The Public Choice Challenge

Back in 2016, I shared three videos to explain the theory of “public choice,” which is simply the application of economic principles to understand the self-interested behavior of politicians, bureaucracies, and voters.

Wonky readers will enjoy this fourth video.

I’m citing public choice because the Economist, in a recent article, shared a very depressing chart about the decline of economic growth in the developed world.

As you can see, the average increase in per-capita economic output has dropped by more than 50 percent since the turn of the century.

From a policy perspective, there’s a very simple explanation.

As explained in this fascinating video, the western world enjoyed pro-growth policies of the 1980s and 1990s. You can credit Reagan and Thatcher or you can credit the “Washington Consensus.”

Unfortunately, the opposite has happened in the 21st century. The United States has moved toward statism and the same is true for Japan and most of Western Europe.

So it’s no surprise that growth has slowed in industrialized nations.

And it’s also no surprise (given the magazine’s ideological bent) that the Economist doesn’t really understand what’s been happening. Here are some excerpts from the article.

The long-run rate of growth has dwindled alarmingly, contributing to problems including stagnant living standards and fulminating populists. Between 1980 and 2000, gdp per person grew at an annual rate of 2.25% on average. Since then the pace of growth has sunk to about 1.1%. …The problem is that…reviving growth has slid perilously down politicians’ to-do lists. Their election manifestos are less focused on growth than before… Our analysis of political manifestos shows that the anti-growth sentiment they contain has surged by about 60% since the 1980s. Welfare states have become focused on providing the elderly with pensions and health care… Support for growth-enhancing reforms has withered. …unless they embrace growth, rich democracies will see their economic vitality ebb away and will become weaker on the world stage. Once you start thinking about growth, wrote Robert Lucas, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, “it is hard to think about anything else”. If only governments would take that first step. Moreover, even when politicians say they want growth, they act as if they don’t.

At the risk of being presumptuous, it’s not just a matter of thinking about growth. It’s also understanding the policies that produce growth.

And it’s also understanding how to get those pro-growth policies when politicians have big incentives to do the wrong thing. And this brings us back to public choice.

Let’s now look at some excerpts from a column in the Wall Street Journal by Alberto Mingardi.

‘What would you do if you were the state?” So begins the greatest book of political theory you never read. “The State,” by the Hungarian-born economist Anthony de Jasay, was published in 1985… Jasay argued that particular leaders matter far less than might be supposed and that all governments ultimately seek to maximize their discretionary power. …Politicians differ, sometimes sharply, in ideas and character. But governments—like businesses—have basic structural tendencies. The state always seeks to expand. Redistribution, Jasay maintained, is “addictive.” The moment government starts giving out goodies, the mechanisms undergirding society and the economy change. Corporations and interest groups have a new incentive to work to win the state’s favor. So businesses tend to shift resources and attention from engineers to lawyers, from serving customers to capturing decision makers. “The greater the reach of the state, the greater is the scope for profiting from its commands,” Jasay wrote.

Sadly, I don’t have any easy solutions. Once people learn they can vote themselves money, it is very hard to rescue a society.

But I know that protecting and promoting jurisdictional competition is part of the answer if we want to avoid the problem of “goldfish government.”

P.S. For more public choice-related analysis, I recommend these three videos.

P.P.S. For more about politicians, click here and here.

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What Is “Rent Seeking”?

I’ve written columns about wonky economic concepts such as “deadweight loss” and “public goods.” Today’s topic is “rent seeking,” which is part of “public choice” and is described by Professor Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University.

To elaborate, here’s a video from Professor Michael Munger from Duke University.

The basic message of both videos is that “rent seeking” occurs when interest groups manipulate the political system to obtain undeserved riches.

And there are all sorts of examples of policies that exist solely because interest groups get politicians to tilt the playing field – including trade barriers, farm subsidies, occupational licensing, and bureaucrat salaries.

As pointed out in the videos, these rent-seeking policies reduce prosperity.

