Marginal Concept

A peculiar rationale for not voting:

Surely there's not much difference between a world where Bush gets 3 more votes than Kerry and a world where Kerry gets 3 more votes than Bush. If Bush is the rightful president in one of those worlds, he's got to be darn close to rightful in the other.

Don't count on it. And an odd, whistling-past-the-graveyard thing for an economist to suggest. If applied to a Profit & Loss Statement, it would mean that it doesn't matter if a company, over a period of years, makes a small profit or a small loss each year.

Of course the notion that "majority wins" is a convention we use to prevent civil war and no one thinks it means that one party is "right" and another "wrong." It simply means that the winner got more votes -- (which of course is not the situation with our current President so it's a bit odd for a right-winger to even bring up the issue.)

Comments

[joe o]

Under Landsberg's theory, it is anti-democratic to vote for the candidate who gets the fewest votes.

The benefit of democracy is that you know that every few years the people get to vote. This keeps the leaders relatively responsive to the people.