{"id":13551,"date":"2015-10-19T07:33:52","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T12:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13551"},"modified":"2015-10-19T07:33:52","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T12:33:52","slug":"should-everyone-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13551","title":{"rendered":"Should everyone vote?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Should everyone vote?<\/a><\/span><\/h3>\n

It\u2019s election time in Canada, and as usual ad campaigns on TV, radio, print, and even Facebook are urging \u201ceveryone\u201d to vote. But is that such a good thing?<\/p>\n

To ask it another way: Is it really a good thing to tell people who are ignorant of law (so they don\u2019t know which proposed policies are illegal), and\/or ignorant of economics (so they don\u2019t know what the actual outcomes of proposed policies will be), and\/or ignorant of political science (so they don\u2019t know which proposed policies are politically feasible with the actual people and institutions we already have)?<\/p>\n

If politics is serious business, shouldn\u2019t people have more than causal understanding law, economics, and political science before voting? How are people supposed to judge platforms otherwise\u2013by what \u201cfeels right\u201d?<\/p>\n

Imagine you\u2019re on a panel to choose a team of rocket scientists to send a spaceship to Mars. But let\u2019s say you\u2019re ignorant of the general laws of physics, the specific laws of rocket science, and the knowledge of project management knowledge of how different teams of engineers are supposed to work together.<\/p>\n

How would you judge which engineers to hire?<\/p>\n

By what the engineers merely say they\u2019ll do? That doesn\u2019t work, since you have absolutely no framework for what is and isn\u2019t physically possible. They might be suggesting breaking the laws of physics but you\u2019d have no idea.<\/p>\n

By what the engineers have done in the past isn\u2019t a good metric either. Sure they may have sent a rocket to space before, but what if they did it really economically and wasted a lot fuel and other resources? They may have also had a rocket blow up mid flight\u2013but what if they didn\u2019t even expect the rocket to ignite and so it was a great feat of engineering that it went up at all?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Should everyone vote? It\u2019s election time in Canada, and as usual ad campaigns on TV, radio, print, and even Facebook are urging \u201ceveryone\u201d to vote. But is that such a good thing? To ask it another way: Is it really a good thing to tell people who are ignorant of law (so they don\u2019t know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[103,7902,5376,9973,7617,858],"class_list":["post-13551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-canada","tag-canadian-federal-election","tag-election","tag-informed-voting","tag-mises-institute","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13552,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13551\/revisions\/13552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}