Calling People "Low Information Voters" Doesn't Validate Decentralization or Privatization

In a recent article in Forbes, Ilya Somin bangs one of his favorite drums, that of the "low information voter". Somin complains that many voters don't understand the background to the government shutdown, or how much government spending goes to Medicare, Social Security and foreign aid, then lectures, "This kind of basic knowledge may not be all voters need to know to form intelligent opinions. But it’s hard to do so without it." He complains further that even informed voters can misunderstand the evidence, and that people with conflicting political beliefs can interpret the same evidence as being consistent with their own beliefs. Somin, in essence, blames this all on laziness:

It is easy to blame ignorance on stupidity or on the media. But basic information about most political issues is readily available in the media and online. It isn’t hard to find out what Obamacare insurance exchanges are. The problem is that most people don’t take the time and effort to do so. That is not because they are stupid, but because there is so little incentive to acquire political information.

I'll take issue with both of Somin's assertions. First, there is a concerted effort by parts of the media, the so-called news entertainment industry, to mislead its audiences into believing utter nonsense. If you're marginally informed about the issues, you can't turn on Fox News or drive time talk radio without figuring that out. Whether or not people should trust that type of news source isn't really the point, as many people do trust those sources and end up being misinformed and distracted from the actual issues.

Further, the mainstream media has an unfortunate tendency to turn every policy debate into a horse race, taking the proverbial "view from nowhere" while airing guests and interviews that they know to be objectively false or misleading. It seems that people like the argument more than they like to be educated, and that conflicts and contests generate more readers and viewers than a dispassionate explanation of the facts and how one side of the issue has a weaker case or is just plain wrong. A case in point would be "death panels", an outright lie about the PPACA (Obamacare) that was concocted, refined and perpetuated by the right-wing media. The mainstream media could have snuffed out that absurdity at the outset, but instead treated it as if it was a valid claim and let partisans lie on the air about the meaning and effect of perfectly reasonable provisions of the PPACA. Even though those provisions were dropped as a result, to the detriment of elderly patients, many people remain convinced that the PPACA creates "death panels". The fault for that lies almost entirely with the media. Another example would John Boehner's statements, including his widely distributed editorial, about the government shut-down. If you believe what he says you'll be less informed than when you began trying to follow the issue - but the media is not going to help you understand that, because they want Boehner to submit editorials or make appearances on their shows.

More than that, though, why does Somin believe people should have to dig for information in order to be informed, when they are reading the newspaper (or virtual equivalent) or watching the news and are being assured by the talking heads that they're getting enough information to be informed? Not everybody has the luxury to be a law professor, with many hours in an office to explore areas of esoteric interest, read the Internet, and discuss the issues of the day with informed colleagues. Most people work jobs that do not afford them similar luxuries, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to believe that the time they spend catching up with the news before heading to work, in the car, or after putting the kids to bed is sufficient to keep them informed. It's not what Somin deems being "rationally ignorant", with people knowing that they are informed but choosing to spend time on other things. It's a matter of there being only so many hours in the day, and the fact that the less you know the less aware you are of how much you need to learn.

Let's recall also that the concept of democracy does not anticipate that every voter will be informed on every issue, or even most issues. The Founding Fathers includes a number of checks on popular democracy out of concern that the masses might make bad choices - hence the non-elected Senate and the Electoral College. Inherent in the popular vote is the notion of the wisdom of the crowd - the idea that the larger body of voters will collectively exercise a level of insight and wisdom that significantly exceeds that of the typical individual voter. That's not an excuse for failing to try to better educate the pubic about the issues of the day, but if you accept that concept it's much less worrisome that people wish that spending for foreign aid were only 1% of government spending... it's actual level... instead of 10% or more.

From that rather dubious perch, Somin launches himeslf into a non sequitur:

The problem of ignorance is exacerbated by the enormous size and scope of government. Government spending accounts for well over one third of GDP, and government also regulates nearly every aspects of life. Even if voters devoted far more time to following political issues, they would still be ignorant about most government policies.... But we can help alleviate the problem by limiting and decentralizing government. When people “vote with their feet” in the private sector or in choosing what state or local government they want to live in, they have much better incentives to acquire information and use it rationally than when they vote at the ballot box.