But what’s the origin of the term? In the modern era, it’s often associated with Gordon Tullock, one of the founders of public choice school of economic analysis.

But the term actually was coined a couple of hundred years ago by David Ricardo, as explained by Professor David Henderson of the Naval Postgraduate School.

Rent seeking” is one of the most important insights in the last fifty years of economics and, unfortunately, one of the most inappropriately labeled. …People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena. …But why do economists use the term “rent”? Unfortunately, there is no good reason. David Ricardo introduced the term “rent” in economics. It means the payment to a factor of production in excess of what is required to keep that factor in its present use. …What is wrong with rent seeking? Absolutely nothing. I would be rent seeking if I asked for a raise. My employer would then be free to decide if my services are worth it. Even though I am seeking rents by asking for a raise, this is not what economists mean by “rent seeking.” They use the term to describe people’s lobbying of government to give them special privileges. A much better term is “privilege seeking.”

To elaborate, there’s nothing wrong with rent seeking as defined by Ricardo.

But rent seeking is now associated with “privilege seeking,” which obviously is very unsavory.

Ben Casselman of FiveThirtyEight also wrote on rent seeking.

Imagine you run a barbershop and you learn that someone is planning to open a rival business down the street. What do you do? One option, of course, would be to compete the old-fashioned way by offering lower prices or better service. But the old-fashioned way is hard! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could keep your competitor from setting up shop in the first place? There’s evidence that a growing number of businesses in the U.S. are trying to do exactly that. And while that may be good for them, it’s bad for entrepreneurs, workers and the economy as a whole. …Economists call this kind of behavior “rent-seeking,” which is another way of saying “gaming the system to make more money than you’ve earned.” …There is evidence that rent-seeking, in various forms, is becoming more common in the U.S. economy. In a recent paper, economist Dean Baker argued that rent-seeking has driven much of the recent increase in income inequality. And while Baker is a liberal, conservatives are also concerned about rent-seeking, such as land-use restrictions that make it hard to build housing in high-priced coastal cities.

The bottom line is that politicians spend much of their time buying their way to reelection by providing undeserved goodies to various interest groups. You can call it rent seeking. You can call it corruption. Or you can call it politics.

But one obvious takeaway is that shrinking the size and scope of government is the only effective way of reducing rent seeking.

P.S. If you’re in the mood for more economic wonkiness, here are several videos that explain “Austrian economics” and two videos that explain the price system.

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The Economics of Unholy Alliances: Bootleggers and Baptists

The class-warfare crowd and tax lawyers don’t have a lot in common, but both groups oppose the flat tax. An even stranger unholy alliance involves the War on Drugs, which has the support of both the activists who despise drugs and the criminals who get rich selling drugs in the black market.

Professor Bruce Yandle explains this “bootleggers and baptists” phenomenon.

Professor Yandle, who is at Clemson University, even has a book on this topic, co-authored with Professor Adam Smith of Johnson & Wales University (no relation to has namesake, the author of The Wealth of Nations, at least to my knowledge).

One message of the book is that politicians often have noble-sounding reasons for the things they do, but closer investigation usually reveals that interest groups are the real beneficiaries.

In other words, the phenomenon of bootleggers and baptists is run-of-the-mill government corruption, an example of “public choice” in action.

What’s motivated me to write about this issue is a story from Petaluma, California. As reported by Axios, the city wants to ban new gas stations for the supposed purpose of fighting climate change.

Petaluma, California, has voted to outlaw new gas stations, the first of what climate activists hope will be numerous cities and counties to do so. …Expect more such ordinances, particularly in liberal towns. Grassroots groups are popping up with the mission of spreading this type of ban… “This is not a ban on the existing gas stations, which are providing all the gas currently needed,” Matt Krogh, U.S. oil and gas campaign director for the environmental group Stand.earth, tells Axios. …The city councilor who introduced the measure, D’Lynda Fischer, is quoted as saying: “The goal here is to move away from fossil fuels…” A Seattle-based group called Coltura, which aims to phase out gasoline altogether, is working on the issue locally and nationally. …In the 2020s, this is not the time to be expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” Woody Hastings, co-coordinator of CONGAS, tells Axios. …He says his group has succeeded in blocking three applications to build new stations in Sonoma.

