Rational Voters and a Do Over?

There is a lot of posturing about the great moment of populism represented by Brexit.

Ryan Cooper sort of gets it that voting for something foundational like this is a bad idea for a popular referendum. Certainly 50+1 is to low a bar.

Still he is piqued by what he sees as the elitist disparaging of the voters. He argues that the EU management of the crisis and recover have been a disaster. Impossible to deny that one.

Cooper argues that if the Eurocrats hadn't botched the job so royally, this would not have happened.

http://theweek.com/articles/632167/why-brexit-might-last-chance-european-union-save-itself

Agreed. Though what you never get from Cooper is any idea of how to proceed politically. To get the sort of Keynesian response he thinks would have been the right one-I tend to agree with-was never going to happen due to politics.

Still, Matt Yglesias makes the clear case for Remain.

"Here is a dull take: That one group of establishment policymakers made bad policies is not a good reason to make new, even worse policies."

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/746364970678497280

That is the where I differ with Ryan Cooper, or my reader Greg or anyone else retorting that 'You can't blame the voters as things are so bad.'

Tom Brown has talked about a do over. There clearly are many Brits already asking 'What have we done.'

https://twitter.com/sunny_hundal/status/746352113916252160

With such a small margin in such a change there rightfully should be another vote and Nigel Farage once said the very same:

"In a 52-48 referendum, this would be unfinished business by a long way." Nigel Farage, 17 May

https://twitter.com/MichaelPDeacon/status/746223319595122693

Of course, that was before he won 52-48. Now he probably doesn't sound like he thinks this is unfinished business.

As for voters, they might have studied up on leaving the EU before they voted to leave.

Right as polls were closing in the United Kingdom last night, Google Trends reported a massive spike in British people asking "what happens if we leave the EU?"

"This is the kind of question one might think people would want to look up before voting on whether or not to leave the EU, since the answer is pretty relevant."

"By the same token, it was only after referendum results were in that UK Googlers got obsessed with asking what the EU actually is:

"This is a reminder, I think, that while political democracy is the best system of government, it is normally implemented through the idea of accountable representatives."

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/24/12024862/brexit-popular-google-searches

Ryan Cooper has mocked the 'elites' for their response.

"democracy should be *just* broad enough to lend a thin veneer of popular legitimacy to pre-approved elite decisions, and no broader"

https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/746181724758020098

But then he himself admits that a 50+1 plebiscite vote on such a foundational issue is the wrong move.

"really should not have popular referenda on these sort of questions"

https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/746377747132448768

That's all the elites are saying. Yglesias then really throws mud in the populists' eye by quoting Bryan Caplan approvingly.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/746388482562605056

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007AIXLDI/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I actually have that book on Kindle. I haven't read this book in the myth of the rational voter yet, but maybe this is the occasion to do just that.

Bryan Caplan is a guy who I've always seen as little more than a libertarian fanatic in the past, but hard to deny he has a point here.

Here was his response to Brexit.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/06/brexit.html

Caplan goes a lot further than me or Yglesias. I certainly agree that representative democracy is the best system.

Caplan gets into Rothbardian territory.

Still, on a day when my old Mother Country has chosen to flush 10 percent of my own savings in the country down the toilet for no good reason at all-and their own-I'm not feeling terribly charitable to 'regular people fed up with elites.'

That's fine except it seems to entail doing really stupid things that hurt yourself much more than any elite. Ok, maybe it screws some elites in the EU and Britain. It also empowers people like Trump, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson.

It's particularly galling that even after the murder of that pro EU MP, the British electorate wasn't move in the least.