That argument strikes me as utter nonsense. The federal government gets an incredible amount of media attention. The more local government becomes, the less media attention it typically receives. In many communities there's no meaningful media coverage of local government. While there have been corruption scandals at the federal level, in recent decades they have typically involved a small number of individuals with little impact on the overall functioning of government. The problem of corruption can be significantly more pronounced at the state level, as evidenced by Illinois, and can be appalling at the local level, as evidenced by Kwame Kilpatrick's Detroit. It is absurd to pretend that it is easier for voters to stay informed in relation to matters handled by a panoply of state and local governments, than it is to stay informed in relation to the actions of the federal government. Were that not true, one would reasonably expect that corruption and misconduct would improve at the local level, not significantly worsen.

Also, it's a rather arrogant conceit to suggest that if people don't like where they live, it's simple for them to sell their homes, uproot their families, get new jobs, and relocate to a community more to their liking. While there is no question but that when things get really bad a growing percentage of people will "vote with their feet", the significant number of people who stay behind reflect the reality that for most people it's not simple or easy, and for many it's an unaffordable luxury. More than that, there's more involved in choosing where you live than whether or not you like the state or local government, and moving to a different location that has a government more aligned with your beliefs may mean sacrificing social, employment and cultural opportunities that are important to your quality of life, as well as giving up easy access to top hospitals or similar local amenities.

Most of us spend far more time and effort acquiring information when we choose what car or TV to buy, than when we choose the president of the United States. The person deciding which car to buy knows that their decision is likely to make a real difference to the outcome. The same goes for a person deciding where to live in a federal system.

Perhaps he's speaking for himself, but I disagree with Somin's initial assertion. Most people give considerable thought to the president, and whether or not they will vote for or against an incumbent president. One might argue that much of that thought is partisan, and thus "doesn't really count", but that would sidestep Somin's claim - which is tantamount to arguing that people start thinking about their next car or television the moment they bring a new one home. I think people who vote hope that their vote makes a difference. A real difference in the outcome? Very few people who move to a new community do so with Somin's unrealistic notion that they will somehow influence local government simply by leaving one community or by joining another - I don't believe that I've ever met such a person. Moving to a different community based upon an assumption that it will be materially better than the place you live because of your perception of the political ideology of the local government seems like a fool's errand.

Somin presents no evidence, nor really any argument, that localized government would be cheaper, better, more transparent, less corrupt, more efficient... that it would provide any actual benefit to the public. He does not address the complexity of the modern nation state, nor the fact that some of the things of which he complains (e.g., ignorance of spending levels for foreign aid, Social Security and Medicare) are going to remain at the national level. He may have a pipe dream where programs like Social Security and Medicare become state-run programs, but the added complexity of such an approach should be obvious, as should be the impairment of people's ability to "vote with their feet" when they have to worry about how benefits are coordinated between states. But if you leave the big ticket items at the national level - military spending, Social Security and Medicare, along with matters that the federal government alone can reasonably address, such as managing foreign relations, regulating interstate commerce, providing the FDA, FTC, SEC, EPA, FEMA, USCIS, ICE, USPTO and the like, Somin's approach isn't actually going to simplify choices for voters at the federal level. It will instead add to the complexity of their other votes while doing next to nothing to simplify the federal government.

From there, Somin doubles down on his non seqiturs:

By reducing the size of government, we can enable more choices to be made in the private sector, where people have better incentives to become informed.

It seems that Somin imagines a future involving a lot more than localization of government, with government either outsourcing various tasks to the private sector or people being left without government support in certain areas of their lives and having to turn instead to private sector solutions. Somin is employed by a major university, and likely chooses his health insurance from a number of heavily subsidized plans offered by his employer - something akin to a health insurance exchange under the PPACA, but with his receiving a large subsidy for which he would be ineligible under that law. It's unlikely that Somin has ever tried to purchase health insurance on the individual market, let alone insure his family in that manner. It is unlikely that he has dealt with insurance companies' arbitrary denial of coverage, or trying to get individual coverage with a pre-existing medical condition. If he had, he wouldn't adhere to the fantasy that "more choices" result in a better informed consumer and even if all he cares about are incentives he would be aware of how difficult it is to actually compare individual health plans - even those offered by a single insurance company.