Given my views of climate activists, I don’t want to say this effort is noble. But I’m sure the average person might say this is a well-meaning crusade.

But let’s take a jaundiced look at what’s really happening. At the risk of being the skunk at a garden party, I’ll state that what’s happening, either in the town of Petaluma or in Sonoma County, will have zero impact on the climate.

But it could have a big impact on the owners of existing gas stations. They now have no reason to worry about new competitors. Which makes their gas stations more valuable and gives them greater leeway to raise prices.

Mr. Hastings, the climate activist quoted in the above excerpt, even acknowledged in the story that a ban would help existing stations.

“The problem with allowing new gas stations is we don’t really need them and they’re putting existing gas stations out of business.”

The bottom line is that consumers will lose because the government is limiting competition.

Which is good news for the bootleggers (the owners of gas stations that already exist) and the baptists (the green activists who feel good because they think they’re saving the planet).

P.S. There are countless examples of bootleggers and baptists working together in Washington.

• Big business and big labor supporting higher minimum wages (to screw over small businesses and low-skilled workers).
• Wall Street firms and anti-free market groups supporting Dodd-Frank (to raise compliance costs for small firms).
• Environmental groups and farmers supporting ethanol (a back-door handout for big agri-businesses).
• Drug makers and health insurance companies endorsing Obamacare (higher prices enabled by third-party payer)

The moral of the story is that it’s almost always insiders who benefit when politicians do something.

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Milton Friedman on Spending

I identified four heroes from the “Battle of Ideas” video I shared in late August – Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. Here’s one of those heroes, Milton Friedman, explaining what’s needed to control big government.

For all intents and purposes, Friedman is pointing out that there’s a “public choice” incentive for government to expand.

To counteract that disturbing trend, he explains that we need a high level of “societal capital.” In other words, we need a self-reliant and ethical populace – i.e., people who realize it’s wrong to use the coercive power of government to take from others.

Sadly, I don’t think that’s an accurate description of today’s United States.

So how, then, can we get control of government?

Since politicians are unlikely to control spending in the short run (their time horizon is always the next election), our best hope is to get them to agree to a rule that constrains what can happen in the future.

I’ve repeatedly argued in favor of a spending cap. Such a policy has a proven track record, and is far more effective than a balanced budget requirement.

That’s what should happen.

Now let’s focus on what shouldn’t happen. As Milton Friedman famously observed in 2001, tax increases are never the solution because politicians will simply spend any additional revenue (and the tax increases also will hurt the economy and cause Laffer-Curve feedback effects).

P.S. You can enjoy more wisdom from Friedman on issues such as the role of the firm, spending other people’s money, and so-called Robber Barons.

P.P.S. On the issue of spending other people’s money, here’s an example of Jay Leno channeling Friedman.

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How Much Democracy Is Desirable?

Like many supporters of individual liberty, I’m an anti-majoritarian. I don’t want my freedom to be at the mercy of 51 percent of the population. For all intents and purposes, I want the Supreme Court to protect the country from democracy.

So, based solely on the title, I was automatically disposed to like 10% Less Democracy, a book authored by Professor Garett Jones of George Mason University.

But Garett’s book isn’t a manifesto about the American Constitution and its (sadly neglected) provisions designed to protect economic liberty. It doesn’t even mention my favorite part, Article 1, Section 8, which lists the few and limited powers of the central government.

Instead, his book focuses on a different topic. He’s arguing that we will get better outcomes if ordinary people have less influence on public policy.

And he’s not subtle about that point. The full title of his book is 10% Less Democracy: Why you should trust elites a little more and the masses a little less.

All of a sudden, I was less instinctively favorable to the book.

Simply stated, there are too many cases where the elite tends to be on the wrong side.

