20100930-Stossel-[Should Everyone Vote].Fox Business.CF

STOSSEL - Do we really want everyone voting? - Fox Business Network 2010, September 30, Thursday Xvid/MP3 AVI - encoded from clean composite SD source video ----- [Excerpted from John Stossel's blog:] September 30, 2010 05:00 AM UTC by John Stossel Tonight's Show: Voting in a Supermarket. Or Not Voting. (FBN @ 9pm ET) This week my show is on voting. I steal ideas from Don Boudreaux, Will Wilkinson, and Bryan Caplan. Their writing expanded my mind, so I’d like to pass what inspired me on to you. Boudreaux wonders, what if grocery shopping were like voting? Upon entering the store, you’d see before you only two or three shopping carts, each pre-filled with a selection of groceries…You must choose one of the pre-filled carts. …The cart you choose will be the best one for you given the other options – but it would not be as beneficial for you as would a cart that you personally rolled through the supermarket aisles and filled yourself, precisely as you wished…Perhaps that’s why so many Socially Aware people, so many Scolds, dislike retailing. In markets, each of us gets pretty much exactly the set of things we want …there’s no role for busybodies who fancy themselves to be especially fit for choosing what millions of other people have access to and acquire. It’s another reason to keep government small. Will Wilkinson has a good answer to those who say, “voting is the most important civic virtue”: ...if you want to be civic-minded, your duty isn't to fill in ballots just to fill in ballots. You shouldn't do it in ignorance, out of emotion, or to win approval from your political friends. Your duty is to vote well -- to participate in a way that, at the very least, makes the outcome no worse. Everybody has an incontestable and absolute right to his or her vote, but that doesn't mean it's always right to vote. Abstaining can be a way of looking after the public good, too. Not all of us have the energy, inclination, or opportunity to learn what we need to know in order to vote well. And that's OK. There's more to public-spiritedness than showing up at the polls. You can run a small business or coach a kids' hockey team with the common good in mind. That's an expression of civic virtue, too. When I first suggested that it would be good if ignorant people did not vote, I took heat from people who said: "it's everyone's civic duty to vote." Bryan Caplan had this good answer: This is very much like saying, it's our civic duty to give surgery advice. ... We like to think that political issues are much less complicated than brain surgery, but many of them are pretty hard. If someone doesn't know what he's talking about, it really is better if they say, look, I'm going to leave this in wiser hands. Voting is serious business. It works best when people educate themselves. If uninformed people stay home on Election Day, good. That doesn't include you, because you read this blog.

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