… is from page 250 of Randy Holcombe’s 2018 book, Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power is Made and Maintained:
The threat of Leviathan is that those who write the rules design them to further their own interests.
DBx: And one of the great myths of both “Progressivism” and populism is that “the people” can consciously design and write the rules for themselves through a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making. The fact that a committee of even a dozen individuals is an awkward mechanism for designing and expressing rules is ignored – as is the fact that tens of thousands or hundreds of millions of people, no matter how fair the elections, cannot possibly literally deliberate together, much less design rules by which they will all live. The notion is that elected representatives will carry out this rule-designing and writing task in a way nearly identical to how millions of people would carry out this task in the absence of decision-making costs. This notion is romantic folly.