• They support the IMF.
• They oppose the Second Amendment.
• They favored TARP.
• They like value-added taxes.

When someone says we should trust the elite, I envision people like Mitt Romney and Michael Bloomberg deciding everything from how much tax we pay to what food we’re allowed to eat.

To be sure, people like that would produce a much better outcome when compared to having a lunatic like Bernie Sanders in charge of the government, but I’d like to have a government filled with people who are more likely to leave me alone, such as Calvin Coolidge, Grover Cleveland, and Ronald Reagan.

But you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. And that means you shouldn’t judge it by its subtitle, either.

So I took the bold step of actually reading the book (unlike, for instance, when I wrote about Nancy MacLean’s smear job against James Buchanan).

And I liked it. A lot. It’s well written, avoids needless jargon (you don’t need to be a trained economist to understand his points), and touches on many important issues.

And Garett does a great job of dispassionately providing evidence. So even when he made points that rubbed me the wrong way, I was forced to wonder whether I was thinking with my heart rather than my head.

Here’s a small sampling of why you should buy – and read – the book.

In Chapter 1, you’ll learn that there’s very little evidence that democracies produce better economic results, but you will learn that they’re less likely to produce famine and mass killings.

In Chapter 2, you’ll learn how Congress is a “favor factory” and read Garett’s hypothesis that politicians will be more likely to support good policies such as free trade if they have longer terms.

In Chapter 3, you’ll learn that independent central banks work better (yes, feel free to criticize the Federal Reserve, but nations such as Argentina show it’s always possible to get worse outcomes).

In Chapter 4, you’ll learn from state evidence that independent judges also generate better results, at least when compared to judges that are directly elected by voters.

In Chapter 5, you’ll learn that not all voters are created equal.

In Chapter 6, you’ll learn that public policy might improve if bondholders had a bigger say in government policy, an insight from Alexander Hamilton.

In Chapter 7, you’ll learn some “public choice” insights about getting things done in Washington (whether that’s a good idea is an entirely different discussion).

In Chapter 8, you’ll learn that joining the anti-democratic European Union is the right choice for some nations, but also that the United Kingdom had good reasons for Brexit.

In Chapter 9, you’ll learn how Singapore is a huge success story with “50% less democracy.”

Garett concludes with some analysis on how to get the right amount of democracy.

His basic hypothesis is that we have too much input from the masses and he even put together his own version of the Laffer Curve to show that we would get better outcomes with less democracy.

By the way, I can’t resist pointing out that you want to be at the peak of Garett’s Laffer Curve.

With the original Laffer Curve, however, that’s not the right outcome.

P.S. Garett’s book does suffer from one sin of omission. I would have appreciated a chapter on the anomaly of Switzerland. It’s a very successful, very well-governed nation, yet it has an extremely high level of not just democracy, but direct democracy. Voters directly decide all sorts of major policy issues.

Is Switzerland an exception to the rule? Are Swiss people simply more rational than their neighbors? Does the country’s federalism-based model lead to better choices? It would be fascinating to get Garett’s insights.

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A Taxpayer-Funded Smear Job of Professor James Buchanan

My daily columns usually revolve around public policy issues such as tax reform, entitlements, and corrupt government. And while sometimes get a bit agitated about bad things in Washington, it’s because I’m a curmudgeonly libertarian, not because of some personal stake (other than being an oppressed taxpayer).

But sometimes there is a personal connection, like when I responded to the Washington Post‘s front-page attack on the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a group that I founded.

Today, I’m writing because of a different kind of personal connection. I got my Ph.D. from George Mason University, and one of the great parts of that experience was taking a couple of classes from James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize shortly after I arrived on campus.

Professor Buchanan was more than an economist. He was also a social philosopher. He thought big thoughts and cared deeply about a free society. I didn’t have the opportunity to develop a close relationship with Buchanan, but I felt privileged to take his classes and also to hear his insights in various conferences and colloquia during my years on campus.

