Abstract
We know that one of the reasons congressmen vote for such things as protective tariffs and the farm subsidy program is that they think it will attract votes. Economists are almost always opposed to these items because they think they injure the voters. Technically speaking, what happens is that the voters specialize their vote, i.e., concentrate their entire preference function on one particular issue (or a few issues) that has considerable importance to them. Other voters concentrating their voting decision on other special issues ignore the well being of the first voter.
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Notes
Herbert Stein, “Balancing the Budget) Compared with What? AEI Economist (February 1987).
New York: Harper and Bros., 1942.
Problems of Majority Voting,”Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 67 (December 1959), pp. 571–579.
The advice came from the Department of State who simply misunderstood economics.
The bankers did not want them.
We need not worry about the problem of comparing utility between persons; science fiction, after all, is science fiction.
See my “Information Without Profit,” Papers on Non-Market Decision Making, Vol. 1 (Charlottesville, VA: Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy, 1966), pp. 141–159.
I knew a wealthy man whose foundation provided financial support for tournaments between professional bridge players. I thought this was a total waste of money, but he did not. The Internal Revenue Service ruled that it was a charitable contribution.
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© 1989 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Tullock, G. (1989). The Cost of Rent Seeking: A Metaphysical Problem. In: The Economics of Special Privilege and Rent Seeking. Studies in Public Choice, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7813-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7813-4_3
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