MAJORITY TYRANNY IS BUILT IN.

As Steve Horwitz puts it, In Politics, Everyone has to Eat the Olives.  "Electoral politics, by its very nature, cannot abide the tolerance of minority tastes the way that markets do."  The bundle that might be Consensus today becomes Oppressive tomorrow.

Particular candidates or parties will offer a platform full of a variety of policy proposals. Individual voters might like some of those proposals but also dislike some of them. Some voters might dislike nearly all of a candidate’s positions. Whichever candidate wins, or whichever party wins a majority, everyone will be subject to their attempts to put their preferred policies in place, regardless of whether we liked those policies or not.

Imagine going to the grocery store and rather than picking out the individual items you wish to buy, each store offered a pre-selected bundle of groceries that were available for purchase. Kroger might offer a different bundle than Whole Foods or Aldi, but each store offers only one bundle and you have to buy everything that’s in it. If we push this analogy to its limit, imagine further that you are required to eat everything that’s in the bundle. Similarly, we could imagine restaurants working in this sort of way.

You can easily see the problems. First, the stores would cater to the median shopper and diner, in a pretty good replica of the median voter theorem. Minority tastes would be largely shut out. Second, very few people would be anywhere close to fully happy with their bundle of groceries or their meal. And if you’re required to eat what you buy, some folks are going to be very unhappy about their meals.

The median eater phenomenon is the best case scenario. Imagine a polarized polity, divided about evenly between strong olive eaters and strong olive avoiders, with control of the bundle being alternated every few years.

The collective choice processes of politics, by definition, don’t allow for the possibility of the tolerance of others’ preferences that is the foundation of the marketplace. This is why so many political battles, especially recently, seem so high-stakes. It’s a winner-take-all game, so those who perceive themselves in the minority have every reason to fight hard, if not cheat.

The more goods and services that are provided through political allocation, the more we will deal with this sort of problem.

Read and understand. Olives optional.