By Bryan Caplan

Last year, I tried to figure out why there aren’t a lot more right-wing (or apolitical) firms.  A recent piece by Richard Hanania comes down firmly in favor of my Explanation #4.  To review:

Explanation #4. Few moderates or right-wingers care enough to create a major profit opportunity.  While they don’t relish looking over their shoulders, they prefer their current job to an alternative where they can shoot their mouths off but earn a $1000 less per year.  In this story, the left proverbially just “wants it more.”  And as usual, the market takes the intensity of conflicting preferences into account.

Hanania presents a pile of evidence that despite near-parity in ordinal preferences (the number of Americans who support Democrats roughly equals the number who support Republicans), there is a massive imbalance in cardinal preferences (the number of Americans who strongly support Democrats vastly exceeds the number who strongly support Republicans).

Evidence?  Read the whole essay for the graphs; I’ll just summarize here.

1. Vastly more people donate money to Democrats than Republicans.

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