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Forwarded from the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]:
From: Taylor, John (JH) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Public Choice theory
Date: Wednesday, November 17, 1999 2:21 AM
>From another list
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Public Choice theory is an application of the methods of economics
to the political process. In the economy, businessmen aim to
maximize profits and consumers the satisfaction from their
purchases. Similarly, in politics, politicians aim to maximize
their votes and citizens (esp. as organized into pressure groups)
their returns from the public fisc. Businessmen may indeed
sometimes profess to serve the public rather than themselves, but
these professions are not taken seriously. Politicians used to get
away with their professions to serve the "public interest," but
gradually, starting with the great classics of Public Choice
theory^, the pretensions of politicians has been undermined, an
undermining that is still going on some forty years later.
^Anthony Downs, _An Economic Theory of Democracy_ (New York:
Harper and Row, 1957), James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock,
_The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional
Democracy_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), and
Mancur Olson, Jr., _The Logic of Collective Action_ (Ha'va'd
UP, 1967).
But forty years is not a long time in the overall scheme of
things, and it will be a while still before the citizens come to
realize that the political process is largely about who extracts
what from whom rather than a system that promotes some higher
"transcendental common bliss," as Buchanan put it. As the
conceptual revolution of Public Choice theory proceeds apace, we
will hear fewer *complaints* that such and such laws fail to serve
the "public interest" and more calls for a fundamental reform in
the constitution to reign in the ability of pressure groups to
extract their rents. The Founding Fathers set up a remarkably good
constitution in 1789 to control pressure groups by restricting the
unlimited rule by simple majorities, but even this system was
corrected by the constitution of the Confederate States of America
in 1861, which added line-item veto, a six-year, one-term limit
for the president, the specific right of secession, and others.
Since that time, the ability of pressure groups to get organized
has grown leaps and bounds, with the result that restoring the
original balance of the constitution of 1789 would require,
perhaps, a five-sixths majority requirement for Federal
legislation.
I could go on at length here, but I just want to point out that
carrying the discussion up to the constitutional level obliterates
discussion of whether a given law serves the public interest,
since the Public Choice perspective is that laws primarily serve
the interests of those who lobby for them rather than the public
at large. It is no use to complain about such laws: as long as the
rules of the game are such that those who want such laws can
muster the required number of votes in the legislatures, the laws,
good or bad, will be enacted. What needs to be done is to change
the rules of the game, the constitution, so that it will be more
difficult for pressure groups to get their way. True, a certain
number of laws that I might want to see enacted may no longer
muster enough votes by politicians, but this is a price I am
willing to pay in order to limit the number of laws I don't want.
I can be impartial when doing my thinking at the constitutional
level, looking at all the laws, the good and the bad.
Buchanan, whose free-market sympathies are
very great, has said that libertarians are just as bankrupt as the
socialists, in that both seek to implement their own version of
the truth rather than to consider a constitution that would serve
the actual wants of those under it. Government is to serve its
citizens not its libertarian or socialist intellectuals. Ethnic interests
are neither good nor bad in themselves,
nor are any strategies they may adopt to serve their interests.
Their doings are merely part of the evolutionary *game*, just as
politicians voting for pork barrels are part of the political
game. Neither are doing anything bad, any more than basketball
players who get penalized for committing "fouls" are bad.
The time will come, then, when ethnnic groups pursuing their evolutionary
interests will seem no more remarkable, or objectionable, than
basketball players committing "fouls," or politicians voting for
pork barrel projects. Once this happens, it will seem no more
remarkable for a Gentile to be "antisemitic" than a Washington
Redskins fan to be "anti-Chicago-Bulls" or a Republican to be
"anti" a Democratic proposal to expand a welfare program. Cries of
"foul!" will make sense only when the rules of the game are
violated, as when athletes take steroids or when politicians take
bribes.
Of course, borderline cases will remain, as when football players
seem to intentionally injure players of the other team, or when
politicians obtain "soft money." At this point, a call for
clarification or amendment of the rules is in order, a translation
upward to the constitutional stage or at least as quasi-
constitutional stage. In sports, the overall object is to make the
game interesting to the fans. I recall that, at one point,
pitchers became so much better than batters in baseball that "too
few" hits were made. The upshot was to make life more difficult
for pitchers (by placing, I believe, the pitcher's mound higher
up.) In a more difficult and ongoing instance, free-agent rules
allow for franchises to bid for individual players. In basketball,
this means that a high-scorer will come to decide, more and more,
to try to score himself than to pass the ball to another member of
his team, who might be in a much better position to score. The
high scorer that faces a prospective bid for his skill will have a
greater incentive to increase his personal score at the expense of
the overall score of his team.
