Here, you might say, is the germ of today’s billionaires’ bid to shackle democracy. The Calculus of Consent claimed to show that simple majority voting thus “tend[ed] to result in overinvestment in the public sector.” The public sector battened, Buchanan and Tullock argued, because powerful coalitions of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats could foist most of the cost onto a minority whom they subjected to “discriminatory taxation”—or onto the next generation, which inherited the deficits. The syndrome not only wronged minority interests, the authors averred, but also held down private
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