Abstract This paper questions the long-established view in the Musgrave-Samuelson public goods theory about voters’ incentives to misrepresent their preferences for public goods. The arguments are structured as follows: The concept of‘democracy’ as ‘government
by the people’ presupposes that voters freely express their own views in order to influence government's decisions; the idea of governments introducing demand-revealing mechanisms to detect people's ‘true’ preferences seems inconsistent with this view. Voters’ disclosure
of their preferences typically is not immediately related to their tax obligations, whose enforcement takes place after approval of the budget, which makes unprofitable any strategic behavior by the voters. From an historic viewpoint, the ‘preference revelation problem’ for public
goods goes back to Wicksell's essay on «A New Principle of Just Taxation» and, through Musgrave, it was conveyed to Samuelson. However, the Wicksellian statement was based on an incorrect interpretation of Mazzola's theory.