Were Somin to research the issue he would learn that having too many options can be paralyzing - people get confused, don't know how to draw meaningful distinctions, and may end up making their choices based upon arbitrarily selected, sometimes incorrect, information and assumptions. Somin may fret for hours or days about what TV to buy or what car to purchase, but at the end of the day his life will be little affected by whether he chooses a Camry or an Accord, a Vizio or a Samsung. If Somin believes his own conceit that voters are too lazy to educate themselves, his is a recipe for making that situation worse.

Let's Automate Schools and Privatize Everything

The ever-insightful Stephen Moore offers this gem:

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn't pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.

Brilliant. We'll replace public school students with robots and computers, and train teachers how to program them. The teachers will be able to reach thousands of units through a single interface, with uniform, measurable results. And a properly programmed machine should be really good at taking standardized tests.

What's that, you say? Perhaps the issue is the "human factor"? That while we can automate many of the processes involved in manufacturing motor vehicles, or redesign their parts, components and assembly procedures to increase efficiency, we don't have the same luxury when it comes to children?

You know, I understand that back in the 1960's a newspaper columnist might produce, oh, two columns per week. Now, with increased efficiency and technology a typical columnist produces... is it two columns per week? I see. And as "senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page" Moore appears to be far less productive than the typical columnist. But I'm sure Moore will tell us that his own lack of productivity and the fact that he is a "taker" and not a "maker" is somehow different.

Moore's editorial suggests that we've had a massive growth in public sector jobs since 1960, pointing to figures suggesting that about 5 out of 100 Americans worked in government in 1960, rising to about 7 out of 100 in 2010. He doesn't explain the causes of the increase, and devotes absolutely no attention to what parts of government have grown the most (or what parts of government have shrunk). Yet without that type of analysis, the raw figure isn't illuminating. Moore is trying to leverage the concept that "government worker" is a slur - that it's somehow wrong to work for the government, that all government jobs do is "take" from society, and that (forget about the man in Moore's mirror) true nobility comes from "making" things - tangible items such as cars.

Moore's concept of what it means to "make" things is similarly absurd. He complains that the population of government workers exceeds the population of people who "work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined". Because there's nothing like cherry-picking the workforce employed in declining industries during a painlessly protracted "jobless recovery" or industries that have largely automated, and making an "apples and oranges" comparison to government workers. Factory farms have displaced family farms - does Moore believe the nation would be better off if we went back to small family farms and reduced the level of farm automation, crop science, and other factors that have contributed to our nation's having an abundance of food despite a shrinking population of agricultural workers? It would be better to end any automated mining and go back an era in which ore was extracted by men with pickaxes and buckets? Surely not. Yet in insisting that those historic "makers" had some form of moral superiority over today's "takers" he implies that such inefficiency would be a good thing.

Moore asserts, and would have us take it on faith, that "Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions". (It would have been nice had he provided even one example.) It seems fair to note, in response, that a great deal of inefficiency in our society - and in our government - comes not from trade unions but from Moore's buddies in business associations.

Why are our nation's car dealers saddled with an archaic and costly network of car dealerships and, even when they're at the point of collapse, why does Congress rush in to "save" redundant dealerships from being closed? Why can't I go online to a car dealer website, design a car, finance and pay for it and arrange to have it delivered to a dealership near me or even my house? Because NADA has been very effective at lobbying state governments and Congress to protect car dealerships from, dare I say, market efficiencies. Why are purchases and sales of real estate so costly and cumbersome, involving huge fees to parties that seem to do little work other than performing a "merge" on a stack of standard form contracts and having a nice office for people to sit in when they review and sign those documents? Because real estate agents and brokers, the mortgage industry and title companies have successfully lobbied against modernizing and streamlining that system. Why are the tax code and regulations so complicated - for the benefit of ordinary people, or for the benefit of Moore's wealthy peers and multinational corporations? Yes, every time a powerful interest successfully lobbies for new tax favors the tax code gets more complicated.

Moore suggests,

Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services — fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers.

