Thank you for the long response but I think you are beating a straw man here. Yes, democratic and market-based decisions are two different processes. If you re

Thank you for the long response but I think you are beating a straw man here. Yes, democratic and market-based decisions are two different processes. If you review my comment you'll notice that I did not claim both to be the same. Both, however, despite their structural difference, depend on the availability of information. As you normally do not want your decision making process to be a gamble you really need to try to know as much as reasonable about the actual costs and benefits of your potential decision. Your description of what makes a democratic decision is wildly off. There is a small group of thinkers (mainly highly abstract process based direct democrats) that does agree that the defining factor is about a majority of people agreeing upon something, however, this is far from an usual position. Most add a bunch of constrains (think everything between Aristoteles, Locke and enlightened constitutionalists) some abolish the necessity of an election (like, for example, Rousseau). This is why a contemporary analytical approaches would probably start off by marking a decision as democratic as soon as it is validated through the available (democratic) institutions. There are of course also purely output based approaches on legitimacy that claim to be justified through democratic theory, but I guess that is less common. Those decisions can be anything within the scope of the constitutive purpose of the democratic body in question. Other than you suggested this does not have to do anything with redistribution. Your description of what makes a market-based decision is wildly off as well. In situations in which market based decision making processes are proposed, they are universally seen as a sum of heterogeneous and fractional individual decisions dependent on their specific market frame. A public good is a term that describes non-excludable and non-rivalrous goods. Think of it as the oceans, the atmosphere, classically lakes, rivers, etc. I'll leave out the part on libertarians; political analysis is not a football game, you don't always need to side with or against someone to make an argument. My claim is purely systematic and in itself does not affect the ability to redistribute. However, I wonder: If you fear that a specific redistribution might stop as soon as people get aware of it, does this indicates that you believe people would not appreciate the specific redistributional effect if they knew about it?