One problem with our politics today is that people have a hard time evaluating the “sales pitches” that candidates make for their favored policies.
In this AIER article, economics professor Gary Galles explains why that is the case. Political rhetoric, he observes, is notoriously vague. “Such slippery vagueness” he writes, “makes an informed electorate, able to evaluate specific policy positions, beyond reach. And voting dominated by uninformed participants adds nothing to our wisdom, yet can dramatically change the outcome, because absent detailed information, no one can adequately judge how a proposal would fare or falter in the real world.”
Right, and Kamala Harris has managed to take vagueness to previously unimagined levels this year.
Galles explores the defect in democracy that public-choice theorists have long understood, namely, that voters can’t know what they’ll get if they vote for a candidate. Glittering generalities obscure the key details of policy proposals.
Read the whole thing.