I mention this connection because a Duke professor, Nancy MacLean, has just written a book that takes some very cheap shots at Buchanan. Heck, the title makes clear her agenda: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Subtle, huh?

I’ll openly admit at this point I have not read the book. I would, if somebody gave me a free copy, but I have no desire to potentially generate royalties for Ms. MacLean by spending money for a copy.

But a review in the Atlantic is a good example of why I think the book merits condemnation.

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains is part of a new wave of historiography that has been examining the southern roots of modern conservatism. …Her book includes familiar villains—principally the Koch brothers—and devotes many pages to think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, whose ideological programs are hardly a secret. But what sets Democracy in Chains apart is that it begins in the South, and emphasizes a genuinely original and very influential political thinker, the economist James M. Buchanan. …she has dug deep into her material—not just Buchanan’s voluminous, unsorted papers, but other archives, too—and she has made powerful and disturbing use of it all.

And what did she find that was so disturbing?

Brace yourself, because the giant scandal that she uncovered is that – gasp! – Buchanan was a classical liberal who believed in small government. And he consorted with other intellectuals with similar views.

The behind-the-scenes days and works of Buchanan show how much deliberation and persistence—in the face of formidable opposition—underlie the antigoverning politics ascendant today. …the University of Chicago, where Buchanan received his doctorate in 1948. During the postwar years, other faculty included Hayek and Friedman, who were shaping a new pro-market economics, part of a growing backlash against the policies of the New Deal. Hayek initiated Buchanan into the Mont Pelerin Society, the select group of intellectuals who convened periodically to talk and plot libertarian doctrine.

But here’s the disgusting part of the book, at least if the review accurately reflects the contents. MacLean does her best to imply that Buchanan somehow must be a racist. In part because of where he was born and raised.

Buchanan owed his tenacity to blood and soil and upbringing. Born in 1919 on a family farm in Tennessee.

By the way, the term “blood and soil” has very odious connotations. I don’t know if that term is used in the book. If not, then the reviewer, Sam Tanenhaus, is the one who deserves condemnation.

The book also implies that Buchanan is racist because he tried to take advantage of Virginia’s desegregation battle to push for school choice.

Buchanan played a part, MacLean writes, by teaming up with another new University of Virginia hire, G. Warren Nutter (who was later a close adviser to Barry Goldwater), on an influential paper. In it they argued that the crux of the desegregation problem was that “state run” schools had become a “monopoly,” which could be broken by privatization. If authorities sold off school buildings and equipment, and limited their own involvement in education to setting minimum standards, then all different kinds of schools might blossom.

And why is this supposed to be racist?

Because some rednecks might choose schools without black people.

…these schemes were…gave ammunition to southern policy makers looking to mount the nonracial case for maintaining Jim Crow in a new form. Friedman himself left race completely out of it. Buchanan did too at first, telling skeptical colleagues in the North that the “transcendent issue” had nothing to do with race; it came down to the question of “whether the federal government shall dictate the solutions.” But in their paper (initially a document submitted to a Virginia education commission and soon published in a Richmond newspaper), Buchanan and Nutter were more direct, stating their belief that “every individual should be free to associate with persons of his own choosing”.

In other words, we’re supposed to believe that Buchanan was racist simply because some people – in a system based on freedom of choice – might make race-based decisions.

But that’s like saying advocates of free speech are racist because some people will make racist statements or write racist books.

For what it’s worth, I wish the racist Democrats who controlled the state in the 1950s had adopted school choice. After all, the ultimate effect of their actions would have been very beneficial for black students.

That would have been delicious irony.

But I’m digressing. I wonder whether Tannenhaus is the one who is guilty of smearing rather than the author. His review, after all, notes that MacLean apparently didn’t think Buchanan’s work was motivated by race.

…race, MacLean acknowledges, was not ultimately a major issue for Buchanan.

The review then shifts to Buchanan’s main intellectual legacy, the “public choice” school of economics (first formally proposed in Calculus of Consent, co-authored with Gordon Tullock).

