Most people have a great deal of psychological pain on that kind of conversion. It reminds you when people say, why don't you just explain how free trade works to the congressmen and then he'll switch over? Yes. One of the very, I think, delightful things in the book is that there's a lot of evidence that people don't vote their narrow self-interest"
Bryan Caplan, of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog, talks about his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Caplan argues that democracies work well in giving voters what they want but unfortunately, what voters want isn't particularly wise, especially when it comes to economic policy. He outlines a series of systematic biases we often have on economic topics and explains why we have little or no incentive to improve our understanding of the world and vote wisely. So, it's not special interests that are messing things up but the very incentives that lie at the heart of a vote-based system. This is a disturbing and provocative lens for viewing political outcomes.