Public Choice — What Is Wrong With It?

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I have just chanced on a post containing a critical assessment of the theory of Public Choice. I have not yet read the article. Before I look at it, it might be fun to try to remember what I still know — after all these years — and how I feel about Public Choice today.

Personally, an intriguing exercise since it was my attempt to probe deeper into Public Choice that eventually undermined my confidence in libertarian ideas.

My memories are vague, though.

Actually, I had planned to give a lecture on Public Choice but cancelled the event by the end of 2012, I think, owing to a feeling that I had not enough of a command of the subject. It was a gut feeling that turned out to reveal a growing dissatisfaction with an approach that was too partial to be convincing.

As far as I remember — and I may be wrong — two aspects in particular bothered me about Public Choice (PuCh).

(1) PuCh seemed too eager and to spell out a foregone conclusion: the state is bad.

(2) PuCh seemed to reiterate its belief in the economy, free economic activity (whatever that actually is) as being the legitimate and best force to shape society — as opposed to politics and the state — by couching its analyses of collective decision making in terms of models based on the economic theory preferred by critics of "statism".

It was a prejudiced theory that built its bias into the premises from which it arrived its conclusions.

I suppose, what changed my fundamental view of the matter was the insight that any advanced society, especially one with a high degree of freedom, does require (a lot of) politics and the state, and that the criticism of these makes only sense against the backdrop of appreciating the indispensable positive role that politics and the state play in ensuring a free society.

So, let us see what is in

Steven Pressmann on Public Choice Theory.

Well, Presmann's conclusion is pretty similar to the one I would arrived at:

At bottom, the problem is that public choice begins with an ideological aversion to government and a religious worship of the market. This antigovernment ideology has blinded the entire public choice school. It has become the study of government failure, a set of assertions that governments are too big, and a criticism of all political decision-making. These biases keep public choice advocates from seeing the self-refuting and self-contradictory nature of its arguments. (Pressman 2004: 15–16).

Here is the analysis that I developed upon emancipating myself from Public Choice: The State and Politics.