Governments, they argued, were being assessed in the wrong way. The error was a legacy of New Deal thinking, which glorified elected officials and career bureaucrats as disinterested servants of the public good, despite the obvious coercive effects of the programs they put into place. Why not instead see politicians and government administrators as self-interested players in the marketplace, trying to “maximize their utility”—that is, win the next election or enlarge their department’s budget? This idea turned the whole notion of a beneficent government, and of programs and policies designed more or less selflessly, into a kind of fairy tale expertly woven by politicians and their flacks. Not that politicians were evil. They were looking out for themselves, as most of us do. The difference was in the damage they did.

Sounds quite reasonable to me. And Tanenhaus even grants that the theory has some merit.

You didn’t have to accept Buchanan’s ideology to see that he had a point about the growth of government-centered clientelism—“dependency,” in the term used by a new wave of neoconservatives such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

But he then is very critical of Buchanan’s support for rules to constrain government.

The enemy was the public itself, expressed through the tyranny of majority rule… It wasn’t enough to elect true-believing politicians. The rules of government needed to be rewritten.

Actually, the rules don’t need “to be rewritten.” The United States already has a Constitution that was explicitly designed to protect against majoritarianism. The problem is justices who put politics first and the Constitution second.

Now let’s address a second part of the book that irked me. The author links Buchanan to Chile, which to a leftist is an automatic sign of guilt.

…in Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. A vogue for public choice had swept Pinochet’s administration. Buchanan’s books were translated, and some of his acolytes helped restructure Chile’s economy. Labor unions were banned, and social security and health care were both privatized. On a week-long visit in 1980, Buchanan gave formal lectures to “top representatives of a governing elite that melded the military and the corporate world,” MacLean reports, and he dispensed counsel in private conversations.

There’s no evidence, from what I can tell, that Buchanan endorsed or supported Pinochet’s bad record on human rights. Instead, he’s simply “guilty” of encouraging a bad government to adopt good policy.

But if providing policy advice supposedly implies support for everything a government does, then I’m guilty of supporting Russia, China, and many other regimes. Needless to say, that’s nonsense.

In any event, here’s the part that doesn’t make sense.

Buchanan said very little about his part in assisting Chile’s reformers—and he said very little, too, when the country’s economy cratered, and Pinochet at last fired the Buchananites.

The economy “cratered”? Really?

Chile has been a star performer since the market reforms on the 1980s.

Maybe MacLean and/or Tanenhaus are geographically illiterate and meant Venezuela?

Because only a blind ideologue could deny the tremendous success of Chile’s economy.

Now let’s look at some excerpts from a review in Slate written by Rebecca Onion. It starts with a major smear.

When the Supreme Court decided, in the 1954 case of Brown vs. Board of Education, that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Tennessee-born economist James McGill Buchanan was horrified.

Again, I haven’t read the book. But I have to imagine that if the author had the slightest bit of evidence, one of the reviews would have shared it. Instead, we get nothing but assertions. Is MacLean the one who smears Buchanan, or are the reviewers guilty of asserting that the Nobel Laureate is somehow racist because he doesn’t support a big welfare state?

I don’t know, but someone is being grossly unfair.

For what it’s worth, I never caught even the slightest whiff of racism from Buchanan during my time at GMU. Which stands to reason since libertarians and classical liberals are all about individual rights and view racism as a form of collectivism.

But it is true that Buchanan was not a fan of big government.

…the libertarian thinker found comfortable homes at a series of research universities and spent his time articulating a new grand vision of American society, a country in which government would be close to nonexistent, and would have no obligation to provide education—or health care, or old-age support, or food, or housing—to anyone.

Ms. Onion’s review includes a Q&A section with the author.

Here’s some of what MacLean said, starting with a description of public choice.

He had a very different personality from somebody like Milton Friedman. …His books were really written for other scholars, not so much the general public. …His basic idea is that people had been wrong to think of political actors as concerned with the common good or the public interest, when in fact, according to Buchanan’s way of looking at things, everyone should be understood as a self-interested actor seeking their own advantage.

