The cartel in the voting booth

The New York Times reports that redistricting in Florida has placed Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who is white — into a district with a historically Black constituency, where four Black Democratic candidates now risk dividing the vote and handing her the seat. The mechanics are straightforward. When a single authority draws the lines, it controls who competes with whom. That is the essence of a cartel: not a conspiracy of businesspeople, but any arrangement that reduces competitive pressure and insulates incumbents from the discipline of the market.

I have always argued that the burden of proof lies with whoever restricts competition, whether in commerce or in politics. Defenders of the current redistricting regime will say that majority-minority districts were created precisely to remedy historic exclusion from political power — and that is a serious argument, one I will not dismiss. The Voting Rights Act addressed real and documented injustice. But the instrument chosen, the state-managed racial district, is now producing outcomes its architects would not have intended: a white incumbent protected by a fractured field in a district designed for Black representation. Good intentions and good results are not the same thing. We learned that lesson repeatedly in economic policy; it applies here too.

What has gone wrong is structural. When political geography is managed by the very incumbents who benefit from it, the consumer — the voter — loses bargaining power. In a functioning market, entry is cheap and the consumer switches suppliers easily. In the current system, entry is expensive, geography is fixed by political authority, and switching is nearly impossible. The result is predictable: durable incumbency, reduced accountability, and districts that cease to represent coherent communities of interest.

The orthodox remedy on the left is more aggressive racial mapping; the orthodox remedy on the right is color-blind redistricting that tends, in practice, to dilute minority representation. I would suggest a different frame. The question is not which group should control the district, but whether the process of drawing lines should be insulated from the people who benefit from those lines. Independent, rules-bound redistricting commissions are imperfect, but they at least relocate the conflict of interest. Beyond that, ranked-choice voting or multi-member districts would allow several candidates to compete without the spoiler effect that the Times describes — vote-splitting would cease to be a structural weapon.

The deeper principle, as I argued throughout my career, is that concentrated political power and concentrated economic power reinforce each other. Whoever controls district boundaries controls access to the legislature; whoever controls the legislature writes the rules for the economy. Citizens who care about economic freedom ought to care very much about competitive elections. The two are not separate issues. They are the same issue expressed in different currencies.

Inference, not recollection: I have not followed the specific Florida redistricting litigation or the precise candidates involved; my analysis rests on the structural description provided by the New York Times lead and on principles developed over a lifetime of studying how political monopolies and economic monopolies mirror each other.