. Though I agree that more issues should be taken off the table and out of the sphere of the state, some of his ideas might be very disturbing to libertarians.
If libertarians know well that intervening in the marketplace (whether in goods or in votes) for the ‘greater good’ is the Fatal Conceit of the benevolent dictator (and one step down the road to serfdom), they might not prefer overriding actors in the market to say, helping markets correct themselves. If libertarians hold individual responsibility and equality before the law as principles central to their beliefs, they might be fearful of policies designed to diminish individual responsibilities and rights as voters.
Here are some choice bits:
Another way to deal with voter irrationality is institutional reform. Imagine, for example, if the Council of Economic Advisers, in the spirit of the Supreme Court, had the power to invalidate legislation as “uneconomical.” Similarly, since the data show that well-educated voters hold more sensible policy views, we could emulate pre-1949 Great Britain by giving college graduates an extra vote.
Unfortunately, there is a catch-22: The majority is unlikely to vote to reduce the power of the majority. Still, milder versions of these reforms might slip through the cracks. The public has largely ceded control of monetary policy to professional economists; perhaps the public would be willing to defer to expert judgment on some other areas as well. In a similar vein, although the majority is unlikely to approve plural votes for college graduates, it does allow the well-educated to exert extra influence by virtue of their higher turnout rate. It might be politically possible to further increase the de facto influence of educated voters by spending less money to increase turnout.
As such, I feel that Caplan’s preemptive dismissal of opponents as ‘celebrating mediocrity’ or fetishizing a J.S. Mill antipaternalist position on individual choice misses the main problem of his argument. The answer to market failure is better markets, not less, and so the answer to democratic failure must be better democracy. Voter irrationality calls for smarter voter education, not voter disenfranchisement (though to his credit, that is one of his suggested solutions). He leans dangerously close to elitism and authoritarianism, probably not a step in the right direction.
“…they might not prefer overriding actors in the market to say, helping markets correct themselves. If libertarians hold individual responsibility and equality before the law as principles central to their beliefs, they might be fearful of policies designed to diminish individual responsibilities and rights as voters.”
I think it’s the sense that individual repsonsibility and equality are not best protected by minimal government intervention as a model rather than a principle (which assumes it is possible to clearly define by means of unarguable conceptions of property rights what that minimum even really is) that eventually turned me away from libertarianism. It’s hard to reconcile libertarianism with much of a kind of substantively diverse vision of the sort of human opportunity we want to protect.