I don’t understand why a public choice theorist can’t be a leftist. Public choice theory offers a mere description of the political game at work. As far as I can tell it is just common sense that politicians are self-interested and that the rich and well organized will be able to have the most influence.

The left need not dispute the operation of the game to powerfully describe and decry the fact that certain players in the game–the poor–are weak while others, –the rich–are strong. The vision of the leadership of a capitalist state as a kind of committee of capitalists can easily coexist with a theory that describes how this committee of capitalists controls the political system. And the organization of the economy can still be at the structural foundation of it all, providing the conditions for capitalist control. Feel free to replace the term “capitalist” with some sub-group of capitalists who are large in resources but small in number; the economic structure may still explain why they have the resources and concentration to be the dominant players they quite evidently are.

I don’t see the necessary confrontation. Now, I certainly understand why there is a dispute about a political statement asking for a

“framework of limited government where inequalities which reflect superior performance and entrepreneurial ingenuity are welcomed but where those that reflect the power of crony capitalists, crony union bosses and public sector bureaucrats are reduced to a minimum.”

There are a lot of classical liberal and rightist ideas embedded here, of course, but your post does not address why subscribing to public choice theory as an explanation for the behavior of politicians must lead to the classical liberal policy subscriptions you offer.

Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober offer a quick take on the issue here, in an 8 page article: http://bit.ly/vZMR3N

A perhaps key quote:

“We believe instead that sloppiness and rhetorical excess is more nearly the culprit than considered, radical holist convictions. Few, if any, Marxists have ever imagined that functional relations could be established in the absence of micro-level mechanisms or that collective agents could ever be more than aggregations of individual actors. But Marxists (including Marx) have indeed failed rather frequently to trace out the implications of these (eminently sensible) beliefs.”

The concluding paragraph nicely sums up the case for, as you put it, ‘pluralist’ analysis:

“In short, the reductionist programme of methodological individualism fails because science has explanatory projects beyond the explanation of token events. Besides asking why this organism or that firm survived, we also want to explain what various objects and processes have in common. When the properties cited in answer to such questions supervene on properties at the micro-level, the explanations provided by the macro-theory will not, even in principle, be reducible to a micro-account”

That’s hard for classical liberals, because it’s a violation of one of their core axioms. So I don’t expect it to generate a productive discussion. Although if you’d like to, then the starting point is to develop an example of such transparency actually in existence in the modern world.

This is where the real questions are. PCT is simply a symptom of that axiom. If you buy into that axiom, PCT is a fact. If you are unsure, PCT looks like a sleight of hand which simply replaces corruption of government by self-interested businesses and individuals with direct tyranny of company towns, corporations and guilds. All of which there are historical examples of – and all of which contributed to the development of national governments with larger than libertarian scopes.

“And yes, if we do not have states engage in trade policy and more disguised forms of protectionism – then that would reduce the power of big business because it would mean that markets are more competitive.”

This is thinking grounded in older, smaller, economies which produce and exchange relatively simple goods. Beinhocker – Origin of Wealth uses complexity science to give us good grounds to believe that markets run using only “core functions” tend to oligopoly. And that’s not commensurate with more competitive markets.

I suggest you read Karl Polanyi on the history of enclosures – a very left leaning source, to put it mildly, but even he doesn’t buy ‘the peasants were forced off the land argument’. Some peasants were, but it is ludicrous to claim that all property and contract have their origins in such acts.

Marx himself does not think that individual behavior is simply determined by class membership. Maybe some Marxists do, but that is clearly not what is going on in much Marxist theory, let alone the most astoundingly obvious counterexamples to the caricature present in this article – Jon Elster and John Roemer, whose stock and trade were precisely the same game theoretic, methodologically individualist, micro-foundational approaches to power analysis.

On the other hand, PCT seems like an attempt to blame the government for corruption created by capitalism (never understood this), and all states are deemed to be the same.

I wouldn’t think I’d need to state evidence. There is clearly massive cronyism going on at the moment. The history of capitalism offers us a massive exercise in public choice theory and private property – and it doesn’t look good for property, seeing as peasants were forced off their land through game laws and repossessions during the industrial revolution.

