Man, it’s such a shame I didn’t get a chance to read this article until after the polls closed last night…

A man named Greg Mankiw wrote an article for Fortune magazine that ended up getting pulled, but he published it himself online. In it, he states,

Sometimes, the most responsible thing a person can do on election day is stay at home … If you really don’t know enough to cast an intelligent vote, you should be eager to let your more informed neighbors make the decision.

In response, Ezra Klein has a great rebuttal in the American Prospect:

This makes a superficial sort of sense if you assume a commonality of interests between educated and uneducated, poor and rich, black and white, etc. And, to some degree, there certainly is such a commonality. But not on everything. If you receive expansive health care benefits with very little cost-sharing from your employer, for instance, your immediate interests are different from a low-wage, uninsured worker. A system that advantages them will require greater buy-in from you. If you’re the owner of a profitable retail outlet with very low labor costs, you don’t want a sharp raise in the minimum wage. If you’re the low labor cost in question, you do.

So yeah… if you want the Cliff Notes, here it is: if you can vote, you should vote. Don’t trust others to make the right vote for you!