All Posts Tagged With: "majority rule"

What’s So Good About Democracy?

It was once said that “democracy is the most promiscuous word in the language; she is everybody’s mistress.” Indeed, political regimes of widely differing institutional features label themselves democracies, as did totalitarian communist orders. Often, the best guide to a country’s democratic credentials was that it didn’t call itself democratic: compare West Germany’s Federal Republic with the East German Democratic Republic.

1May2003 | | 37 comments | Continued

Henry Ford, Upton Sinclair, and Limits on Consumer Choice

Richard Coffman and Ashley Lyman are associate professors of economics at the University of Idaho. Early in the twentieth century two prominent Americans, one a capitalist, the other a socialist, enunciated surprisingly similar views on the relationship between product differentiation and consumer welfare. The capitalist, Henry Ford, had revolutionized the young automobile industry, using mass-production [...]

1Feb2003 | | 1 comment | Continued

What Do Farmers Want from Me?

You’d think in a democracy that the greater the number of people on your side of an issue, the more likely it will be that you’ll get your way. But it ain’t necessarily so. As Mancur Olson, Gary Becker, and others have pointed out, in politics, small is often beautiful. Take farmers. When farmers were [...]

1Sep2002 | | 2 comments | Continued

Say It Isn’t So, Jerry Lewis

It was a disappointing day for me, that day last year when comedian Jerry Lewis testified before a Senate subcommittee seeking taxpayer funding for muscular dystrophy research. It drove home how in the past 70 years the virtue of charity has been corrupted from a matter of individual choice and initiative to one of group [...]

1Jun2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

A New Old American Concept of Political Liberty

It is odd that a libertarian should have a conception of political liberty at all. Isn’t it the case that there is a permanent war between freedom and politics? Surely any reduction in the political sphere produces a concomitant increase in individual liberty. Has not choice in the market, characterized by personal autonomy and spontaneity, [...]

1Mar2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Sound Bites and Unsound Decisions

Place: an executive meeting room at Boeing’s headquarters. Background: a meeting is about to commence between Boeing’s chairman and CEO, Phil Condit, and a team of Boeing engineers. The engineers asked for the meeting to explain to Mr. Condit a new method they’ve devised for manufacturing aircraft. By increasing the efficiency of the assembly process, [...]

1Feb2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Who Should Vote?

Status as an adult citizen in a political jurisdiction is seen as a sufficient condition to entitle one to vote for a representative or participate in collective decision-making. Why not apply that same criterion and entitle adult citizens to voting rights to decide the composition of corporate boards of directors and other corporate matters? If [...]

1Jan2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Ultimate Externality

Pick an economist at random and ask him or her, “What is government’s chief role?” The likely answer will be, “To correct market failures.” Economists have long understood that markets aren’t textbook perfect. Sometimes they fail, most notably when part of the cost of a person’s actions is shifted onto others who don’t consent to [...]

1Dec2001 | | 1 comment | Continued

Regulating Biodiversity: Tragedy in the Political Commons

David Laband teaches natural resources economics and policy at the Forest Policy Center in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences at Auburn University. Last summer, lightning struck and killed an enormous pine tree on one side of my backyard. At about the same time, voracious pine bark beetles girdled and killed an equally impressive [...]

1Sep2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Rule of Law and Freedom in Emerging Democracies: A Madisonian Perspective

James Dorn is vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute. The collapse of communism in 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe, and the fall of the Soviet Union two years later, have increased the number of democracies in the world to a total of 120. Of those, however, only 85 are classified as [...]

1Aug2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Rights Without Exceptions

Jeff Snyder is an attorney in New York City and is the “Gun Rights” columnist for American Handgunner magazine. This article is adapted from columns he wrote in the November/December 2000, January/February 2001, and May/June 2001 issues of that magazine. He is the author of Nation of Cowards: Essays on the Ethics of Gun Control [...]

1May2001 | | 3 comments | Continued

Rights Without Exceptions

Jeff Snyder (jsnyder@ekks.com) is an attorney in New York City and is the “Gun Rights” columnist for American Handgunner magazine. This article is adapted from columns he wrote in the November/December 2000, January/February 2001, and May/June 2001 issues of that magazine. He is the author of Nation of Cowards: Essays on the Ethics of Gun [...]

1Apr2001 | | 2 comments | Continued

The Ideals of Tyranny

Socialism, along with other movements founded on egalitarianism, has often been held up as a moral ideal. Many people consider the drive for “equality” to be laudable. It is frequently claimed, however, that socialism, although based on a moral principle, failed because it used immoral means to obtain its ends.

1Mar2001 | | 1 comment | Continued

Rules versus Rulers

By now someone presumably has been inaugurated president of the United States. It’s a good time to reconsider voting as a method of making important decisions. The presidential election has exposed to light a long-known but little acknowledged fact: democratic processes are like a cheap sweater. Don’t look too close, and for gosh sakes, don’t [...]

1Feb2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Two Indispensable Lessons

The 1900s are now history. I say “1900s” rather than “twentieth century” to avoid irritating those sticklers for precision who note that the final day of the twentieth century is December 31, 2000, and not December 31, 1999. I agree, too, with sticklers of another sort who point out that, because time measurement is a [...]

1Jan2000 | | 0 comments | Continued

An Open Letter to the California Legislature

As a student of public choice theory, I understand why you support SB 1241, a mandatory agency-shop bill for California State University (CSU) faculty. After all, in the words of Ambrose Bierce, “politics is a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.” The California Faculty Association (CFA) supports you in the political marketplace, [...]

1Aug1999 | | 3 comments | Continued

Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order

Butler Shaffer is professor of law at Southwestern University School of Law and author of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival (1985) and The Redistribution of Authority: Privately Owned Property as a System of Social Order (forthcoming). While studying political philosophy in college, I often pondered: why should my preferences for liberty [...]

1May1999 | | 0 comments | Continued
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