If you’ve seen inside job, well, this has happened. Also the MP society was funded by Swiss banks & insurance companies and many of the 1950-60s libertarian movement was closely linked with Rockefeller. Go figure.

Where is the evidence that the ‘neo-liberal’ era has been more corrupt? If we are talking about defence contractors etc then you have a fair point about corruption – but one which has got scarcely anything to do with ‘neo-liberalism’.

With respect to the 19century – with the possible exception of railroads, most of the sectors where ‘big business’ was supposed to dominate with ‘trusts’ and ‘robber barons’ etc were characterised by falling prices and rising output. Big buisness does not/need not equate to non-competitive business – unless it is protected by regulatory restrictions on entry. There is no substitue for reading some Schumpeter on this – and for the evdience on prices in the ‘robber barons’ era Domininc Armentano on ‘Anti-trust and Monopoly’.

Is there really a correlation between large states and capture? Strikes me that the ‘New-Deal’ era was comparatively low on corruption whilst the ‘neoliberal’ era has been high. The period of worst monopoly (afaik), the 1890s, was one with few regulations, and didn’t end until the state became more active under Teddy Roosevelt.

Your idea of making markets ‘more’ competitive takes competition as unquestionably desirable and ignores the theory of the second best – taking away a restriction on pareto optimality may not be desirable if there are still other restrictions.

And ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ aren’t the only classes we can analyse. Classes are more fluid – they can coalesce, change and evolve. I find markets and government is often more restrictive.

“Public? Eh, who’s that? Should they exist?”

“Choice? Eh, what’s that? THAT definitely shouldn’t exist.”

“Theory? OK, we’ve got enough of that. Comrade, let’s go theorise some more.”

Public choice analysis of politics seems to me much more nuanced than a Marxist focus on ‘capital and ‘labour’. It highlights varied coalitions of interests and looks at the transaction costs of organisation facing different sorts of groups – something that neo-Marxist theory doesn’t even consider – it simply assumes that if the members of a group have common interests then somehow automatically they will form an effective political force. To be fair there are some more sophistocated Marxist models which speak about ‘fractions of capital’ conveying that business is not a homgenous entityy – but these models only succeed by effectively dropping the Marxist ‘class analysis’ to become just another form of elite theory.

Firstly, I do not agree that is is superior to marxist class analysis. In right wing thought there are generally two institutions (you might even call them classes): ‘markets’ and ‘governments’. This poses a lot of problems because the two are not necessarily opposing and a social democratic government isn’t the same as a totalitarian state:

http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/governments-markets-and-class-and-libertarians/

Secondly, the right refuse to apply public choice considerations to institutions they take for granted like private property, bankruptcy law and contracts. The history of capitalism offers a massive natural experiment in this, and suffice to say that PCT considerations appear to be most important when considering private property:

http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/libertarianism-versus-public-choice-theory/

Thirdly, the right automatically seem to take it as a given that reducing the size of the state somehow reduces the power of big business. But this is a non-sequitur – no matter the size of the state, it will always have certain unique powers and as such can be harnessed by big business. The theory of the second best tells us that if we accept this reality, the best solution is regulatory apparatus rather than a smaller state:

http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/big-government-and-big-business-do-not-go-hand-in-hand/

Sorry for all the plugs, just thought you might be interested.

“Faced with the argument that politics is a game where self-interested businesses, labour unions and government bureaucrats use the state to enrich themselves at public expense, some left-wingers respond by denying that this is so. ”

Like you, I would also deny this is so, at least I would deny this is a complete account. Left wingers don’t like what they see as a right-wing attitude “government is always and everywhere bad” , and if that attitude originates in a theoretical approach that excludes any possibility of the government “doing good for its own sake” (or something similar), it’s easy to see why they object to the theory.

In some models of political economy that I encounter, there is room for the government to place some weight on social welfare, either directly (altruism, “values”) or indirectly (via wanting to win the votes of people who place some weight on social welfare). Are those models “public choice” or not, would you say?