Why do people sell their votes so cheaply?

It's a philosophical question really, where the dividing line is between "doing the right thing" and "vote buying".

Yes, I am by instinct a tax-cutter, but at the back of my mind I would expect this to be electorally popular; at the other extreme is ruthless vote-buying where small, identifiable groups are preferential treatment - but as soon as a government is giving preferential treatment to every identifiable group, to be paid by everybody else, nobody ends up better off, and because of all the distortions and dead-weight losses, collectively, we end up worse off.

This story in the Evening Standard I found particularly sickening:

Millions of Londoners will get a council tax freeze next year after Labour unveiled a last-ditch move to avoid wipeout in the capital.

The Standard can reveal that all eight Labour-run town halls across the city will not raise the tax. As Gordon Brown scrambles to avoid a general election defeat, Cabinet colleagues hope that the move will persuade voters the party can cut costs without hitting key services. With Labour still struggling in the polls, the Prime Minister sees a tax freeze in London as a key example of the party helping people get through the recession.

OK, don't forget that Council Tax is a balancing figure (which raises less than a quarter of spending under the control of local councils), and that the government always skews the formula by which Whitehall allocates grants to local councils so that Council Tax is lower in councils which its party controls (and the Tories were just as bad as Labour in this respect).

The government has announced that in 2010 it will increase Employer's NIC by 0.5%, which must ultimately feed through into higher unemployment or lower wages (reducing annual wages by about £100 per employee); and it will increase VAT from 15% to 17.5% (in theory costing each household about £400 per year, but of course a lot of it is borne by the producer, and of the producer's share, most is in turn borne by, er, employees).

So that's a fairly grim increase. So why, oh why, are the very same people, only this time with their "Council Tax payer" hat on supposed to rejoice about the fact that these councils won't increase Council Tax, which, assuming it would otherwise have gone up by three per cent, "saves" each household about £50 a year?

Not to mention the facts that a) as a property tax, Council Tax has the lowest 'deadweight costs', and b) as an in-your-face-tax, it is least likely to be wasted by those who collect it.