… is from page 184 of Dwight Lee’s and Richard McKenzie’s 1987 book, Regulating Government:
The redistributive view of society makes the nations’s income, to a significant extent, a common-access resource, as air, land, and water used to be. As tends to be true with all common-access resources, the competitive struggle for portions of this new common property should lead to abuse and misuse of the property.
DBx: This truth is important. When income earned by individuals is regarded as being part of a common pool of income to which everyone in the country has access if he or she aligns with a successful majoritarian coalition, individuals will spend more time trying to raid this common pool and less time performing those actions that contribute to the pool.
