So Little Interest and Information

Get-out-the-vote efforts, which receive endorsement by a variety of social groups and media outlets, have acquired a wholly undeserved respectability. By bringing to the polls voters who, left to themselves, would generally have so little interest and information at their disposal that they would rather stay home and watch TV, at the very least add only noise to whatever signal the election is imagined to send.

Of course, many interest groups and parties suppose that such uninterested voters will, on average, bulk up a certain party or set of ballot issues, and hence they expect to benefit by the addition of apathetic ignoramuses to the ranks of the voters. Such is the overall folly of the so-called democratic process. It’s almost enough to make one glad that the system in operation is an oligarchy that has little if any regard for the well-being of the masses or the outcome of elections in any event.

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Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.