George Will’s Book Review regarding Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter — Is a Seemingly Persuasive Argument — until You Look Back at the Historical Record

02 January 2014

Citation — to book review

George F. Will, The price of political ignorance: More government, Washington Post (01 January 2014)

How do we fix a government demonstrably intent on destroying fundamental American freedoms?

Even though I am not a conservative like those who object to even competent government on principle, I do think that our current Police State is destroying the very freedoms it pretends to protect.

For those of us who still believe in Freedom and Personal Privacy, what to do?

George Will’s book review of Ilya Somin’s new book — Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter — suggests that reducing the size and power of American government is the solution to many of our problems.

The core point that Somin and Will make is that people are ignorant about the powers that control them, and that it would be wise to limit the reach of the government that we ignoramuses elect.

This small government solution sounds appealing, until we recognize that History has already tested and failed it. With that observation, I do not mean to imply that our current big government alternative has succeeded.

Indeed, Ilya Somin and George Will may be correct. To preserve Freedom, we may have to limit the size of government and put up with aspects of the unregulated chaos that would result.

Read on and see what you think.

Let’s agree that (a) government is inherently and necessarily intrusive and (b) that choosing and overseeing its limits is the difficult part

Keeping people from preying upon one another requires an outside force to maintain some semblance of order. Similarly, government has to do what no other entity has the clout to get done. And then, there is a valid point that favors government making possible some societal directions that the population generally wishes — the social contract and all that.

Naturally, people argue about what needs to be done, and who should do it. The debate (if one can call it that) is increasingly slanted toward what government should do for “me” rather than “you.” Communitarian ideas about what constitutes a just and nurturing society have evidently dropped out of fashion.

A reminder — regarding “left” versus “right”

Liberals (“left”) tend to think that government is beneficial, even when sprawling. Conservatives (“right”) think that large government is bad. And Libertarians, among the planet’s most reason-deficient and Reality-avoiding people, tend to think that virtually all government and all regulations are bad.

All political sides are frequently and demonstrably wrong in their estimations of what (a) government can realistically do or (b) is doing.

And this is where George Will’s book review of Ilya Somin’s new book about voters’ ignorance, and the remedy for it, comes in.

Ilya Somin’s thesis about voters’ ignorance and its relationship to a desirable size for government — as explicated by conservative columnist George F. Will

An exquisite barb begins Mr. Will’s fine book review:

It was naughty of Winston Churchill to say, if he really did, that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

[M]any voters’ paucity of information about politics and government, although arguably rational, raises awkward questions about concepts central to democratic theory, including consent, representation, public opinion, electoral mandates and officials’ accountability.

In “Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter” . . . Ilya Somin of George Mason University argues that an individual’s ignorance of public affairs is rational because the likelihood of his or her vote being decisive in an election is vanishingly small.

[I]f remaining ignorant is rational individual behavior, it has likely destructive collective outcomes.

Mr. Will provides a few illustrative samples of astonishing voter ignorance about issues that affect all of us.

He continues toward Ilya Somin’s conclusion:

The problem of ignorance is unlikely to be ameliorated by increasing voter knowledge because demand for information, not the supply of it, is the major constraint on political knowledge.

Despite dramatic expansions of education and information sources, abundant evidence shows the scope of political ignorance is remarkably persistent over time.

New information technologies have served primarily to increase the knowledge of the already well-informed, which increases the ability of some to engage in “rent-seeking” from the regulatory state, manipulating its power in order to transfer wealth to themselves.

A better ameliorative measure would be to reduce the risks of ignorance by reducing government’s consequences — its complexity, centralization and intrusiveness.

If much of the electorate is unaware of the substance or even existence of policies adopted by the sprawling regulatory state, the policies’ democratic pedigrees are weak.

Hence Somin’s suggestion that the extension of government’s reach “undercuts democracy more than it furthers it.”

A portion of the Somin/Will argument for small government rests on an unspoken (but accurate) assumption

The lust for control and a sense of righteousness eventually overcome almost everyone, who holds essentially unopposed or unseen power.

Having been a cop once myself, I understand how power nibbles away professional self-restraint. All manner of supposedly beneficial police and government interventions become arguably necessary.

In the minds of government doers, these intrusions on people’s lives are preferably hidden behind a wall of secrecy. Even when outrageous abuses of power are uncovered, the government’s Axe of Retribution falls on the whistle-blowers making the exposure. To wit, Edward Snowden and former U.S. Army Private Bradley/Chelsea Manning. Not to mention all the other innocents, who regularly fall to our intelligence system’s (often understandably) overweening paranoia.

If we accept the unspoken premise that power corrupts and our democracy is based predominantly on the votes of ignoramuses, then the Somin/Will contention that a large and too powerful government is socially and democratically undesirable makes sense.

But the proposed solution overlooks one critical point.

Will overlooks a key point — which can be inferred from one of his own statements

If powerful interests have seized government to their advantage — “manipulating its power in order to transfer wealth to themselves” — is it necessarily true that reducing the size of government will counteract these interests to the degree that the population at large might wish?

History’s answer is a clear “no”. Remember the Robber Baron era, which took place before government had anywhere close to the regulatory power that it does now.

Big versus small government may come down to a preference for (a) oppression and order versus (b) the chaos of unregulated freedom.

The moral? — The reality seems to be that powerful interests always win and, therefore, for some us — chaotic and anarchical small government freedom may be preferable to Big Government’s oppressive order

Not a great choice.

But one that we seem increasingly to be faced with — given human nature, combined with our historically determined state of voting ignorance.

In sum, as with safely implementing nuclear power, it may be that we human beings are just too “stupid” and too selfish to democratically cope with large population numbers and modernity’s complexity.

PeteFree.com

George Will’s Book Review regarding Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter — Is a Seemingly Persuasive Argument — until You Look Back at the Historical Record