In the 1950s a passenger rail line served Ithaca, N.Y. It was the only reliable way to get to Ithaca, working in all seasons and weather conditions, but it was slow and uncomfortable, so when possible many people traveled instead by car, air, or bus. The railway didn’t make enough revenue to continue the service, and in May 1959 it shut down the line.

The commuters expressed real dismay. Their daily choices to travel by other means had been too “small” to reflect their desire for continued rail service; the railway, by contrast, had had to make one big, long-term decision whether to maintain the line. Both sides were acting rationally, but they’d reached an outcome that no one preferred.

Cornell economist Alfred E. Kahn called this the “tyranny of small decisions”:

The short- and long-run determinations by business men are governed by decisions of customers involving a corresponding range in size and time-perspective — to buy a single candy bar, a camping trip, an automobile, a house, or to enter a rental contract of short or long duration. Still, the ‘size’ or importance of the individual choices by customers is typically less than of those made by the business man, so that each of the latter’s decisions reflects a prospective adding up of the consequences of a large number of customer actions taking place over a period of time.

And the “sum” of these small decisions may not reflect what people really want. “[I]f one hundred consumers choose option x, and this causes the market to make decision X (where X equals 100x), it is not necessarily true that those same consumers would have voted for that outcome if that large decision had ever been presented for their explicit consideration. If this is true, the consumer can be victimized by the narrowness of the contexts in which he exercises his sovereignty.”

(Alfred E. Kahn, “The Tyranny of Small Decisions: Market Failures, Imperfections, and the Limits of Economics,” Kvklos 19:1 [1966], 23-47.)

If you and I are both well-informed, rational, morally reasonable people, then we should both have the right to vote for our leaders. But what if I’m incompetent, misinformed, or irrational? My vote exerts political power over you — it appoints people to powerful offices and influences the coercive power of the state.

Georgetown University philosopher Jason Brennan argues that, as an innocent person, you should not have to tolerate this. Citizens have the right that any political power held over them should be exercised competently, and giving the vote to everyone violates this right. He advocates replacing democracy with a moderate “epistocracy,” a system in which suffrage is limited to politically competent, well-informed citizens, perhaps through a voter qualification exam. There are objections against this view, but Brennan argues that it’s less intrinsically unjust than our present system and probably produces more just outcomes.

“Just as it would be wrong to force me to go under the knife of an incompetent surgeon, or to sail with an incompetent ship’s captain,” he writes, “it is wrong to force me to submit to the decisions of incompetent voters. People who exercise power over me, including other voters, should have to do so in a competent and morally reasonable way. Otherwise, as a matter of justice, they ought to be excluded from holding political power, including the power to vote.”

(Jason Brennan, “The Right to a Competent Electorate,” Philosophical Quarterly 61:245 [October 2011], 700-724.)

In 2001, when its NEAR Shoemaker space probe landed on asteroid 433 Eros, NASA received a $20 parking ticket from Gregory W. Nemitz, who had claimed ownership of the asteroid 11 months earlier.

There followed a slowly escalating legal war. NASA’s lawyer told Nemitz that his claim appeared to have no foundation in law, so he appealed to the State Department, which agreed that his claim was without legal basis. Nemitz demanded a federal jury trial for “breach of implied contract.” The case was dismissed, but Nemitz still asked for a declaratory judgement concerning his right to own private property in space. The court dismissed his claim in 2005.

Proponents argue that only property rights in space will motivate entrepreneurs to pursue exploration. “Space development and settlement will not happen if it’s internationally taxed and controlled,” attorney Wayne White told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. “I think space settlement is a social ‘release valve’ that we desperately need. … It’s only going to get more crowded here on Earth.”