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FREEDOM AND THE LAW
FREEDOM AND THE LAW
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In this way, legislation has undergone a very peculiar development. It has come to resemble more and more a sort of diktat that the winning majorities in the legislative assemblies impose upon the minorities, often with the result of overturning long-established individual expectations and creating completely unprecedented ones. The succumbing minorities, in their turn, adjust themselves to their defeat only because they hope to become sooner or later a winning majority and be in the position of treating in a similar way the people belonging to the contingent majority of today. In fact, majorities may be built and pulled down within legislatures according to a regular procedure that is now being methodically analyzed by certain American scholars—a procedure that American politicians call “log-rolling” and that we should call “vote-trading.” Whenever groups are insufficiently represented in the legislature to impose their own will on some other dissenting group, they resort to vote-trading with as many neutral groups as possible within the legislature in order to place their intended “victim” in a minority position. Each of the “neutral” groups bribed today is in its turn prepared to bribe other groups in order to impose its own will on other intended “victims” tomorrow. In this way, majorities change within the legislature, but there are always “victims,” as there are always beneficiaries of the sacrifice of these “victims.”
Unfortunately, this is not the only grave disadvantage of the inflation of the legislative process today. Legislation always involves a kind of coercion and unavoidable constraint of the individuals who are subject to it. The attempt made in recent times by some scholars to consider the choices made by individuals in their capacity as members of a decision-making group (such as a constituency or a legislature) as equivalent to choices made in other fields of human action (e.g., in the market) fail to observe a fundamental difference between these two types of choice.
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