Tag: Public Choice

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free trade & free markets ideological culture individual achievement too much government

None of Us Are Angels

An old thought: Were we all angels, we wouldn’t need government. Indeed, were we angels, it wouldn’t matter what kind of government we had.

But we’re not angels. We have limitations. Each one of us judges according to our own context-​ridden conception of advantage and value, bound by our differing perspectives and situations. Despite our love for others, that love isn’t infinite and it doesn’t often trump our perceived self-​interests, and it certainly isn’t angelically unlimited.

So we need something very much like government, and that government needs limits.

We need protection from criminals, but we also need protection from those who would protect us, who can — with “government power” — usurp their roles and become criminal themselves.

This is, I repeat, a very old thought.

Yet it seemed new when James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock advanced something very much like it with their book The Calculus of Consent, and in the many great contributions of their separate careers.

James M. Buchanan died this Wednesday. Before his contributions, economists typically assumed that public servants would swoop in like saving angels, setting the world aright according to the latest mathematical models, disinterestedly, without partisan passion or individual error.

Naive in the extreme.

Thanks to Buchanan, economists today occasionally go so far to confess that though markets often “fail,” merely appointing government to “fix” markets can put us in a bigger fix, since government failure is rampant. Government isn’t magic. It doesn’t change our natures for the better merely by being instituted, or by being called “government.” Power still corrupts, and economists now have to deal with that ugly but unavoidable fact.

By showing us that we’re no angels, Buchanan put himself on the side of the angels.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

From Local to Federal

Both the politics of “getting what we want” and the politics of reasonable principles — too often two very different things — rely, ultimately, upon the local, upon voters in actual communities.

In a review of a book with the provocative title How Local Politics Shapes Federal Policy, economist Robert Meiners considers the political economy of America’s most famous dam:

[M]ultiple states wrestled for control of the multi-​state Colorado River and for control of the electricity that might be generated. When there is a pot of gold on the table, the stakes are high. Eastern interests opposed the dam. The rhetoric was about “states’ rights” … but likely had more to do with eastern members of the legislature seeing no benefit, only costs, for themselves. Again, assuming the dam had net benefits, there is no reason the national government needed to be involved in a project that provide benefits to six states at best.

The book’s author tells the story in terms of ideology, but the reviewer counters that it looks, to him, “more like traditional rent-​seeking and logrolling.…” Our folks in Congress “constantly think about how to satisfy local interests at the expense of non-​local taxpayers,” and that’s certainly the current problem.

And here ideology comes back into the picture. If you think that some people’s lives or property should be sacrificed for some other people’s lives and property, then the ultimate result is the mess we have today. Voters have little option but to take a stand and “ideologically” place limits on politicians and their very own selves.

In our limits, our liberty.

Lacking those limits, we’re each others’ hosts and leeches.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

The Latest Mixed-​Economy Mix

Mix special interests, politicians-​on-​the-​make, and expanding bureaucracies and what do you get? E15 gasohol.

Matthew Wald of the New York Times’s “green” blog reports that government ethanol mandates and subsidies make it harder to sell gas efficiently. Converting gas tanks to accommodate the new 15 percent ethyl alcohol/​gas blend, E15, could mean shortages of gas for customers with cars that can’t use it. Moreover, ethanol can damage some engines and gas pumps.

A slew of engine manufacturer associations have sued the EPA to block approval of E15. On the other side of the special-​interest coin, it’s worth noting that it was the ethanol industry that pushed for E15 approval in the first place. 

The approval by itself wouldn’t mean much if buyers and sellers weren’t being forced to use ethanol. New fuel products have been introduced by market participants in the past; with E15, producers and resellers could offer — and consumers buy — the fuel that makes the most economic and technological sense. Instead, the current innovation is an artifact of government policy. You can be sure that the problems caused by imposing ethanol will trigger other political “solutions” that worsen market disruptions, triggering even worse “solutions,” and so forth.

Our “mixed economy” isn’t generally efficient, like free markets tend to be. In a mixed economy, the political winners win big; the rest of us lose.

It’s a mixed bag. The headier mix resulting from freedom? Far better.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.