PrintOctober 8, 2013
Obama's Shutdown and Public Choice Theory
More and more, as we Americans trudge through the mire of the Obama years, we have to ask if the president is just plain ignorant. He doesn't seem to have bothered to study the political classics that tell a political leader why he should avoid dividing his people and avoid creating scapegoats.
And now, in an interview on NPR, the president has said that "I shouldn't have to offer anything."
Fortunately, for those people that give no credit to the thought of ancient dead white males, there is the modern settled science of just-dead white males to show the error of the president's ways. I am thinking of public choice theory and in particular the public choice bible The Calculus of Consent written by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.
After hundreds of pages analyzing all the various kinds of government voting systems and the logrolling that each allows, Buchanan and Tullock come to a fairly simple conclusion. The only kind of voting that prevents the loser from getting screwed is...(Read Full Article)
