Why don't they listen to me?

I've been moaning about how stupid the general public are over on my reactionary parochial HTML emulation of talk radio at its worst, Citizen of Woking. But that left me wondering how come supposedly educated people can make such sub-optimal decisions about important economic matters. Consider the simple example of technology policy. The current government is supposed to be in favour of competition, progress and individual liberty. But when it comes down to it, they always cave in favour of vested interests by restricting competition, reducing economic growth and controlling the populace.

Look at the continuing fuss about Internet tracking and censorship. Economic evidence seems to suggest that a copyright term in the range of 12-15 years is best for society, balancing the rewards to IP creators and the rest of society appropriately, yet politicians keep extending the copyright term far beyond this level. This has an unfortunate spillover that leads to bad policy in other areas, such as internet privacy. Cliff Richard is against internet privacy for entirely sociopathic reasons to do with what economists call "rent-seeking regulatory capture", but he finds a sympathetic ear in the government because a) the government don't want privacy either - they want Chinese cyberwarriors as well as EMI and GCHQ to be able to listen in to your internet conversations - and find sobbing pop stars a useful smokescreen and b) because it's more fun talking to pop stars than to dreary middle-aged "experts" (e.g., me).

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes