[Cialug] no more UPS needed

[Nathan Stien]

On Jan 4, 2008 5:02 PM, Stuart Thiessen <sthiessen at passitonservices.org> wrote:
> Not if we are engaged on the topic. Of course, if we sit back and let
> the legislators handle all the issues, then sure. That is a foregone
> conclusion.

Most people have children to feed, jobs to work, etc.  The benefits to
any given individual of paying attention to the political process are
very small.  What are the odds that your vote will make a difference?
Very nearly zero.  What is the cost of voting well?  Quite a lot of
time and effort -- you need to follow candidates and events, and try
to guess which ones are more likely to do what you want.  And in many
cases, figuring that out is difficult or impossible.  Very often, no
available candidate is likely to do what you want.

If you live an even moderately interesting or difficult life, it is
likely that the cost of following politics and voting well is greater
than your individual benefit from participating.  Most people
rationally ignore most of politics, as their time is better spent on
other things.  (Of course, Iowans' opinions count for more than the
average American's when it comes to electing presidents, so that
increase in expected political benefit does seem to result more people
bothering with politics than the average.)

I myself find it fascinating and follow politics constantly.  But it's
more like a hobby, since I am one of those relatively rare people who
enjoy doing it.

To make this slightly on-topic, consider Linux adoption.  We believe
that it is in most people's best interest to switch to Linux.
However, most people have better things to do than invest resources
reading about computers and learning new operating systems.  They are
not stupid -- they are rationally ignorant about Linux.  Switching to
Linux may benefit you, Joe Blow, but you have to invest hundreds of
dollars worth of your time and effort to figure out how much it might
help you (if at all), and then thousands more implementing the switch.
 No wonder most people just use whatever comes preinstalled.  When we
do installfests and other public outreach, we are attempting to lower
the cost of figuring Linux out so that more people will do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance

I myself find Linux fascinating and follow it constantly.  But it's
more like a hobby, since I am one of those relatively rare people who
enjoy doing it.

> I think we need to get people more engaged in national business so
> that legislators become more acccountable so that good laws have a
> chance to pass.  Look at tobacco for example. Now that the public (in
> general) realizes the harm in tobacco and are engaged on the topic,
> the tobacco lobby is less powerful and has less influence.

I am fairly certain that most people have known that smoking is bad
for you for quite some time.  The culture has been changing on this
for a while, though, and I think that is why the tobacco lobby is
losing power.  The buggy whip lobby also died when interest in buggy
whips declined.

The process re: tobacco is going faster because city and state-level
politicians are finding it politically profitable to institute smoking
bans.  The tobacco lobby is most effective at the federal level, since
they can't afford to seek out every city council meeting that might
involve smoking.

As an aside, I hate cigarettes, but I hate comprehensive smoking bans
even worse.  Why can't consenting adults put whatever they want into
their bodies, in private, even if someone else thinks it's dumb?

> Similarly, lobbies that are advocating for issues and products that
> are truly in our interest (and not just for someone's pocketbook) are
> strengthened when we speak up.

Since we're giving civics lessons, here comes mine:

The lobbies that are in the general interest will always be inherently
less powerful than highly concentrated special interests.

For example, look at sugar protectionism.  We have a handful of sugar
producers in this country (google says about 11,000 farms), but they
have a very strong lobby.  They make a lot of money via the political
process, since the government forcibly prevents people from importing
cheap cane sugar from central America.  Instead we buy domestic beet
sugar (or substitute corn syrup, as in the case of Coke) at an
artificially inflated price.  The extra sugar cost for each of us
individually is very small, so it's rationally not worth our time to
fight it very hard.  But the benefit to the domestic sugar producers
is enormous, so it is very much in their interest to keep some palms
greased via campaign contributions (and no doubt many undocumented
gifts).

In effect, this is a transfer scheme which takes a little bit from
each of us each year via increased food prices, and hands it to sugar
producers, who then hand some fraction of it back to congressmen.
Even if it costs you $100 a year, it's still not worth your time to
fight it very hard.  So anyone trying to dismantle that scheme is at a
big disadvantage.  This is one of the canonical examples in public
choice theory; it's very clear cut and widely understood, but still we
haven't dismantled it.  It is easily verified if you look at US sugar
prices vs. world sugar prices, or at the text of our trade laws.

Unlike tobacco, interest in sugar is not really in decline as far as I
know.  If a big fraction of the country went on low carb diets, it is
likely the sugar lobby would go into decline like tobacco is doing.

As a more direct hypothetical, let's say I set up Evil Lobby Co. on K
Street.  I want to get legislation passed to take $10 from each
American and give it to, say, a group of 100 dudes.  We have about 300
million people, so that's a take of 3 billion dollars, and each
recipient will get $30 million.  These 100 dudes will be willing to
pay a significant fraction of that $30M in order to get it.  Paying
$20M in order to get $30M is a really great ROI.  If each one chips
in, that's a collective political war chest of $2 billion.  That kind
of money can seriously impact who gets elected and how those who get
elected behave.  Also, you don't have to buy that many legislators
because of logrolling -- your bought legislators will help other
bought legislators with their schemes in return for help with their
own pork.

Obviously, the text of the Evil Lobby Co. legislation won't say
"transfer a bunch of money from everyone to just a small group".  It
will couch it in patriotic, populist language that makes it seem like
it's in the general interest.  "Industry X needs help to compete with
foreign devils" or something like that.  The deceptive language will
play on popular misconceptions about politics and economics.  That
will bring in a horde of well-meaning voters who don't know what
they're doing.  They will go home with their "I Voted" stickers and
feel warm and fuzzy about it, thinking they helped save some jobs or
something.

Let us consider the opposition team -- Good Lobby Dot Org tries to
fight this legislation.  Any given individual would be silly to pay
more than $10 into the fund, since his entire goal is to avoid paying
$10 to the beneficiaries of the evil legislation.  Also, since the
issue affects everyone, and most people have better things to do than
follow politics, those $10 bills will largely be held by people who
don't even know this is happening.  The 100 recipients are a lot
easier to organize and have much stronger incentives to contribute.
Good Lobby Dot Org has no way to raise comparable money to Evil Lobby
Co., short of some Warren Buffet stepping in with some unlikely
political philanthropy.  The dispersed general interest is thus
usually defeated by the concentrated special interest.

It might be nice if we all stood up and got more engaged in the
process like our comrade Stuart suggests.  But that is counter to the
incentives of most of us, and consequently few people will actually do
it.  This is an inherent flaw in our republic, and it is not easily
fixed.  One ray of hope is the new attempts at transparency laws, and
RSS feeds or other structured data from government sites.  This
reduces the cost of figuring out what those congresscritters are up
to, but you can still count on most people following their incentives.

</civics lesson>

- Nathan