Public Choice is an approach to political science that holds that one cannot assume virtue or good action on the part of the state, and that rules must therefore be designed to prevent bad action even when people who work for the government lack a strong moral sense. Mike Munger, describing the field on The Bob Zadek Show, said Public Choice was devised in the late ’50s and early ’60s as a response to a then-dominant functional theory in political science — the idea that the President serves us one way and the Congress another. Against that, Public Choice insisted that government is not aggregate institutions but individual people with their own goals and incentives Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019).
The individual as the unit of analysis
Munger characterized Public Choice as the study of the interaction between rules for choosing and the likely behavior of the real human beings who occupy offices, merging psychology, political science and economics. A central concept is aggregation: what are the aggregate consequences of individuals acting according to their self-interest? The market, he noted, is itself an aggregation process in which the baker and the butcher, each pursuing their own interest through the price mechanism, benefit others. Public Choice asks whether the same is true in politics, and Munger’s answer is generally no — not always, but generally — unless good rules are in place. He credited the US Constitution, with its protections for political and economic rights, with producing a set of rules that generally led even self-interested politicians to benefit the public interest, calling it either a work of genius or great good fortune Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019).
Munger’s summary formulation is that one cannot simply assume the self-interest of members of the government and the public interest of citizens are identical. He also stressed that self-interest in office is not per se bad; what makes it bad is its intersection with a system that offers favors to capitalist companies. The alternative — assuming people will be altruistic and act for others — he called the path to destruction. Hence what he described as a paradox in Public Choice: the same analysis that blames government for offering favors also insists that good people cannot be assumed to staff it.
Cronyism, bribery and the legality of favors
In the 2019 episode, Bob Zadek proposed that crony capitalism is bribery writ large — that offering a policeman a bribe to escape a speeding ticket, or bribing a building inspector for a certificate of occupancy, is a criminal act that does not indict an economic system. Munger rejected the equation on a factual ground: bribery is illegal, while cronyism is not illegal but merely immoral. He then agreed with Zadek’s underlying point that the real problem is that government makes these favors legally available, and that democratic governments in particular do so. He offered Singapore as an example of a capitalist country that is not a democracy, and framed the heart of the question as how to prevent democratic governments from making such favors legally available Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019).