What does the public think they want???

In a survey conducted by Greenberg, Quinian, and Rosner, most Americans don't want government handouts. But they do think the government's role is to level the playing field between the average worker and the greedy, powerful, corporate titans. What does this mean exactly? And quite frankly, does the average worker really have a clue what is best for them? I don't mean that we need to be paternalistic in our attitude towards workers. I just think that they don't know enough about macroeconomics to really know what is best for themselves, let along for the country as an aggregate.

But it is easy for the eco-novice to view all global outsourcing and cheap labor immigration to be direct competition and a drag on their wages. But can they see the complexity of the macroeconomic benefits of global competition and comparative advantage? Probably not.

So ironically, we don't want to set policy based on what the electorate wants. What we need to do is establish a set of core values that the electorate believes in, and then set policy based on the ability of experts to develop programs that maximizes these values, regardless of whether the electorate understands/agrees with the specifics of the program. But while this makes for good policy, it makes for bad politics. There are no soundbites that can overcome the Lou Dobbs rants on CNN every night.