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Mike Munger

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Mike Munger is a professor of political science, economics, and public policy at Duke University and a recurring guest on The Bob Zadek Show. Across episodes he argued that political outcomes should be understood through Public Choice theory, the study of how individual officeholders respond to the incentives created by rules rather than to an assumed commitment to the public interest. He is the author of Is Capitalism Sustainable? and Tomorrow 3.0, and he has been a senior fellow of the Independent Institute and a writer for the American Institute for Economic Research. Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019)

On the show

4 appearances, 2015–2023.

Their books discussed on the show

  • Tomorrow 3.0 (2018) — discussed 2017

Campaign finance and party organization

In a 2015 episode, Munger traced party organization to the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 and to Martin Van Buren’s work by 1840 in building parties as organizations. He described the party’s function as turning out partisans—once by wagon and a barrel of whiskey, now by a volunteer knocking on doors—and said this has nothing to do with the abilities of the candidate. His own proposal for campaign finance reform was to ban contributions to candidates entirely and allow contributions only to parties, on the reasoning that voters are really choosing a party, not a candidate. He argued that opponents of money in politics want to eliminate it so that unions and labor organizations, which tend to have more volunteers, gain an advantage, a position he called craven. Who Wants to Buy a Politician? With Mike Munger (2015)

Public Choice theory

Munger described Public Choice as an approach to political science holding that virtue and good action on the part of the state cannot be assumed, so rules must prevent bad action even when officials lack a strong moral sense. He equated crony capitalism with bribery writ large, while distinguishing the two: bribery is illegal, whereas cronyism is not illegal but merely immoral. He located the problem in government making favors legally available, and said democratic governments in particular do this—offering Singapore as an example of a capitalist country that is not a democracy. Public Choice, he said, was devised in the late ’50s and early ’60s as a response to a functional political science, and it treats government not as aggregate institutions but as individual people with their own goals and incentives. He credited the U.S. Constitution with a set of protections for political and economic rights that generally led self-interested politicians to benefit the public interest, while insisting that self-interest and public interest cannot be assumed to be the same. Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019)

The nurse, the police, and the individual

Asked by a caller about a confrontation in Utah between an emergency room nurse and a police detective seeking blood specimens from a badly burned, unconscious patient, Munger said the police had no probable cause and wanted the sample to look for drugs they might use against him. He called the nurse’s refusal to comply a brave act and an example of the correct rule—protection of the individual against the state. He framed the episode as the police acting on behalf of the majority and the nurse on behalf of the individual, and said Public Choice says not to forget about the individual. Bob Zadek added that the nurse was a true public servant and the police were not, and argued that because government carries guns and has cells, those who favor a diminished role for it do so to limit the areas where it can act. Leviathan in Chains: Michael Munger on Public Choice Economics (2017)

The Munger Test and COVID-era policy

In a 2022 episode, Munger described what he called the Munger Test: when someone says the state should be in charge of something, substitute the actual politicians elected in a system dominated by organized private interests such as unions and corporations. He illustrated it with healthcare, asking whether the questioner meant Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi should be in charge, and said that wanting scientists to decide without democratic accountability means favoring fascism. He defined Public Choice as the science of understanding institutions in terms of the incentives they create rather than the motivations attributed to people who work in the system. The episode’s framing concerned the federal government’s COVID-19 response, including rapid testing, bureaucratic inertia, and the exclusion of economic trade-off analysis. Troubleshooting the Constitution (2022)

Across episodes

Public Choice is the through-line of Munger’s appearances, treated in the 2017, 2019, and 2022 episodes. The 2017 discussion presents it as a corrective to romanticized government decision-making and applies it to a concrete confrontation over individual rights; the 2019 episode has Munger and Zadek arguing over whether the pathology should be called crony capitalism or crony governmentism, with Munger locating the problem in government making favors legally available; the 2022 episode extends the framework to the Munger Test and to pandemic policy failures. The episodes show a consistent framework rather than a development in Munger’s position.

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