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COMPETITION AND DEMOCRACY*
GARY S. BECKER
ColumbiaUniversity
* A draft of this paper was written in the summer of 1952, but pressure of other work
prevented me from revising it for publication until the summer of 1957. In the interval, an
article using a similar approach was published by Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory
of Political Action in a Democracy, 67 J. Pol. Econ. 135 (1957); however, our work does
not overlap too much, since Downs emphasizes somewhat different aspects of the political
structure than I do here.
1 Henry Simons vigorously argued that all "natural" monopolies (i.e., monopolies caused
by increasing returns) should be nationalized by the state; see his A Positive Program for
Laissez-faire, reprinted in Economic Policy for a Free Society (1948).
105
106 THE JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS
to an ideal free enterprise system in the market place. That is, political de-
cisions would be determined by the values of the electorate and the political
sector would be run very efficiently. Section II tries to determine why actual
democraciesdiffer significantly from the ideal, and whether government regu-
lation of private monopolies in actual democracies would improve matters.