This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 11th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

Political promises are a bit like fad diets, and however laughable those promises might be

voters tend to fall for them over and over.

Unfortunately according to Aaron Powell editor of Libertarianism.org

it's a persistent problem with no clear answer.

It's often rather perplexing that people keep falling for the promises of politicians.

That every election politicians have these grand plans that they politicians that

they offer up to fix small or enormous problems in all of our lives

and people accept them and then it doesn't work.

And the next election, we're back to making promises that people accept again.

And there's often, it's just not clear why this happens, like why don't we seem to learn from these experiences and why don't we instead embrace market solutions which have a much better track record.

And I think part of the reason that this happens over and over

again is actually a pretty understandable one and it has to do with how abstract

market solutions are and how concrete proposed political solutions are.

So imagine that you're someone who's hurting in some way, you've just lost your job, you've

been out of work for a while, you have a long-term illness, so you've got

this substantial problem in your life and you need help in some way.

And so on the one hand you've got a candidate who gets up and says,

if you vote for me, I'm going to pass legislation that's going to give you a job

or it's going to give you health insurance.

It's going to fix your problem.

It's a concrete set of sets.

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