Sublime

If Mill’s hypothesis is wrong and Schumpeter is right, we must ask some hard questions: How much do we really want people to participate in politics? How much should people even be allowed to participate?

To justify democracy takes more work: we have to explain why some people should have the right to impose bad decisions on others. In particular, as I will show in later chapters, to justify democracy, we’ll need to explain why it’s legitimate to impose incompetently made decisions on innocent people.

Bryan Caplan has proposed a national “Voter Achievement Exam.” Each year (or maybe before an election) the government offers a voluntary test which covers basic political information and basic social scientific matters. Citizens who take the exam get a cash prize, pays a thousand dollars for getting 90–100 percent of the questions right, five hundr

disagreements. The

THE PEOPLE QUESTION

I think most people are bad at politics and politics is bad for most of us, yet I am not arguing that therefore we should have government do less (or more).

THE PEOPLE QUESTION