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The electors of a ‘legislature’, whose members are mainly concerned to secure and retain the votes of particular groups by procuring special benefits for them, will care little about what others will get and be concerned only with what they gain in the haggling. They will normally merely agree to something being given to others about whom they know little, and usually at the expense of third groups, as the price for having their own wishes met, without any thought whether these various demands are just. Each group will be prepared to consent even to iniquitous benefits for other groups out of the common purse if this is the condition for the consent of the others to what this group has learnt to regard as its right. The result of this process will correspond to nobody’s opinion of what is right, and to no principles; it will not be based on a judgment of merit but on political expediency. Its main object is bound to become the sharing out of funds extorted from a minority. That this is the inevitable outcome of the actions of an unrestrained ‘interventionist’ legislature was clearly foreseen by the early theorists of representative democracy. Who indeed would pretend that in modern times the democratic legislatures have granted all the special subsidies, privileges and other benefits which so many special interests enjoy because they regard these demands as just?

Freidrich A. Hayek,  Law, Legislation and Liberty, volume III (1981)

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Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
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