{"id":34226,"date":"2016-02-06T03:00:24","date_gmt":"2016-02-06T08:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34226"},"modified":"2017-07-14T17:05:39","modified_gmt":"2017-07-14T21:05:39","slug":"the-most-likely-explanation-for-politicians-doing-what-they-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/02\/06\/the-most-likely-explanation-for-politicians-doing-what-they-do\/","title":{"rendered":"The most likely explanation for politicians doing what they do"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his weekly column for USA Today<\/em>, Glenn Reynolds<\/a> distills down the essence of public choice theory:<\/p>\n

The explanation for why politicians don\u2019t do all sorts of reasonable-sounding things usually boils down to \u201cinsufficient opportunities for graft.\u201d And, conversely, the reason why politicians choose to do many of the things that they do is … you guessed it, sufficient <\/em>opportunities for graft.<\/p>\n

That graft may come in the form of bags of cash, or shady real-estate deals, or \u201cconsulting\u201d gigs for a brother-in-law or child, but it may also come in broader terms of political support and even in opportunities for politicians to feel superior or to humiliate their enemies. What all these things have in common, though, is that they\u2019re not about making life better for voters. They\u2019re about making life better for politicians.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t sound much like the traditional view of politics, as embodied in, say, the Schoolhouse Rock<\/em> \u201cI\u2019m Just A Bill<\/a>\u201d video. But it\u2019s a view of politics that explains an awful lot.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s a whole field of economics based on this view, called \u201cPublic Choice Economics.\u201d Nobel prize winning economist James Buchanan referred to public choice economics as \u201cpolitics without romance<\/a>.\u201d Instead of being selfless civil servants motivated solely by the public good, public choice economics assumes that politicians are, like other human beings, heavily influenced by self-interest.<\/p>\n

Public choice economists say that groups don\u2019t make decisions, individuals do. And individuals mostly do what they think will be best for them, not for the \u201cpublic.\u201d Public choices, thus, are like private choices. You pick a car because it\u2019s the best car for you that you can afford. Politicians pick policies because they\u2019re the best policies \u2014 for them \u2014 that they can achieve.<\/p>\n

How do they get away with this? First, most voters are \u201crationally ignorant<\/a>.\u201d That is, they realize that their vote isn\u2019t likely to make much of a difference, so it\u2019s not rational to learn all the ins and outs of policy or of what political leaders are doing. Second, the entire system is designed \u2014 by politicians, naturally \u2014 to make it harder for voters to keep track of what politicians are doing. The people who have a bigger stake in things \u2014 the real estate developers or construction unions \u2014 have an incentive to keep track of things, and to influence them, that ordinary voters don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Can we eliminate this problem? Nope. But we can make it worse, or better. The more the government does and the more decisions that are relegated to bureaucrats, \u201cguidance\u201d and other forms of decisionmaking that are far from the public eye, the more freedom politicians have to pursue their own interest at the expense of the public \u2014 all while, of course, claiming to do just the opposite. Meanwhile, if we do the opposite \u2014 give the government less power and demand more accountability \u2014 politicians can get away with less. But they\u2019ll always get away with as much as they can.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his weekly column for USA Today, Glenn Reynolds distills down the essence of public choice theory: The explanation for why politicians don\u2019t do all sorts of reasonable-sounding things usually boils down to \u201cinsufficient opportunities for graft.\u201d And, conversely, the reason why politicians choose to do many of the things that they do is … […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,53],"tags":[363,727,1144],"class_list":["post-34226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-politics","tag-corruption","tag-cronycapitalism","tag-publicchoicetheory"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8U2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34227,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34226\/revisions\/34227"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}