Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Has that always been the case? It’s selective. I think the overall composition of the federal budget — it’s too much to old people and not enough to young people, and that is because old people vote more. You wouldn’t actually say it’s bad for the old people. No, they get more money, and then they’re going to die. It’s okay for the old people, but still, there’s a lot of expressive voting, and people wanting to vote for causes just to send a message. But when it’s done en masse, it screws up the system. You see this in the French elections that were just concluded. The extreme left, the extreme right — they get a lot of votes because people are upset with the status quo. In my view, it would have been better if they all voted for Macron, and maybe you had 5 percent or 10 percent with protest votes. But you have most of the electorate casting a protest vote. Why do you think that’s happened? Why has everything become to the tail ends of the extremes?…

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