This misses the key point of the libertarian critique of voter ignorance. The problem is not that voters “have to be experts,” but that they often lack even very basic knowledge of the issues and candidates they are voting on. They also do a poor job of evaluating the information they do know. Moreover, they have little incentive to improve their performance or to learn from past mistakes, because a voter who increases his knowledge or learns to use it more wisely has only an infinitesmal chance of influencing electoral outcomes. That is a key reason why voters often cling to gross errors for years and decades on end, despite the accumulation of contrary evidence. Gobry cites “legalized trade” and “gay marriage” as triumphs of democracy. But public opinion remains highly protectionist despite centuries of evidence of the superiority of free trade endorsed by economists across the political spectrum. And it took decades for majority opinion to recognize what should have been the fairly obvious point that gays and lesbians pose no threat to heterosexuals, and there was no good reason to persecute them. In each of these cases, people with higher levels of political knowledge on average figured out the truth a lot earlier than the median voter. Ignorance, not just bad “values,” was a major cause of the problem.

Consumers are far from perfectly informed or perfectly objective in their evaluation of information. But, in general, they do a much better job than voters do. The average person puts a lot more time and effort into learning and objectively evaluating information when he or she buys a car or a TV, then when they decide who to support for president or governor. There is a big difference between the way we approach “foot voting” decisions where there is a real payoff to seeking out the truth, and ballot box decisions where the likely payoff is infinitesmally small.