… is from pages 75-76 of Harold Demsetz’s insight-packed and wisdom-filled 1982 volume, Economic, Legal, and Political Dimensions of Competition:
The use of a given amount of time and the expenditure of a given sum to search among market alternatives yields a much greater expected increase in welfare to a person consuming in the market place than to the same person consuming through the polling place. In the market place his purchase may be tailored closely to his taste. In the polling place he will need to be satisfied with a compromise that his vote has influenced very little. Politics is the art of compromise because political outcomes are very indivisible. The greater divisibility of market outcomes makes business the art of serving new wants without compromising old ones.
It’s ironic that the group of people who most loudly sing the praises of “diversity,” and who congratulate themselves most ostentatiously for their liberal “celebration” of “differences,” are the same group of people who are most eager to substitute genuinely diverse market-driven outcomes for one-size-forced-upon-all politically imposed ones.
