Ballots Are Better than Bullets

The conventional, indeed classical, wisdom used to be that democracy led to instability.

The Anglosphere has done well, but other industrialized democracies are much more fragile - France, Germany, South Korea, etc.

Arnold writes:

I have to say that the book is getting a fantastic amount of attention. Whether that translates into sales is something else.

If all policy decisions were straightforward economic calculations, it might be simpler and better for everyone if only people who had a grasp of economics participated in the political process. But many policy decisions don’t have an optimal answer. They involve values that are deeply contested: when life begins, whether liberty is more important than equality, how racial integration is best achieved (and what would count as genuine integration).
That sounds somewhat compatible with Caplan's suggestion of a "council of economists" to rule certain laws "uneconomic".

A second point is that the "losers" must be different people on different issues. If a self-aware group of people finds themselves on the losing side of most choices, their willingness to grant legitimacy to the process will evaporate.

Perhaps this is a hidden force behind the non-minimal State: more issues to decide means that there are more chances that a given person will win on one.

As an example in the context of the current U.S., powerless and disaffected traditional conservatives might be persauded that the system was legitimate by the passage of laws restricting abortion and nudity.