You’re (Rationally) Ignorant

…how many people live in Tallahassee

…what Putin’s favorite dessert is

…how to weld

…who invented the typewriter (but I do know the modern version was invented in Milwaukee), 

And,

…how Costco manages to sell its rotisserie chickens for only $4.99.

Relax. Much of our ignorance is rational. In politics, “rational ignorance” explains why people don’t know the particulars of politics, and its cousin, rational apathy, explains why many people don’t vote and most of us don’t act politically.

It’s a maxim of conventional wisdom that people should vote regularly (or, as the old Chicago joke goes, “early and often.”)

Let me explore that a bit.  

The supporting maxim is that “Your Vote Counts,” even though, really it does not. Perhaps in a small town for a city councilman, yes. But for a senator? A president? For an individual vote to “count” (defined only as changing the outcome of the election), my vote in my state will need to tip the scale of votes. In the swing state of Wisconsin, the 2020 vote tally was 1,630,866 to 1,610,184—roughly a 20,000 vote difference. For my vote to sway the election, it would need to play out something like this:

The votes are tied: Ms. A receives1,625,166 votes, as does Mr. B. I vote for A, and candidate A receives 1,625,667 votes and therefore wins all of Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes. And, since the nation’s tally of electoral votes happened to be 264 to 264, my vote tips Wisconsin’s tally over to candidate A. The likelihood of that happening is something like 1 in 60 million (it depends on your state’s population; I’m not sure why anyone votes in California). The question is not “why don’t more people vote?” A better question is, “Why do people vote?”

And yet people not only vote, they buy lotto tickets, and they cheer at athletic contests. 

If you’re cheering on the Packers, one of 81,441 cold fans at Lambeau Field, and you scream “GO PACK GO!” you alone will not affect the outcome. If all 80,000 fans scream, that’s a different story. So, why not just silently enjoy the game rather than losing your voice?

Because it’s fun. You feel like you are participating. You’re a fan! 

And with voting, you’re an American! You get to proudly wear that sticker, silently shaming your coworkers.

I’m fine with that (though not the shaming part). I not only cheer at athletic contests, but I vote, cheerfully knowing that neither my cheering nor my vote will make a whit of difference. But I don’t join the chorus of people who complain about low voter turnouts, or—horrors—want to compel voting. 

But here’s the real problem with rational ignorance. 

Representative Smith proposes a law that gives $10,000 to every dairy farmer. Since there are 36,000 dairy farmers in the USA, that would total $360 million, or about a buck per person.

Can we all agree this is silly?

And yet, it might pass. Wisconsin has over 6500 dairy farmers, and many just might support that windfall. They’d receive a total of $65 million, and Wisconsin’s three million taxpayers each would ante up only $2.29 each ($360m divided by the total number of taxpayers in the US, which is 157,000,000). Better yet, Congress would borrow the $360,000,000 and let someone else pay for it. Most citizens would receive no benefits…but would they oppose this waste of funds? Not merely theoretically (I trust most would), but with some sort of action?

You might march, or write a letter, or send an email opposing it, if you know about it.  Assume the easiest one, the email, takes 15 minutes, and your time is worth $40 an hour. That will cost you $10, to save $2.29. But it gets worse.

What is that chance that your email will influence one representative? Perhaps one in a million? And what is the chance that, in the House, your representative’s changed vote flips the bill from winning 218-217 to losing 217-218? With a cost of $10, your benefit would be $2.29 divided by a million divided by…well, it’s statistically pointless. You might as well carry a steel umbrella on sunny days in case a meteor hits you.

I don’t know (and I’m rationally ignorant about that too), but my hunch is that the chance your vote or your email derails a program is considerably less than 1 in 60 million.

So I’d do nothing about that wasteful program. I admit it. 

And Representative Smith teams up with Jones, from California, who wants to give each avocado farmer $10,000, and Brown, from Florida, who wants to give each orange farmer $10,000….

The bill just might pass. 

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison argued that small groups of self-interested factions wouldn’t get their nefarious plans passed in a constitutional republic. But he underestimated the increasing scope of democracy, politicians who logroll (“I’ll vote for your hog farmers if you vote for my pistachio growers,”) and the changing interpretations of the constitution. In democracies, many bills supported by what Madison called “minority factions” pass, despite popular opposition. People are blissfully unaware of legislation, and even if earnest civics teachers enlighten them, they do little to oppose the laws.

So how can we limit these wasteful proposals?

Madison suggested “enlightened statesmen” would be a nice option; perhaps a president might veto such spending. The problem here is that vetoes are becoming more and more rare: since 2000, presidents have vetoed, on average, a mere 1.5 bills per year (FDR vetoed over 600 in his 13 years). But 1.5 isn’t much when one considers that Congress typically passes between 122 laws per year (which was last year’s total, the lowest since the Great Depression) to over 1000 per year. Each bit of legislation passed is getting larger and more complex, with the total words in passed laws exceeding over two million words per year. 

A better option is consulting the constitution, which isn’t “what the judges say it is.” One might ask whether dairy subsidies are allowed in the list of enumerated congressional powers. I doubt it. One could say “they support general welfare,” but

But I am in the minority on this topic, as Congress happily and (apparently) constitutionally allocates about $10 billion to $35 billion per year to farmers. Is this power legitimate? This reminds me of a G.K. Chesterton quote about some diners in a restaurant: “If a rhinoceros came in through that door it would have considerable power. I should be the first to rise, however, and assure the creature that it had no authority.” And yet, the subsidies continue. Some 20,000 farmers have received subsidies for 37 years in a row.

Methinks that if the Feds have to subsidize anything I do for 37 consecutive years, I probably should do something else.

I’m all for enlightened statesmen who follow the constitution; pause and fantasize about that for a minute, with John Lennon’s Imagine in the background. But absent that, perhaps we need to return to honest money—money that cannot be conjured into existence by federal fiat to pay for programs that benefit a small group of people at the expense of a larger group of people.

What that entails deserves a separate analysis, one which looks at the origin of funny money.

Which, I confess, isn’t funny at all.