She then asserts – with no evidence – that public choice isn’t an accurate way of describing the world.

…there were other people who actually tested that empirically and found out that it didn’t hold, so it’s really a caricature of the political process, but it’s a caricature that’s become very, very widespread right now.

This strikes me as nonsense. Anybody who works in DC has a very jaundiced view of the political process.

We see public choice in action every day.

She also criticizes Buchanan’s work in Chile.

…he went from writing that to advising the Pinochet junta in Chile on how to craft their constitution. This document was later called a “constitution of locks and bolts,” [and was designed] to make it so that the majority couldn’t make its will felt in the political system, unless it was a huge supermajority. So yeah, it’s pretty dark.

Well, if that’s a “dark” approach, then America’s Founders were very dark as well.

MacLean also links Buchanan to Cato.

Buchanan helped with the founding of the Cato Institute and with various other intellectual enterprises that were close to Charles Koch’s heart, like this thing called the Institute for Humane Studies.

She then plays armchair psychologist and tries to guess Buchanan’s real motivation. After all, surely he couldn’t have been motivated by a belief in liberty and limited government?

I think it’s also much more about this psychology of threatened domination. People who believe it will harm their liberty for other people to have full citizenship and be able to work together to govern society. And that somehow that goes much deeper than money to me. It’s hard to find the right words for it, but it’s a whole way of being in the world and seeing others. Assuming one’s right to dominate.

In other words, if you don’t want a tax-and-transfer welfare state, that means you want to dominate others. Amazing bit of mind reading.

Or perhaps a bit of projection.

It’s folks on the left, after all, who concoct strange theories involving Koch, Cato, and other parts of a vast libertarian conspiracy.

If we really had that much power, I can assure you that government would be much smaller than it is today.

Here’s what MacLean says about Buchanan being part of the supposedly sinister Koch network.

The most important thing I want readers to take from this book is an understanding that the Koch network and all of these people are doing what they’re doing because they understand that their ideas make them a permanent minority. They cannot win if they are honest about what they’re doing.

Let’s close by sharing some very bizarre passages from a review by Genevieve Valentine for NPR.

…economist James Buchanan — an early herald of libertarianism — began to cultivate a group of like-minded thinkers with the goal of changing government. This ideology eventually reached the billionaire Charles Koch… This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream…is at the heart of Democracy in Chains.

Here’s Ms. Valentine’s contribution to gutter politics.

…this isn’t the first time Nancy MacLean has investigated the dark side of the American conservative movement (she also wrote Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan).

A collectivist-minded group like the KKK was part of the conservative movement? Is there any evidence for that slanderous assertion?

Of course not.

And besides, what would that have to do with libertarianism?

But Ms. Valentine is just warming up. Did you know that libertarians somehow are at fault for the incompetence of Flint, MI, which is governed by Democrats?

As MacLean lays out in their own words, these men developed a strategy of misinformation and lying about outcomes until they had enough power that the public couldn’t retaliate against policies libertarians knew were destructive. (Look no further than Flint, MacLean says, where the Koch-funded Mackinac Center was behind policies that led to the water crisis.)

And she repeats the crazy assertion that Chile’s shift to free markets backfired, even though the economy boomed and subsequent governments dominated by Social Democrats have left the reforms in place.

By the time we reach Buchanan’s role in the rise of Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet (which backfired so badly on the people of Chile that Buchanan remained silent about it for the rest of his life), that’s all you need to know about who Buchanan was.

It’s also remarkable that she wants us to think there’s something sinister about Buchanan remaining “silent” about his role in Chile.

This is a man who gave dozens of speeches every year in countries all over the world, while also producing all sorts of books and scholarly articles. Does she really think he was supposed to spend his time reminiscing about a couple of speeches and meetings back in 1980?

Here’s the bottom line. Professor Buchanan is “guilty” of believing in individual liberty and favoring constraints on government. It’s perfectly fair for folks on the left to object to those views (as well as the views of other Nobel Laureates with similar outlooks).

