Public choicethe economist James M. Buchanan Explained, was built on the ‘domestic’ proposition that politicians are just like the rest of us. We call this ‘behavioral symmetry’. They have their own interests and try to satisfy those interests. Furthermore, we can understand the behavior of people in the voting booth and the agency with the same tools that we use to understand their behavior in the supermarket and the boardroom.
When I lived in Memphis, I would regularly see signs for a local congress representative who proudly announced that he is ‘fighting for Memphis’. Fight whoI wondered And for what? The answers were pretty clear. He fought the rest of the country for as much as he could get from the public. As far as I know, politicians generally do not say: “No, we don’t have to spend this money in my district” or “we already have too much; let’s use these sources somewhere else.”
But the most important thing is that it is assuming that people are ‘self -interest’ does not mean that they are bad, selfish or venal. It just means that they have interests that other people may not share, and they do things to better finish them, as they choose to define that. The public choice even applies if people are perfect selfless As long as they disagree about what will do best for the world.
A completely selfless humanitarian may think that education is very under -financed. Another completely selfless humanitarian may think that health care is seriously under -financed. How are they going to vote? How will politicians try to make the favor of them work? Economy does not build on assumptions about the worst kind of selfishness, nor do it endorse them. It rather builds on the simple fact that people disagree about what the good, the true and the beautiful thing is.
Indeed, standard economic models that say that people maximize “maximize consumption” work just as well as we define “consumption” in completely different ways. The “consumption” stems from the fact that resources are consumed While satisfying our wishes. The economic problem does not fundamentally change if we assume that people want to maximize the consumption of food, clothing and shelter of everyone instead of that of themselves. However, economy predicts that people will be less careful with the money of others than those of them, and Experimental proof of my Samford colleague Joy A. Buchanan and Gavin Roberts from Weber State suggests that they are.
No two people can eat the same core of grain, so even if you are completely selfless, there will only be so many that can go around at some point. And people who have different ideas about what is best for the poor – take out the grain now versus plants the grain and have more later – will come across the same conflicts that even too much too much to praise the most selfish among us.
Economy doesn’t tell you something About what your preferences should be. It develops insights based on the conviction that people have different ideas about what is good and the fact that resources are scarce. Economy per se Does not offer theory of good, the true and the good because it is not possible. For that we look at the Humanities and the Natural Sciences. Good places to start the great conversation with free texts Project GutenbergThe online library of freedomand (for audio books) Library. Economy is an analytical framework, no series of statements about what is good and correct. It is a much more powerful analytical framework than we might think in the beginning: even Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer were against scarcity and the resources had to be at their disposal under competitive goals.
When public choice evokes ‘behavioral symmetry’, they do not say that we assume that people are bad. Instead, we just have to assume that people have different ideas about the content of the good, the true and the beautiful, and just as we try to maximize them in the market, we also try to maximize them in the political atmosphere.