A client called me last spring to ask how a proposed change to the capital gains rate would hit his portfolio. Fair question. That's my job. Then he added something that stuck with me longer than the tax math did. He said he'd vote against anyone who touched his Social Security check, regardless of what else was on the ballot. He's 74. He built two companies from a garage and a line of credit. He's one of the most productive people I've ever advised. And in that one sentence, he became something else too: a man voting his subsidy instead of his principles.

The Constitution's framers weren't naive about this. Madison spent Federalist No. 10 explaining why a pure democracy, where a majority sets policy directly, has no defense against what he called factions, groups whose interests run contrary to the rights of others or the good of the community. His answer wasn't to trust future majorities to behave. It was to build a republic large enough that no faction, including a majority faction organized around who gets paid by whom, could capture the whole government at once. The 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to tax income. Nothing obligates Congress to spend that revenue buying the votes of the people it taxes. That's a policy choice, not a constitutional one, and policy choices can be undone.

You've probably seen the quote pasted over a stock photo of the Capitol dome: a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government because once voters discover they can vote themselves money from the treasury, they'll keep doing it until the system collapses under its own debt. It's attributed to a Scottish judge named........

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