But when they want to ascribe base motives for his views, without the slightest shred of evidence, that’s crossing the line.

P.S. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Ms. MacLean’s book was subsidized by taxpayers. Isn’t that wonderful. Not only do we subsidize international bureaucracies that push statism, we taxpayers also subsidize hit jobs on scholars who object to statism.

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John Stossel, Paul Krugman, and the Washington Swamp

If you ask what worries me about the incoming Trump Administration, I’ll immediately point to a bunch of policy issues.

• Will Trump be too timid to deal with the huge entitlement problem?
• Will Trump do a business-as-usual pork-filled infrastructure deal?
• Will Trump’s tax cut be feasible without concomitant spending discipline?

Others, though, are more focused on whether Trump’s business empire will distort decisions in the White House.

Here’s what Paul Krugman recently wrote about Trump and potential corruption.

…he’s already giving us an object lesson in what real conflicts of interest look like, as authoritarian governments around the world shower favors on his business empire. Of course, Donald Trump could be rejecting these favors and separating himself and his family from his hotels and so on. But he isn’t. In fact, he’s openly using his position to drum up business. …The question you need to ask is why this matters. …America is a very rich country, whose government spends more than $4 trillion a year, so even large-scale looting amounts to rounding error. What’s important is not the money that sticks to the fingers of the inner circle, but what they do to get that money, and the bad policy that results. …what’s truly scary is the potential impact of corruption on foreign policy. …someplace like Vladimir Putin’s Russia can easily funnel vast sums to the man at the top… So how bad will the effects of Trump-era corruption be? The best guess is, worse than you can possibly imagine.

I’m tempted to ask why Krugman wasn’t similarly worried about corruption over the past eight years. Was he fretting about Solyndra-type scams? About the pay-to-play antics at the Clinton Foundation? About Operation Choke Point and arbitrary denial of financial services to law-abiding citizens?

He seems to think that the problem of malfeasance only exists when his team isn’t in power. But that’s totally backwards. As I wrote back in 2010, people should be especially concerned and vigilant when their party holds power. It’s not just common sense. It should be a moral obligation.

But even if Krugman is a hypocrite, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. At least not in this case. He is absolutely on the mark when he frets about the “incentives” for massive looting by Trump and his allies.

But what frustrates me is that he doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion, which is that the incentive to loot mostly exists because there’s an ability to loot. And the ability to loot mostly exists because the federal government is so big and has so much power.

And as Lord Acton famously warned, power is very tempting and very corrupting.

Which is why I’m hoping that Krugman will read John Stossel’s new column for Reason. In the piece, John correctly points out that the only way to “drain the swamp” is to shrink the size and scope of government.

…today’s complex government allows the politically connected to corrupt… most everything. …In the swamp, no one but taxpayers pays for their mistakes. …it’s well worth it for companies to invest in lobbyists and fixers who dive into the swamp to extract subsidies.For taxpayers? Not so much. While the benefits to lobbyists are concentrated, taxpayer costs are diffuse. …Draining the swamp would mean not just taking freebies away from corporations—or needy citizens—but eliminating complex handouts like Obamacare. Candidate Trump said he would repeal Obamacare. Will he? He’s already backed off of that promise, saying he likes two parts of the law—the most expensive parts.

As you can see, Stossel understands “public choice” and recognizes that making government smaller is the only sure-fire way of reducing public corruption.

Which is music to my ears, for obvious reasons.

By the way, the same problem exists in many other countries and this connects to the controversies about Trump and his business dealings. Many of the stories about potential misbehavior during a Trump Administration focus on whether the President will adjust American policy in exchange for permits and other favors from foreign governments.

But that temptation wouldn’t exist if entrepreneurs didn’t need to get permission from bureaucrats before building things such as hotels and golf courses. In other words, if more nations copied Singapore and New Zealand, there wouldn’t be much reason to worry whether the new president was willing to swap policy for permits.

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