I have already briefly touched on the idea of "rent
seeking" on the part of the voters (but never
used the term officially) so let's briefly touch on this again.
Members of a collective have demands for public goods and they
believe that they can better satisfy their demands by making collective
agreements. However they immediately realize that there are high
costs associated with collective decision making. So to lessen
these costs they agree to rules of, for example, majority-rule
for making laws. Plus they elect legislators that they think will
make laws on their behalf. Yet this gives people an incentive
to influence the actions of legislators and enforcers. Sometimes
they will try to influence politicians to make laws that will
facilitate trade and as a consequence be beneficial in general.
However, people also promote those laws that they expect to benefit
themselves at the expense of other members of the collective.
These types of action are all a part of rent-seeking. These actions
are in totality very wasteful. Even when "redistributional
rent seeking" occurs, it is wasteful because there is no
overall net gain in benefits to society. All that happens is that
the laws that are passed redistribute wealth from one group to
another group. It has been stated that rent-seeking is a very
serious problem in our society, costing taxpayers billions of
dollars.