This week we mourn the passing and celebrate the achievements of James M. Buchanan. There have already been many moving and informative tributes. Alex Tabarrok offers a nice summary here. I was fortunate to take one of the last classes Buchanan taught. Even though he was well into his eighties, I found him to be sharp, enthusiastic, and more than a little intimidating to this graduate student.
The observation that malgovernment is a major source of human ills is quite correct, but embracing fatalism about it only exacerbates the problem. What’s needed are efforts to push societies in the direction of taking honor and civic obligation more seriously, not less so.
Consider a problem from normal economics: the tragedy of the commons. Armed with empirical and theoretical reasons to expect that fishermen will over-fish a common pool, we should plan accordingly. We should examine the incentives of fishermen and think of ways to improve or alter these incentives (e.g., assign property rights over the pool, or impose a Pigouvian tax). To my knowledge, few if any economists would council that we ought to spend our time begging fisherman to pretty please stop overfishing. That is likely to be a fool’s errand.
The idea is much the same with public choice. Armed with empirical and theoretical reasons to think that politicians might do bad things, we should plan accordingly by placing some things—such as the establishment of religion—beyond the reach of politicians. I suppose we could ask Congress to pretty please not establish a religion but in my view it is better to make it illegal for them to do so.
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and the other founders of Public Choice and its close-cousin Constitutional Political Economy didn’t stop their analysis after they found that politicians sometimes behave badly. Like James Madison before them, they thought of constructive ways to make political actors behave better, sometimes by placing certain decisions beyond their reach.
There is nothing fatalistic about that.
This entry was posted in Public Choice and tagged Against Public Choice, Alex Tabarrok, Constitutional Political Economy, Gordon Tullock, James Buchanan, make, Matt Yglesias, Public Choice on January 11, 2013 by Matt Mitchell.