The public-choice school of economics, developed since the mid-20th century, assumes that an individual who moves from the private sector to the public sector, whether as a government bureaucrat or a politician, remains the same mostly self-interested individual. He does not metamorphose into an altruist angel. This view of “politics without romance” (to quote James Buchanan) led to new and fruitful explanations of government actions.
We should expect that a president (or another top ruler) will, if not effectively constrained by institutions (constitution, laws, and other sets of established rules), redefine his own self-interest as the “public interest.” Even if he wanted to do good for all citizens, he would typically be unable to do so because not all of them have the same preferences about what is good for them; so he better promote the public interest that is good for him.
Viewed in this perspective, the actions of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump are not surprising. Each of them has been able to use the incredible power accumulated in the presidency for the pursuit of his own interest–for example, to be adulated by his supporters and 51% of the voters, to exercise power over people and show it, and (if age permits) to be reelected. Other motivations may play a role, but it is unrealistic and dangerous to ignore self-interest.
If you are a Democrat and hated Trump, you should realize that he is, some idiosyncracies aside, the sort of ruler you are likely to suffer under the Leviathan you are calling for. If you are a Republican and hate Biden, you should understand that he is, some idiosyncracies aside, the sort of ruler you are likely to get under the Leviathan you long for. Mutatis mutandis if you are not living in America: that’s what you will get if you don’t already have it. Hence the argument, in “constitutional political economy” (or “constitutions economics”), for constraining government, that is, chaining Leviathan. (The featured image of this post reproduces Gustave Doré’s “The Destruction of Leviathan,” in reference to the original bible monster.)
Chaining Leviathan is a goal that goes back to the source of classical liberalism. For example, David Hume wrote:
In constraining any system of government and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, each man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all of his actions, than private interest.
Similarly, John Stuart Mill:
The very principle of constitutional government requires it to be assumed that political power will be abused to promote the particular purposes of the holder; not because it is always so, but because such is the natural tendency of things, to guard against which is the special use of free institutions.
These two quotes were reproduced by Buchanan in his article on constitutional economics in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.
Buchanan wanted to reconcile “politics as exchange,” that is, the implicit exchange involved in the government’s production of unanimously desired public goods, with the need to constrain its exploitative power. Those who, like Anthony de Jasay, believe that public goods can be produced privately or that it is not possible to chain Leviathan opt instead for anarchy. The existence of a continuum between anarchy and Leviathan may provide some intermediary options, but this opens a Pandora’s box.
READER COMMENTS
Bill
May 16 2021 at 12:28pm
A few years ago, while reader a paper on public choice, I ran across a statement that went something like, “The ratio of saints to sinners is the same in government as it is in the private sector.”
I have searched for the source of this statement, without success. Has anyone reading this blog post seen this statement and know who the author was?
Bill
May 16 2021 at 2:19pm
“while reading,” not “while reader.”
Ahmed Fares
May 16 2021 at 8:52pm
Most searches seem to point to James Buchanan as he uses these words often, but I couldn’t find an exact quote.
e.g. “Nowhere in the Buchanan body of work is it suggested that
politicians are any worse than the lot of us. Rather, his work simply stressed that
politicians are just like the rest of us – neither sinners nor saints, but a bit of both.”
I did however find this quote from Thomas E. Patterson which is similar, and he is described as “Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press”:
“The proportion of saints to sinners among politicians is probably not much different from the proportion in the general population, or among journalists for that matter.” —from a Google Book search and a Salon article.
Bill
May 17 2021 at 9:28am
Thanks, Ahmed
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
May 16 2021 at 3:26pm
Public Choice’s explanations may be fruitful. (I have not seen the fruits put into policy-making practice — except in the Monsieur Jourdain sense — but it could be.) New the explanations are not.
And that people stop being self interested when they go to work for the government is an idea so daft I doubt anyone has ever seriously entertained it.
What we want to do, following Madison, is arrange the incentives so that politicians and civil servants are led as if by an invisible hand to accomplish the public good as they attempt to achieve their own. Of course in this sublunary world, this often does not work very well. 🙂
Bill
May 17 2021 at 9:25am
Thanks
Pierre Lemieux
May 17 2021 at 10:31am
Thomas: On your second paragraph, isn’t it obvious that what Karl Popper called “the spell of Plato” with his philosopher-king dominated political philosophy and political discourse until (more or less) public choice theory? In fact, the spell of Plato is still powerful. The king has simply been replaced by parliament or the bureaucracy or “the Administration.”
On the modernity of public-choice ideas, it is true, of course, that there have been precursors. But Madison, Adam Smith, or Montesquieu were just a good start. Who before public-choice analysis could explain the median-voter theorem (and its limitations), the reasons for rational ignorance and its consequences, the impact of vote-trading or rent-seeking, the exploitation of minorities under permanent majorities, the politics of budget deficits, and so on, and so forth. And these ideas have rather obvious public-policy implications.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
May 19 2021 at 8:32am
Merci, Monsieur Jourdain. 🙂
Jon Murphy
May 17 2021 at 1:34pm
Over the past year that idea has been front and center. How many times did we hear “just listen to the experts!”?
Indeed, the idea still runs rampant. How many people believe that simply voting in the right people (or becoming the right advisors to government) is the solution to public choice problems? How many people argue “if you’re so smart, you should run for office!”
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
May 19 2021 at 8:17am
Non sequitur. Whether one should listen to “experts” (for me the question is which ones?) has nothing to do with whether people in government are or are not more virtuous than people outside.
Pierre Lemieux
May 19 2021 at 10:23am
Thomas: We are talking about government experts (bureaucrats, consultants, subsidized academics) and that is the point. They have their own interests. They should not be viewed as philosopher-kings or as cautions for the philosopher-king. A look at the recent history of public health looks pretty persuasive: see https://reason.org/policy-study/public-health-models-and-related-government-interventions-a-primer/.
Jon Murphy
May 19 2021 at 10:49am
Virtue is only one part of the equation. The point of public choice is that we shouldn’t expect people within government to be fundamentally different than people outside. They will be virtuous and they will be vicious. We must practice analytical egalitarianism and understand they respond to incentives just as everyone else. Thus, we can discuss various institutional arrangements, limitations, etc., just like we do with markets.
Mark Brady
May 16 2021 at 10:17pm
“Buchanan wanted to reconcile “politics as exchange,” that is, the implicit exchange involved in the government’s production of unanimously desired public goods, with the need to constrain its exploitative power.”
How many public goods are “unanimously desired”? That strikes me as a very rigorous standard. In fact, are any public goods “unanimously desired”?
Pierre Lemieux
May 17 2021 at 12:26am
Mark: That’s a good question, which I better treated in my longer Econlib article “Lessons and Challenges in The Limits of Liberty.” Recall that Buchanan’s contractarian approach distinguishes between the “constitutional stage” and the “post-constitutional stage.” At the constitutional stage, “unanimously desired” applies to rules on which unanimity is easier to obtain: for example, I suppose, “the state shall protect us against foreign and domestic tyrants” instead of “establish a permanent army with a Space Force” or “create the DEA.” Moreover, the participants to the social contract can define public goods at that stage, like if they decide that, say, 70% of the land will be public or primary education will be available to all children. In post-constitutional politics, the production of specific public goods must follow the rules of collective decision-making determined at the constitutional stage; these in-period rules don’t require unanimity, which the free-rider problem would prevent. All this allows “politics as exchange” to work as a sort of (political-) market exchange in the post-constitutional stage. In my article, I mention many unsolved problems in this approach.
Jens
May 17 2021 at 3:50am
I think I have two problems with this distinction.
On the one hand, it could be that part of the constitution is a provision or agreement that no part of the constitution can only be changed unanimously. In other words: It could be part of the constitutional stage that the post-constitutional stage always includes the constitutional stage. Why shouldn’t that be possible? Why shouldn’t that be necessary ?
