Mancur Olson Quotes

As soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the ‘public purse’, and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson’s) ‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft.

To say a situation is ‘lost’ or hopeless is in one sense equivalent to saying it is perfect, for in both cases efforts at improvement can bring no positive results.

Distributional coalitions slow down a society's capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions, and thereby reduce the rate of economic growth.

The incentive to produce is diminished; the incentive to seek a larger share of what is produced increases. The reward for pleasing those to whom we sell our goods or labor declines, while the reward for evading or exploiting regulations, politics, and bureaucracy, and for asserting our rights through bargaining or complex understandings becomes great.

Mancur Olson put it eloquently in The Rise and Decline of Nations: “The reader should accordingly not accept the argument in this book simply because he or she finds it plausible and consistent with known facts. Many plausible stories have been told before and often also widely believed, yet they failed to stand up.

La primera característica con la que debería contar un sistema impositivo es la de la máxima individualización posible de los tributos, también denominada por Mancur Olson (1969), «equivalencia fiscal». La idea de fondo es que los colectivos receptores del gasto público han de ser quienes costeen ese gasto público.