I don't know what the optimal rules allowing for or discouraging
free-agent contracts in sports would be, from the standpoint of
the fans who want both great players and great teams. All I know
is that letting the best players decide the free-agent rules would
not be the best for the fans. With the financing of political
races, short of constitutional amendment, it is the active
players, namely the incumbent Congressmen, who will are trying to
change campaign financing laws. Neither Republicans nor Democrats
are impartial constitutional spectators, and Democrats regularly
charge Republicans with having larger campaign treasuries. More
importantly, the *incumbents* from both parties have an interest
in making challenges difficult. On top of this, the First
Amendment to the Constitution reads to this naive chap that there
should be no restrictions whatever on campaign financing. The real
solution to an excess of special-interest laws is to amend the
Constitution to effect, say, the five-sixths supramajority rule I
mentioned earlier.
we do observe long-term trends
toward increasing complexity, order, organization, and information
(negentropy), each of which comes somewhat at the expense of the
other three. (See, for example, Arthur Peacocke, "Thermodynamics
and Life," _Zygon_ 19 (1984): 395-432.)
The great problem is that
rhetoric has usurped the constitutional dialog, much as
altruistic and egalitarian rhetoric about the poor so dominates
political discourse that any proposal to reduce the welfare state
must be couched in claims that the poor will in fact benefit. All
but a few Objectivist followers of Ayn Rand have internalized
egalitarian norms, in the same way that disputants from the Middle
Ages to long after the Reformation all claimed to be followers of
the true teachings of Jesus.
As Public choice and Kevin McDonalds ideas slowly do sink in,
constitutional discussion can
begin to take place. How should the constitutional rules be
changed? How much higher should the pitcher's mound be placed? How
should free-agent rules be changed? How much more difficult should
it be made to pass laws? Generally, what is the overall governing
end for these constitutional changes of rules? And whose ends are
being served?
For sports, the rule makers are the team owners, who are out to
make money, to be sure, but who must satisfy their consumers,
namely the fans. For politics, it is supposedly the citizens, but
here there is a difference, for governments down through the ages
have been as much exploitative as cooperative. The late Mancur
Olson, Jr., said the big breakthrough came when a roving bandit
discovered that his rake-off over time would increase if he were
to become a *stationary bandit* and ensure that the lands he
plundered were not so devastated that there would be nothing left
to seize when he came back later. (This is the theory behind the
Laffer Curve, by the way.) Bandits formed alliances with priests
that legitimated their predation in the eyes of their subjects,
but over time the subjects themselves started seeing through the
ruses (a process that is also very much still going on) and tried
to turn government from pure conflict to one of cooperation, with
the state confined to protecting rights and producing those public
goods that can only be provided collectively.
the teachers, the doctors, and
the government bureaucrats and trial lawyers that take the greatest cut.
Far greater grounds for
complaint is the suppression of discussion of this issue and those
much larger programs that ethnic interests have historically
supported, such as affirmative action and non-White immigration.
This is true of cultural
changes as well, esp. that of an increasingly sensate culture and
the erosion of family values. I find no particular correlation
across European-derived countries between these kinds of alleged
decadence and different lobbying representation in the population. (Does
anyone remember when Denmark was the pornography capital of the
world?) I say alleged decadence, since those of us, which means
all of us, who have internalized a particular set of norms will
strongly notice when the decline of those norms as they change and
will pay less attention to new norms that replace them. Overall
decadence, as opposed to the *evolution* of norms is much more
difficult to establish. Honor, which led to protracted war, was
replaced, for example, with the capitalist "small virtues" of
honesty, frugality, and diligence. Care should be used, in other
words, when claiming decadence, though it is pretty clear that our
current institutions of government are indeed decadent.
Samuel Francis, calls for the
Middle American Radicals to get organized to control this now-
decadent force, but I don't see how we can overcome what Olson
calls the "internal free-rider problem," the tendency to let the
other guy do the organizing. Besides, the cost features of human
communications mandates bureaucratic organization, for all its
drawbacks. Fortunately, the great cheapening of information and
communications costs through computers means, more and more, that
the guy who makes the decisions can get the information that in
the past only the managers could acquire. We are seeing
outsourcing and delayering in business and, more than most of us
are aware, in government as well. The managerial *mindset* will
take a while to erode--such is culture lag--and again we must be
patient and wait for the old guard to die out.
As a constitutional dialog becomes open when it becomes a matter
of course that any group, will follow their
interests (just as politicians *of course* aim at reelection ahead
of serving the "public interest"), then not only will ethnic
rhetoric become no more believable than that of politicians.Forwarded for info and
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