possibly noteworthy wrote:

A supporter once called out, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” And Adlai Stevenson answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”

The central idea of this book is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational—and vote accordingly.

This book has three conjoined themes. The first: Doubts about the rationality of voters are empirically justified. The second: Voter irrationality is precisely what economic theory implies once we adopt introspectively plausible assumptions about human motivation. The third: Voter irrationality is the key to a realistic picture of democracy.

This all sounds really good until he breaks into parroting this boring Milton Friedman crap.

Economists have an undeserved reputation for “religious faith” in markets. No one has done more than economists to dissect the innumerable ways that markets can fail. After all their investigations, though, economists typically conclude that the man in the street— and the intellectual without economic training—underestimates how well markets work.12 I maintain that something quite different holds for democracy: it is widely over-rated not only by the public but by most economists too. Thus, while the general public underestimates how well markets work, even economists underestimate markets’ virtues relative to the democratic alternative.

No, Libertarians have a well earned reputation for "religious faith" in markets. Arguing with libertarians is not the same thing as arguing with economists. Frankly, I fail to see why every criticism made here of Democracy applies differently to most consumer markets. In fact, it is the consumer markets who teach the political system how to manipulate people's emotions and push them toward irrational decisions.

RE: The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies