You soon come to question how
it is that taxes, expenditure decisions and budgets get made,
so you are forced to think about the political process. The government
can be seen as having many roles, and what the government does
can have quite a few implications to the economy.
Efficiency in
its most basic form can be defined as: the capacity to produce
the desired results with a minimum expenditure of energy, time,
money, or materials. Keeping this definition in mind, the following
information and thoughts provided will attempt to offer various
explanations as to why, since Kenneth Arrow, the general argument
has been that voting is inefficient, does not lead to optimal
results, and is seriously flawed in most of its common manifestations.
Democracy is a type of government. A government
consists of laws and the enforcement of these laws by a hired
agent. In a democracy the "people" supposedly control
the most significant agents through periodic elections. In this
sense then, a democracy can be considered, "of the people,
by the people, and for the people." In an ideal world, the
ideal representation means that each citizen's preferences are
represented in law making and law enforcing-which can be achieved
through voting. Furthermore, in this ideal, all the people are
subject to the same laws, enforcement procedures, and punishments.
There is no discrimination based on status, occupation, heritage,
wealth, race, gender, etc… Sounds great! Except… Of
course none of these ideals exist in complete form.
We would like to think that if
we say that the government does something, we mean that the government
official performed a behavior and that they made a decision that
was "in conjunction with the people's collective decision."
Since decisions can only be made by individuals we mean that the
people use some procedure for transforming their separate decisions
into one single decision that is then carried out by an agent.