There are a lot of news articles that cite polls on policy, signifying the importance of majority opinion to policy decisions. I think polls on policy might be interesting, but they nevertheless are worthless, because they contribute nothing to the question of whether a policy is right or not.
Yes, I am saying that the majority opinion on policy does not dictate whether the policy is right. People who cite these polls in order to justify policy should really think things over.
For example, Reuters cited a poll stating that “Most Americans say tax rich to balance budget”. Ok, I don’t have any particular issue in taxing the rich to balance the budget, but why should having most Americans agreeing to that policy make any more right then the counterfactual situation?
It doesn’t.
We don’t have a pure democracy in the U.S. for a great reason. The majority opinion is a very bad measure of evaluating a policy. Why? Simply, the population as a whole is not trained and knowledgeable enough to make these critical policy decisions correctly.
People might accuse me of being undemocratic. I will point out that the point of democracy in the first place is not to represent the majority opinion of the people but to represent the General Will of the public. Don’t know what a General Will is? Look it up. Rousseau wrote a great philosophical article on it.
We don’t live in a pure democracy, and the evaluating policy should not take account on how the majority feels about it. We have elections to make sure that the people’s will is represented by Congress, so institutionally we do have a type of checks and balance by the people against their representatives and senators.
Still have a problem with my dismissal of the majority opinion on policy issues? Why don’t we have a minute to minute poll to dictate how we should balance the budget by department to department? Why don’t we meddle in the arms forces by having polls to see whether we should send 10 or 11 troops to certain region in Afghanistan in combat operations?
I hope you get my point.
