Are the Rich Too Rich to be Expropriated?: Economic Power and the Feasibility of Constitutional Limits to Redistribution

Friedrich Breyer and Heinrich Ursprung

Public Choice, 1998, vol. 94, issue 1-2, 135-56

Abstract: Why is it that, in democracies, the poor do not expropriate the rich even though they outnumber them? In this paper the authors analyze the commonly held belief that the rich escape expropriation because they are economically powerful. They demonstrate that the economically powerful, i.e., the above-average income earners, are indeed in a position to bribe the small segment of the voters with incomes between the median and the mean to resist the temptation of supporting confiscatory taxation. This is true even if compensation payments in cash are politically unfeasible and therefore need to be made in terms of an evenly distributed private good; and it may even be true if only pure public goods are available to swing the middle class. Copyright 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Are the rich too rich to be expropriated?: Economic power and the feasibility of constitutional limits to redistribution (1998)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:94:y:1998:i:1-2:p:135-56

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().