Who Should Vote on What?
Dennis Mueller is quite stimulating. Now he is talking about redistribution. Scott Yenor asked about the motive of, say, giving food stamps to the poor because the rich feel bad seeing poor people starve.
Professor Mueller responded by saying, among other things, that if that is the motive, then only the donors– the rich– ought to vote on it. This is a neat idea. We might want the taxes and food stamps to be compulsory, government-organized, but to overcome the free-rider problem we might want to say that a majority of a class– say, rich donors– can vote to compel the entire class to be taxed and to thereby donate. But of course you do not want the recipients to vote on this.
The class might be narrowly defined– and should be, an interesting question. Hollywood millionaires would like to be taxed more for charity to the poor, but Idaho potato farmer millionaires would not. The Hollywooders, being more numerous, would like to define the class broadly, so as to make the farmers subsidize their charitable desires.
Mueller says he has a paper on this. No doubt his Public Choice III cites it.
June 30th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
Professor Mueller emailed me with the cite:
The paper about
redistribution is “Interest Groups, Redistribuition and the Size of Government,” in
Stanley Winer and Hirofumi Shibata, eds. Political Economy and Public Finance, E.
Elgar, 2002.