Why do people often vote against their own interests?

[c1ue]

Re: Why do people often vote against their own interests?

P.S. -- Taking my tongue out of my cheek, I'd suggest that for large elections, stupidity, ignorance, and naivete might count for 30%, mass propaganda, misinformation and deception might count for 30%, fraud in the casting and counting of votes another 30%, and reasonable choice based on reliable information the remaining 10%.

I think this is just a difference due to accounting style. For me, acceptance of propaganda, misinformation and deception is due to a combination of SIN.

All large governing institutions succumb to the influence of the most powerful and wealthy. Democracies just do so by an indirect means; the powerful and wealthy sufficiently control the propaganda seen by most voting citizens as to be able to control elections to the extent they choose. We cannot "take the money out of politics" in any large nation or state, short of choosing some other method to select our political leaders; we can only temporarily hide the means by which such money influences elections.

I cannot agree with this statement entirely.

Certainly it is true now, but in the past the influence of money was not any different. There were big corporations in the 1800s just as there were big corporations in the 1900s.

Why then were these corporations not able to exert the same level of influence as they do today? If anything, they had more free cash relative to the population as they do today (most people back then didn't have money at all).

Part of this is mass media - there were no TVs and radios until post WW II, and a relatively low level of literacy probably inhibited the influence of newspapers.

But I suspect another part of this was leadership.

Jackson's fight against the US Central Bank (2nd bank of the US) was entirely a choice. He too, was an asshole, but one which used his orneriness to fight against what he perceived as an evil.

Contrast his actions vs. Eisenhower - who warned about the MIC (and SIC) in his farewell speech but otherwise was pretty quiet.

In turn contrast with Obama - who talked the big 'Change' talk but so far has acted exactly opposite.

[Ghent12]

Re: Why do people often vote against their own interests?

Certainly it is true now, but in the past the influence of money was not any different. There were big corporations in the 1800s just as there were big corporations in the 1900s.

Why then were these corporations not able to exert the same level of influence as they do today? If anything, they had more free cash relative to the population as they do today (most people back then didn't have money at all).

Part of this is mass media - there were no TVs and radios until post WW II, and a relatively low level of literacy probably inhibited the influence of newspapers.

Where do you get your information? My sources of propaganda tell me that America has always been addicted to mainstream media. From newspapers and gazettes all the way through the new mainstream of Internet, and the literacy rate was never "relatively low" if relating to similar or different countries instead of timeframes.

I would also argue that one reason why big business had little regard for the government "way back when" is that the government didn't exist in comparison to today. Today's government has a hand in almost every pie, so anyone wanting pies today has to buy the government or deal with their hands. In contrast, government was little more than a military, an excise tax service, a foreign diplomacy office, a tiny Justice department, and a Treasury "back in the day." There were only four original cabinet positions, and there are fifteen now. That's a pretty reasonable metric to assess the scale.

Big business, however, did own numerous local governments and employed their own mini-governments through Pinkerton mercenaries and so forth.

[c1ue]

Re: Why do people often vote against their own interests?

Where do you get your information? My sources of propaganda tell me that America has always been addicted to mainstream media. From newspapers and gazettes all the way through the new mainstream of Internet, and the literacy rate was never "relatively low" if relating to similar or different countries instead of timeframes.

Sorry for the slow reply.

And to answer your question - I refer to the era prior to WW I.

In that time, literacy was relatively low. Certainly newspapers were a much greater percentage of information sources, but were a much lower penetration of the population.

And absolutely big business was even more impactful due to its even larger relative share of liquid wealth.

But at the same time, if the majority of citizens are simply ignorant of anything but their basic religious beliefs (church was probably the single largest common information denominator) - the disadvantage of a non-machine politics operator is less.

In the era from 1776 to 1914, only in the highly organized political arenas like Chicago or New York (again, higher literacy, high population density, etc etc) was it possible to steamroll highly unpopular measures (and politicians) through.

Woodrow Wilson was one of the first 'bought and paid for' Presidents in this respect. Theodore Roosevelt actually was the first, but he turned on his sponsors and pushed back the clock for a few years.