Milton Friedman on Supermajority RulesMike Rappaport

Milton Friedman’s death has spurred me to re-read Capitalism and Freedom, which I have not done in decades.  It is quite bit of fun. 

Rereading classics sometimes turns up arguments that one forgot about or didn’t fully appreciate the first time.  Although a good bit of my scholarly work has been addressed to supermajority rules, I hadn’t realized that Friedman discussed this subject.  Here is what he says:

Unanimity is, of course, anideal. In practice, we can affordneither the time nor the effort that would be required to achieve completeunanimity on every issue. We mustperforce accept something less. We arethus led to accept majority rule in one form or another as an expedient. That majority rule is an expedient ratherthan itself a basic principal is clearly shown by the fact that our willingnessto resort to majority rule, and the size of the majority we require, themselvesdepend on the seriousness of the issue involved. If the matter is of little moment and theminority has no strong feelings about being overruled a bare plurality willsuffice. On the other hand, if theminority feels strongly about the issue involved, even a bare majority will notdo. Few of us would be willing to haveissues of free speech, for example, decided by a bare majority. Our legal structure is full of suchdistinctions among kinds of issues that require different kinds ofmajorities. At the extreme are thoseissues embodied in the Constitution. These are the principals that are so important that we are willing tomake minimal concessions to expediency. Something like essential consensus was achieved initially in acceptingthem, and we require something like essential consensus for a change inthem.

Theself-denying ordinance to refrain from majority rule on certain kinds of issuesthat is embodied in our Constitution and in similar written or unwrittenconstitutions elsewhere, and the specific provisions in these constitutions ortheir equivalents prohibiting coercion of individuals, are themselves to beregarded as reached by free discussion and as reflecting essential unanimityabout means.

His claims here are quite interesting for a couple of reasons.  First, Friedman seems to anticipate some of the conclusions that Buchanan and Tullock were to reach about the benefits and costs of supermajority rules in the Calculus of Consent.  Capitalism and Freedom was published the year before Buchanan and Tullock’s classic.  Second, Friedman emphasizes, as few have, that constitutional law is supermajoritarian: Not only is a supermajority required to amend the Constitution; it was also required to enact the Constitution in the first place.