Here is what "low information voters" don't understand. Trade agreements, and healthcare bills, are large and complex because you have to satisfy dozens if not hundreds of stakeholders all at once. There are so many different interests, public and private, that have something at stake in a healthcare bill or a trade agreement, that you want to corral all their interests in one giant document, then get them to sign off and be done with it.

The result is always going to be a bill, or an agreement, that is huge and multi-faceted and complex. But what is the alternative? What happens if you try to create a healthcare plan, or conduct international trade, without doing this?

What happens is you die the death of a thousand cuts. One of the most important aspects of a trade agreement is that, once all kinds of little things are nailed down, opportunities for political meddling and red tape are cut out. Without a trade agreement, you have politicians trying to run little games on dozens or hundreds or thousands of products, with lobbyists encouraging breaks for this or levies on that, which jams up the whole system.

It's the same thing with healthcare. Without a big healthcare bill that gets everybody signed onto one set of rules, one time, you get a chaos of interests and conflicts and lobbying that snarls everything up. If you don't hammer it all out at once - in a process that takes years because it's so complex - the alternative is to be permanently drowned in red tape and snarled in infinite strings of Christmas tree lights.

The nature of this process explains why evil and stupid go hand in hand. Every trade agreement has trade-offs by necessity, which is how you get different parties to agree. And every healthcare bill will have things that aren't ideal, because you have to balance coverage with costs and budget realities.

So even a best-of-all worlds trade agreement or healthcare bill will have flaws and issues that critics can point to. And it will be big and hairy and complex not because it is badly designed, but because that is the nature of the thing, on the grounds it is better to get a wide array of interests nailed down all at once.

This leaves the agreement, or bill, open to criticism by dishonest politicians who can complain about how unfair or bad or complex or costly it is, how it is a rotten deal and so on, and how they can come up with something much better. And then gullible voters believe the politicians, because they can see with their own eyes the inevitable costs or flaws and they can see the bill, or the agreement, is big and complex. They can have the problems pointed out to them without understanding the benefits, or the alternative costs of no policy at all.

So then the evil politicians promise something that is much cleaner, simpler, more fair, more affordable or whatever, but it is 100% vaporware. You can literally take any complex product in the world and make empty promises to come up with something that is faster, better, cheaper, or all three, as long as you aren't required to have a path of plausibility or a path of backing your claims.

This is what happened with Republicans wanting to repeal Obamacare and is also what's happening with Brexit. Obamacare had its flaws and is unwieldy and complex but that is the nature of the beast, it is a pragmatic solution that did a job and could be improved incrementally. Republicans talked about how terrible it is as a strategy for conning idiots, promising to replace it with vaporware. We are now finding out the hard way that the vaporware never existed and never will.

In similar fashion all the supporters of Brexit are relying on vaporware trade agreements. Britain is walking away from a hugely advantageous deal in access to the EU market, and trading it for a bag of snakes -- the need to make unknown trade agreements that will take years to hammer out, maybe a decade, under very harsh conditions in which Britain has a very weak hand. But because politicians are full of crap and voters are gullible, it is possible to promise vaporware with a straight face, and talk about how everything is going to be great and it will be no problem.

If the major car companies handled product development the way politicians handle trade agreements and healthcare bills, they would be promising flying cars and 300 miles per gallon fuel efficiency every few years, while trashing their competitors' products as the worst ever. The real problem though is gullibility in that the game only works because voters are uneducated, and biased to vote based on emotional preference, as if political parties were sports teams.

As Bertrand de Jouvenal put it, "a society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." The sheep are about to get torn to shreds.