This is really the only framework to understand governement:
http://www.cis.org.au/policy/spr03/polspr03-2.htm
Public Choice:
Politics Without Romance
James M. Buchanan
Click here for PDF version
Public choice theory demonstrates why looking to government to fix things can often lead to more harm than good, as one of its leading architects and Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan explains
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Nations emerging from World War II, including the Western democracies, were allocating between one-third and one-half of their total product through political institutions rather than through markets. Economists, however, were devoting their efforts almost exclusively to understanding and explaining the market sector. My own modest first entry into the subject matter, in 1949, was little more than a call for those economists who examined taxes and spending to pay some attention to empirical reality, and thus to politics.
Initially, the work of economists in this area raised serious doubts about the political process. Working simultaneously, but independently, Kenneth Arrow and Duncan Black proved that democracy, interpreted as majority rule, could not work to promote any general or public interest. The now-famous 'impossibility theorem', as published in Arrow's book Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), stimulated an extended discussion. What Arrow and Black had in fact done was to discover or rediscover the phenomenon of 'majority cycles', whereby election results rotate in continuous cycles with no equilibrium or stopping point. The suggestion of this analysis was that majoritarian democracy is inherently unstable.
I entered this discussion with a generalised critique of the analysis generated by the Arrow-Black approach. Aren't 'majority cycles' the most desirable outcome of a democratic process? After all, any attainment of political equilibrium via majority rule would amount to the permanent imposition of the majority's will on the outvoted minority. Would not a guaranteed rotation of outcomes be preferable, enabling the members of the minority in one round of voting to come back in subsequent rounds and ascend to majority membership? My concern, then and later, was the prevention of discrimination against minorities rather than stability of political outcomes. The question, from an economist's perspective, was how to obtain a combination of efficiency and justice under majority rule.
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... If the government is empowered to grant monopoly rights or tariff protection to one group, at the expense of the general public or of designated losers, it follows that potential beneficiaries will compete for the prize. And since only one group can be rewarded, the resources invested by other groups-which could have been used to produce valued goods and services-are wasted. Given this basic insight, much of modern politics can be understood as rent-seeking activity. Pork-barrel politics is only the most obvious example. Much of the growth of the bureaucratic or regulatory sector of government can best be explained in terms of the competition between political agents for constituency support through the use of promises of discriminatory transfers of wealth.
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Objections to public choice
There is a familiar criticism of public choice theory to the effect that it is ideologically biased. In comparing and analysing alternative sets of constitutional rules, both those in existence and those that might be introduced prospectively, how does public choice theory, as such, remain neutral in the scientific sense?
Here it is necessary to appreciate the prevailing mindset of social scientists and philosophers at the midpoint of the 20th century when public choice arose. The socialist ideology was pervasive, and was supported by the allegedly neutral research programme called 'theoretical welfare economics', which concentrated on identifying the failures of observed markets to meet idealised standards. In sum, this branch of inquiry offered theories of market failure. But failure in comparison with what? The implicit presumption was always that politicised corrections for market failures would work perfectly. In other words, market failures were set against an idealised politics.
Public choice then came along and provided analyses of the behavior of persons acting politically, whether voters, politicians or bureaucrats. These analyses exposed the essentially false comparisons that were then informing so much of both scientific and public opinion. In a very real sense, public choice became a set of theories of governmental failures, as an offset to the theories of market failures that had previously emerged from theoretical welfare economics. Or, as I put it in the title of a lecture in Vienna in 1978, public choice may be summarised by the three-word description, 'politics without romance'.
The public choice research programme is better seen as a correction of the scientific record than as the introduction of an anti-governmental ideology. Regardless of any ideological bias, exposure to public choice analysis necessarily brings a more critical attitude toward politicised nostrums to alleged socioeconomic problems. Public choice almost literally forces the critic to be pragmatic in comparing alternative constitutional arrangements, disallowing any presumption that bureaucratic corrections for market failures will accomplish the desired objectives.
I'm afraid that he has one interest and one interest only, in becoming President and I don't know how out of touch with people he is becoming. His campaign people say they are are putting him in smaller towns to make him appear that he hasn't lost touch. BIG RED FLAG. Letterman was spot on in his criticism. I still wouldn't vote for McCain because I disagree with basic issues, but the choices are looking less desirable.
I think if it comes to this aspect, it's more the people who were acting like that than the candidate himself. And by people, I mean even the official organization was more serious, and Sarkozy even said something like "we met previously, neither of us was president yet". Honestly I don't find that funny at all, but that's even another discussion about Sarkozy constant borderline behavior. That's how I came to think about "intervention".
