Here is the story.  Nick Gillespie says:

"We’re the Sith Lords of American politics," he says, referring to
the "Star Wars" baddies.  "We can show up in any group.  We’re both
terrifying and devilishly attractive."

Since I’m not either of those things, and I’ve made other claims about the Sith Lords, I said something different:

Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University says
the new breed of Swiftian commentary found on shows such as "The Daily
Show" and "The Colbert Report," though not explicitly libertarian, also
has contributed to the current libertarian moment.  "The way to be funny is to make fun of something," Mr. Cowen notes.

There is more by me at the very end of the article (yes, you too can look into my heart).  In part libertarianism has become cool because Republicanism has become so uncool, thereby leaving a cultural gap which Hillary Clinton alone cannot fill.

Megan McArdle tells us:

…why is America’s high-speed rail so dreadful? The Acela delivers
you, at enormous added expense, to Boston one hour ahead of the
regional. On the DC-to-NY run, the added benefit is 10-15 minutes. The
answer is that the Acela uses existing track, which is twisty, the
better to serve every congressional district between here and Boston.
Real high speed rail needs to be fairly straight, for the same reason
you don’t take hairpin turns at 120 mph in your car.

I had never heard the Congressional district argument before.  I’ve also heard that freight railways crowd the lines and Amtrak doesn’t pay a high enough prices for access; the freight services had, way back when, pledged to the government to give Amtrak trains priority but of course that kind of cheap talk is not enough to get the job done; here is some relevant background, and more here.  Here is a good summary of Amtrak critiques.  It comes from a whole blog devoted to criticizing Amtrak.

Why buy votes when you can buy the Bay Area Center for Voting Research?  The BACVR analyzes voting trends in California and nationwide; they are best known for their ranking of the most liberal and most conservative cities (pdf) in the nation.  The founders, however, want out and are selling all of BACVR’s intellectual assets, including the organization’s web site, past research, and well-known name on eBay.  The perfect Christmas gift for that political junkie on your list.

Of course some people believe that all think tanks are for sale.

Mankiw says no, Caplan says the real problem is voting itself.  Of course we let private shareholders sell their votes all the time, and uncontroversially, so the real issue is how politics is different. 

Say society has a 9999 people.  The marginal private value of a (political) vote is almost zero, except for its feel-good benefit (see also Gelman on altruistic motives to motivate voting).  Yet the total value of 5000 votes — a winning tally — is the size of the largest wealth transfer that the winner could impose on everyone else.  The result will mimic a model of self-interested voting but with only one self-interested voter — the owner of the purchased votes — having a say.  And that winner will be the conscience-less (non-liquidity-constrained) person who has the most to gain from buying up votes and getting things his way.

Of course Bryan, in other contexts, has shown that expressive voting is more likely than the self-interested voting model, at least under standard democracy.  I would rather have expressive voting than what is explained directly above, even though expressive voting is somewhat irrational. 

Maybe voters will end up with sudden attacks of conscientiousness and be unwilling to sell their votes; to that extent vote-selling won’t much matter and of course then it can’t bring gains either.

Now let’s go back to the corporate case.  When it comes to policy, shareholders might not agree on means but everyone favors the same end of profit maximization.  A winning coalition of shareholders can’t do much to extract rents from other shareholders, unless of course they are exploiting those other shareholders in their other roles as consumers or input suppliers.  But such effects are usually small (as opposed to the widespread possibilities for redistribution through politics) and thus vote selling works just fine for corporations.  There is no simple way that shareholder A can buy up the votes of shareholders B and C and then just screw them over.

Coda: There is a potential problem with vote-selling in corporations, again relating back to the difference between marginal and average value for a vote.  Shareholders might be afraid to sell to a takeover artist, instead wishing to hold on for the ride and reap gains from the change in corporate control.  But if no one sells the takeover cannot take place and no one reaps the gains.  In other words, there is too little vote selling; that’s Grossman and Hart, 1980.  Alex once wrote an excellent paper on this problem (but where is the link Alex?) and showed that the free-rider problem among shareholders can usually be solved by random Nash strategies; note that the final outcome will depend on whether there is a countable or uncountable infinity of shareholders; please don’t laugh!

The bottom line: There are good economic arguments for why we allow corporate vote-selling but not political vote-selling.