Study after study, but again not even one "for instance." And, surprise, Moore is (I assume deliberately) oversimplifying the issues and omitting the downside. That is, there are many reasons other than "unions oppose it" to hesitate before drinking Moore's Kool-Aid.

Historically, we had private fire protection. You purchased fire protection services from a private company and hoped that they weren't too busy to put out the fire when you called them for help. And if you hadn't paid a fee... I guess some things never change. Strangely, it does not appear that the best way to save money in firefighting comes from privatization, but is instead through volunteer fire departments. You have to ask yourself, how would a private fire department save money as compared to a volunteer fire department? It couldn't pay its employees less than the volunteers make. The answer would appear to be through cutting standards, training, equipment levels, locations, vehicles, maintenance, etc.

There's something else to consider, which is that private companies typically introduce efficiency into government activities when there's competition. That is, when there are a number of private trash haulers serving surrounding communities, a municipality can put trash collection out for bid. (Or it can adopt the approach of some of the surrounding communities and let people retain their own trash hauling company.) If one company falls down on the job, there are others ready to step in. And although the specter of price fixing or oligopoly pricing may loom, for the most part if one company's prices get out of line it will lose customers to the others.¹

The picture changes when there is no competition, or no meaningful competition. If you turn over the full responsibility for fire protection to a private company and that company fails to do its job or declares bankruptcy, where are you going to find on a moment's notice another company that can step in, acquire buildings and equipment, and staff to adequate levels? If Moore is proposing some sort of hybrid - a construct in which the only thing "privatized" are firefighter jobs - he's really talking about breaking unions. That's illustrated by his conceit that the overpaid skimmers of the financial industry are "makers" to be compared to NYC's government employees. I guess they did make the world's economy collapse, but I don't personally see that type of "making" as a good thing.

There's something else to consider in relation to privatization: You lose government control and oversight. You lose responsiveness to the taxpayer. Elected officials have a lot less influence over companies with which they have contracted than they do with government employees. The lack of oversight can create opportunities for corruption. It's difficult to imagine a circumstance in which judges would be bribed by a state-run prison to channel criminal defendants - let alone children - into its cells.

Moore appears to view it as a horror story that government workers are paid decent wages and receive decent benefits. By his own numbers, he's complaining that the average government worker makes about $44,500 per year including benefits.² Sure, if you go with low bidders who employ minimum wage workers and offer no benefits, you may be able to "save money" (although again, with risk to quality and scope of services provided, to responsiveness and, in some cases, to integrity.) But what sort of community are you creating when you structure government such that there are a handful of managers - who would all be making substantially more than the salary Moore suggests is excessive for government work - who oversee contracts with outside providers whose employees can't even afford to live in the towns in which they work? I suppose Moore would have the teachers, firefighters, and low-level administrators bus into town each day on the newly privatized public transportation system. A real sense of community,³ that guy⁴ has.

-----------
1. At the same time, the private haulers may have up charges for services the city included, such as yard waste removal and recycling - part of the way a private company can make money, after all, is by cutting the level of service or charging additional fees for better or more complete service.

2. He writes, "Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million).... Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees."

3. Gated community.

4. You've probably figured out by now that Moore is something of a hack. Here's an example of some true hackery:

Speaking of the current situation in Libya, Moore says "You know Sean [Hannity] what’s really despicable about this is that for years and decades the left has sort of apologized for Qaddafi." Let's be real for a moment. It was the political right under the leadership of George W. Bush that embraced Qaddafi and legitimized both the man and his government. Bush repeatedly held Qaddafi up as a success story in the "war on terror", a man who had surrendered his evil ways and had redeemed himself. As Rand Paul notes, the political right is tied up in knots about how to respond to Obama's participation in military action against Libya:

They just really can't decide over at Fox News. It's like, what do they love more, bombing the Middle East or bashing the president? It's like, I was over there and there was an anchor going -- they were pleading, they were pleading -- "please, please, please, can't we do both? Can't we bomb the Middle East and bash the president at the same time? How are we going to make this work?"

As usual without presenting a single example, Moore stands history on its head and pretends that Bush's embrace of Qaddafi is somehow attributable to the left?