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Romantic anti-politics
Politics without romance still has politics
Janet Bufton
December 12, 2024
I have a new piece at EconLog, The Other Kind of Romance in Politics.
Public choice is sometimes called "politics without romance," and people who like public choice emphasize that the flip side of market failure is government failure. People don't become angels when they work in or for the government. They are self-interested, busy, and biased just like everyone else. Some fans of public choice argue that because politics is inherently messy, we should do away with it.
The theory is that if we can set the institutions and incentives, we can take the reins of politics off those areas of life. There are two problems with this theory. First, we don’t get to start from scratch, but from the world we’re in. That means the problems of public choice apply to the process that would have to bring about these changes. The second is related: it ignores that people do things through politics in the first place for a reason.
I argue (and so does Adam Smith) that this idea is just as romantic as the hope that politics can be uniquely informed and benevolent. Maybe they should be benevolent. Maybe we should do away with politics. But they aren't, and we can't.
People are political and they do things for political reasons. Public choice tells us that doing away with politics would also be political and subject to the problems of public choice. We should expect any process by which we would seek to limit or prohibit politics from the top-down to be at least as prone (IMO, more prone) to capture by special interests.
Liberals are stuck with persuasive politics. Public choice can help us understand the problems that come with politics. It can't help us do away with them.
This piece is the first of three already-written pieces on liberals and democracy. Stay tuned for more!
Feature image is from Elliott Stallion on Unsplash.