On the other hand, this distinction also seems to me to be a temporal one. Late born and Descendants could say that this distinction discriminates against them. Therefore the connection between the constitutional stage and the post-constitutional stage must always be reciprocal (and thus collapses – by the way, this may also happen when one tries to interpret sentences like “the state shall protect us against foreign and domestic tyrants” in new contexts – How does the state do this ? ).
Sentences like “The state is, at the same time, both us and non-us.” are remarkable with Buchanan. They give him a dialectical side, because of course you are also massively influenced and shaped by that to which you explicitly say “no”, to which you have to say “no”. But one should make sure that one doesn’t just turn these perspective it into a game of paradoxical puzzles of self-contradictions or tautologies that allow to say “yes” or “no” to anything and every situation and not take the risk of ever being wrong.
Pierre Lemieux
May 17 2021 at 10:38am
Jens: In Buchanan, the constitutional stage constrains what the state can do in the post-constitutional stage (of course). He also claims that the social contract (constitutional stage) is continuously renegotiated–which, I agree, is not clear.
robc
May 17 2021 at 8:47am
This type of discussion always reminds me of Peter Suber’s nomic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
Pierre Lemieux
May 17 2021 at 11:35pm
Interesting, thanks.
robc
May 17 2021 at 8:43am
Air.
I actually can’t think of another, but 1 is enough right?
Roger McKinney
May 17 2021 at 3:26pm
Hayek answered that with laws prohibiting fraud, theft, kidnapping, slavery, violence and murder. Those are all the state should get involved in.
Matthias
May 17 2021 at 9:35pm
You and me might both dislike slavery, but historically that position has been far from unanimous.
Jon Murphy
May 17 2021 at 12:00pm
Constitutional Political Economy (which, respect to Gordon Tullock, I think does a better job describing the research program of public choice) provides not only useful insights for government operations, but for markets as well.
First, I agree with Carl Dahlman who argues: “[I]t cannot be shown with purely conceptual analysis that markets do not handle externalities: any such assertion necessitates an assumption that the government can do better. That this assumption is valid cannot be proved analytically, and it follows that market failure is an essentially normative judgement.” Without a theory of government actors, we cannot have a theory of market failure. Constitutional Political Economy provides an useful theory of government.*
Second, by providing us with tools for the analysis of “the reason of rules,” we can better understand people’s behaviors in the marketplace. I’ll give a personal example here: recently on Facebook, a person was extolling the virtues of using a credit card for everyday expenses as opposed to a debit card and simply paying off the balance each month. The individual then went on to proclaim that anyone who did not act this way was “economically ignorant.” Being an economist who does not act this way, I of course took objection. For me, such behavior is potentially very harmful. I know I have compulsive buying tendencies. When I was younger, I tried to take his advice, lost control, and ended up nearly 10k in credit card debt. I defaulted and it’s only vey recently I rebuilt my credit. Knowing this about myself, I shackled myself: my credit card is literally frozen (it’s in a glass of ice). Such a rule forces me to be more temperate. We impose these kinds of rules on ourselves and our institutions all the time. Thus, what appeared to naïve observations as irrational and ignorant behavior was actually perfectly rational and well-informed!
*An interesting implication of the line of reasoning here is that what constitutes a market failure may depend on the institutional arrangement of government. It is theoretically possible that one institutional arrangement of government may mean that Outcome X is a market failure and another institutional arrangement may mean that Outcome X is not a market failure.
Pierre Lemieux
May 17 2021 at 12:16pm
“You will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ears with wax that none of them may hear; but if you like you can listen yourself, for you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening. If you beg and pray the men to unloose you, then they must bind you faster.” — Homer, Odyssey, Book XII
Henri Hein
May 17 2021 at 2:49pm
Excellent quotes. I knew the ideas behind Public Choice predated Buchanan and Tullock, but Mill and Hume are uncannily succinct. I should not be surprised they put their finger on it.
Cobey Williamson
May 18 2021 at 1:13pm
Skip the Box. Choose anarchy.
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