Abstract
This paper asks what rules for supplying and financing public goods would be chosen by individuals at the constitutional level. A new principle of decision-making is proposed. This separates decisions about how much to spend on public goods from decisions about how to allocate this spending among different public goods; the latter decision is made by allowing each individual to determine how his own tax payment will be spent. Analogies are drawn between this principle and proportional representation, tax relief for charities, and certain procedures for providing state support for political parties and churches.
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The first draft of this paper was written while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations at the Australian National University. I am grateful for the Centre's support. A later version was presented at a Liberty Fund symposium on Liberty and Constitutionalism in Arlington, Virginia in July 1989. I wish to thank Geoffrey Brennan, James Buchanan, Douglas Heckathorn, Hartmut Kliemt, Richard Langlois, Manfred Tietzel, Viktor Vanberg, Richard Wagner, Richard Wallace and Albert Weale for their comments.
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Sugden, R. Rules for choosing among public goods: A contractarian approach. Constit Polit Econ 1, 63–82 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02393042
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02393042