Jason Brennan and Christopher Freiman have fun applying standard market failure arguments to democratic politics.
A snippet:
Each of the major market failures which supposedly justify government intervention appear in democratic voting and elections. Indeed, some of these failures are anomalies in markets but are baked into democratic elections. Accordingly, there is a prima facie case for regulating democratic voting with the same mechanisms used in market regulation.
Converting this prima facie case into an all-things-considered case requires a few more steps. First, we need to discuss how regulation might work, considering the possibility that regulation will fail, be too expensive, or make things worse. Note that the burden here, as with market regulation, is not to show that regulation will decisively solve all problems, but rather than it will perform adequately, with the benefits exceeding the costs. (We doubt most readers think that market regulation must be perfect and problem-free to be justified. They should apply this same standard here.) Second, we need to consider disanalogies and objections, including arguments which hold that people have a special right to engage in democratic failures free of regulation.
The article is open-access for those keen on reading the whole thing.
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