In Pursuit Of The Common Good

In pursuit of the common good; the American Founders and unanimity
By Lawrence A. Hunter, Ph..D.

An unhealthy tendency arose during the 20th Century to equate representative democracy, what America’s Founding Fathers called a Republic, with majority rule — to equate the “will of a majority” with the “public interest,” the “public good,” the “will of the people,” the “common good” or the “national interest.” The Founding Fathers certainly did not subscribe to any such equation. Indeed, one of James Madison's major intellectual contributions to political economy and practical constitutional design was his effort to distinguish between the “will of a majority” and the “will of the people.”

This critical distinction was beautifully reflected in the design of the American Constitution with its array of checks and balances, divisions and separations of power and supermajority voting requirements. These institutional devices were employed both to protect minorities from the overbearing will of the majority and conversely to protect majorities from the dictatorial impulse of minorities ensconced in government.

By the time Ronald Reagan was elected president, many people had come to the realization that the erosion of constraints on the activities of the federal government allowed majoritarianism to run amok. Relatively small majorities were able to seek rents by passing programs that concentrated benefits upon themselves while spreading the costs of the programs diffusely across the entire population or concentrating the costs on a large minority. Elected representatives no longer sought the “common good” but rather acted as broker-dealers for relatively small majorities to extract rents.

Because the political broker-dealers did not represent a permanent majority, but rather sought political commissions from any temporary majority that could be assembled, the system evolved into a stable, if pernicious, kind of majority-rule meta-cycle in which shifting majorities allowed everyone to have their day in the majority and attempt to recoup their losses from previous, and more frequent, stints in the minority. Representative democracy in America had turned into the world’s biggest daisy chain with everyone having a hand in someone else’s pocket through the political system.

Beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, there was a serious effort in the Congress to thwart this rent-seeking merry-go-round by imposing a supermajority requirement to raise taxes. This article tackles head on the most frequently heard complaints about super-majority requirement to raise taxes: They are “undemocratic” because they permit a minority to govern.

Download the entire essay here. . .

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