The interest of the ministry is to increase its power and its wealth. However, it can increase its power only by restricting my freedom and its wealth by reaching into my pockets.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 280 to 288 (in French)
Undated

This second unpublished draft is again about the issue on the choice of candidates and is a dialogue between a “countryman voter” and a partisan of a general, a priest supporting the king and an “ordinary” candidate. We can see one of the issues of parliamentary representation that can be done only by unknown people whose positions may sometimes overlap with those of the voter but cannot be systematically the same. This fact is particularly well described in a conference given by Donald Boudreaux at MTSU in which he describes the “bundling effect” from minute 48’25’’ to minute 55’25’’ (I recommend to watch the whole conference but one would need to have a spare hour for that).

Donald Boudreaux concludes, as does Frédéric Bastiat’s countryman voter, that in a democracy, we can vote for a candidate we believe he is, in the hope that his decisions will be closer to ours, but we know that this is imperfect. Here the voter shows us that he does not trust a general whose whole career consisted in obeying or giving orders and that he does not trust the king’s supporter because he believes that the parliament should be a counter-power to the government that needs to be controlled and restricted in its capacity to be harmful (today’s quote).