We get what we vote for. When we go to the polls, when we vote for politicians, and when we spend our time and our money; we vote for goods and services, including news and entertainment. So will John King, that elite media spider, stop asking inappropriate questions? That depends upon us.
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The Commercial News Media is only one institution within the constellation that seeks to dominate and control the information we receive. The Commercial News Media is not even the principal institution; it is only the most flamboyant. Because it indoctrinates us when we are young, instilling within us many of the assumptions we use in our daily lives, the Public School System provides the principal danger.
So long as we allow our children to be indoctrinated by a system run by politicians, politicians will use that system to help their special interests instill their values, their beliefs and their ideas within our nation’s children. So long as we allow children to be indoctrinated by a system run by politicians, as adults they will remain susceptible to the misinformation provided by the Commercial News Media.
Hayek said: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
You might think people have begun to understand this. Opinion polls show Americans are very dissatisfied with government. Congress has only a 12 percent approval rating. Good. People should be suspicious of what Congress would design. Central planners failed in the Soviet Union and Cuba and America’s public schools and at the post office.
Despite all that failure, however, whenever a crisis hits, the natural instinct is to say, “Government must do something.”
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“A lot of bad policies … pass by popular demand,” Caplan told me. “In order to do the right thing, you have to know something.”
The “informed citizen” is the ideal of democratic societies, but Caplan points out that average citizens have no incentive to become informed, while special interests do. The rest of us have lives. We are busy with things other than politics. That’s why our democratic government inflates the price of sugar through trade restrictions, even though American sugar consumers far outnumber American sugar producers.
Caplan has a radical proposal for citizens: Be honest. If you know nothing about a subject, don’t have an opinion about it. “And don’t reward or penalize candidates for their position on an issue you don’t understand.”
Thanks for the link, and thanks for the little ego trip.
I am quite flattered to be matched up in the same post with John Stossel.
If the shoe fits…
Yours was a very good post, making a point that needed to be made. In fact, your entire series considering each candidate has been very helpful.
[...] H/T to Thinking in Christ via this post, Worth Reading: Election Edition. [...]