The Rule of Forces, the Force of Rules

Abstract

All is not well with our politics. Never before in history, perhaps with the exception of ancient Greece, has civil life been politicized to quite the same extent as today. It might appear that society should be better, more fully served by its government than ever before. Yet few would think that this is the case. The principal products of more intrusive, more caring, and more comprehensive politics seem to be disaffection with, and dysfunctionof, government. Where the process has gone furthest, under " real existing socialism, " failure reached staggering dimensions. But whether governments now profess to live bydemocratic or socialist precepts, or by the near-ubiquitous, ungainly crossbred of the two, their relations with the governed are sour. The causes ofthis state ofaffairs are by nowquite widely understood. They have become the commonplace wisdom of political science and political economy. The study of public choice convincingly explains why political decisions are biased toward self-defeating, perverse effects and suboptimal, " negative-sum " outcomes, and why we, as rational players in the political " game, " nevertheless keep asking for more of the same. Given the rules of the game, any other outcome is unlikely as long as enough people behave prudentially, in the sense of maximizing some not wholly implausible combination of material ends. Selfless voters or suicidal politicians could, of course, produce less depressing solutions, but they seem to be a rather rare breed. Failing a wholesale change of hearts, one possible solution to the dilemma suggests itself~change the rules. Hence the rising interest in constitutions as they are, and as they should be. Seeming to be close to a state of despair by the very public choice logic that he coinvented and whose workings no one grasps better than he, James Buchanan (1993: 1) put it pithily: