Public Choice and Politics Without Romance (with Mike Munger)

Speaker 1

Welcome to EconTalk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.

You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econTalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

Today is August 18th, 2026, and my guest is Mike Munger of Duke University. This episode is scheduled to be the 1069th episode of EconTalk, and this will be Mike's 52nd appearance of those 1069, which means our archive after this is published Will contain a year of Munger. You can listen to Mike and me for once a week for a year, or an episode for every card and deck of cards, which has no meaning whatsoever.

he was last here in March of 2026, talking about the UNC Duke basketball experience and how Duke allocates tickets for that game. Our topic for today is a set of essays that Mike has written, and we're going to focus on the one on public choice, which is a technical term that we, hope to explore in our conversation today. Mike, welcome back to EconTalk.

Speaker 2

I, the fifty-second episode, I want to assure you that I feel all the honor that the situation merits.

Speaker 1

You're bowed by it. I can see it's heavy on your shoulders.

Speaker 2

I had no idea.

Speaker 1

well, I'm grateful to you for all the times and knowledge that you've given the program. So Let's, let's talk about public choice. It is a, I would, it's a sub-discipline of economics. It's,

it's a way of looking at the world, and that's what we're going to explore. Get us started.

Speaker 2

I'm now president of the Philadelphia Society, which is, some people say it's the American Mont Pelerin Society.

it, at our meetings, three or four hundred people who are classical liberals and conservatives get together, and many of them would like to reclaim the label of liberalism, because in most of the world, liberalism is a label that attaches to what, what we call classical liberalism, and public choice is a branch of that. But I, I wanted to start out by defining what I think liberalism is, because I think public choice is an offshoot of that.

Liberalism, to me, is a combination of two things, humility and tolerance. Humility is the assumption that I may not be right. Tolerance is the assumption that you may not be wrong. Now, obviously, in our hearts, we don't believe either of those things. Clearly, I am correct and you are mistaken. So when I say it's an assumption, you have to adopt that as a position, and that takes a great deal of self-control.

So I cannot force you, and it doesn't mean that I'm not capable of it. Suppose I am capable of it, I have to forbear. So liberalism requires that I forbear acting as if I know I am correct, or acting as if I know you are incorrect. Now, there are limits on that. There may be things that you could advocate that are, if you push on the hard cases, perhaps we can go around the edges.

But for the most part, I have to believe that I might be mistaken, and therefore I have to persuade you, and I have to listen when you talk, because you might be right. So the tolerance and humility are the two watchwords of liberalism, I want to argue.

Speaker 1

So I want to take us back to a episode we did a few episodes back together that haunts me in a good way, in a good way, not the kind of, wake up in the middle of the night,

sweating kind of way, which is the episode we did on Lord Moulton and the concept of, obedience to the unenforceable, which is to say the norms and practices that they're not part of the legal system, they're part of the culture, and they impose limits on decent people, on how they behave and what they say and what they do. And I would argue that your definition of liberalism, it's probably never existed.

As you said, we, we might just pay lip service to it, we don't really believe it. But having said that, I think at the heart of the founding in the United States was some idea of, of that tolerance and humility combined. It's why we have the checks and balances in America. And as listeners who've been paying attention know, I feel like a lot of those norms have been eroded in the United States over the last 50 years, 25 years, and certainly the last 10 years.

I'm not sure they're coming back. It's much harder, I think, to, create a norm than to live by it. And, so in a certain sense, what you're proposing isn't an ideal, a stance, a,

a, a way of looking at our discourse, yours and mine, or any, any two people's conversations in a, in a political system. At the highest level and at the, in the most ideal way, an understanding that those limitations, those norms get stretched, as you said, and they're going to get tested, and at times there'll be issues where we're going to have a great deal of trouble, living by those norms.

But if you don't live by them ever, you, you have a very different system, I would suspect, than if you try to live by them most of the time.

Speaker 2

And so I, I think your, the, the connection with Lord Moulton is right. If people may or may not remember, I suggest that they listen to that podcast, after they finish listening to this one, of course. the thing about that Lord Moulton said is that there are a bunch of things that are wrong that are not illegal, and we have to do that because people have to be capable of self-control.

And Patrick Deneen, in his book, a professor at Notre Dame, in his 2018, Princeton University Press book, The Failure of Liberalism, said that he thinks liberalism is failing because it has come to the view that anything that is not illegal is moral. Now, I think he's mistaken about that as a matter of definition, but I think I am uncomfortably close to agreeing with him that there is that potential, because it is possible to say, well, since it's not illegal, you're allowed to do it.

But you still shouldn't do it. And Moulton's example of debate, a free and open debate in the parliament, I thought was good. So we've got to have a rule that you can't talk for more than a minute, and if we all vote, we can stop you from talking. But sometimes someone may want to take a position, and I'll learn something from it, I'll be persuaded.

And so it's better just to have it as a norm than as a rule. So to the extent that liberalism has allowed itself to define anything that is legal as moral, it's gotten rid of all of Lord Moulton's middle nation, the middle nation that he talked about. And so, well, we could obviously spend an hour talking about liberalism. I do suggest that if you get a chance, listen to the Lord Moulton episode.

So the, in the United States, the idea, the definition of liberalism has become vexed. In, in most of the world, liberalism is an emphasis on individualism, individual rights, not necessarily ethical individualism, but the, the rights of individuals to act as they see fit, and an emphasis on emergent rather than imposed norms. And so,

in the United States, liberalism has come to mean more like progressivism. So progressivism between 1890 and 1920 focused on the idea that people were not actually capable of acting as individuals because they lived in the context of a matrix of forces that were far beyond their capacity, to participate. And so the government needed to put a thumb on the scale to equalize the rights and abilities of individuals compared to these giant shadowy corporations and trusts.

And so liberalism in the United States took that direction. I would say, and this is probably not quite right, but I would say what Americans call classical liberalism is what in the rest of the world is just called liberalism. classical liberalism is mostly in the US a focus on the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, but also Edmund Burke, so a kind of classic conservatism with a concern for limited, limited government and individual rights, but also with a sense of individual responsibility.

So classical liberalism really is a kind of civic republicanism that relies on individuals to create their own meaning and to accept the responsibility for creating their own meaning. Whereas liberalism in the United States has been the idea that we need other institutions, and the government in particular, to help us create communities of meaning.

And so the, I, I'm sure that people could quarrel with parts of that definition, but the main thing is that in most of the world, if I'm in South America, if I'm in Europe, and I say someone is a liberal, then they are what in the United States I would call a classical liberal.

Speaker 1

Beautiful. Carry on.

Speaker 2

There's a branch of classical liberalism, although the Venn diagram, it's not entirely contained because there are parts of it that are not part of classical liberalism,

that are in the subdiscipline called public choice. And public choice, I'm a past president of the Public Choice Society, I'm a past editor, North American editor of the journal Public Choice. And public choice is often called, and it was called this by James Buchanan himself, James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his work in public choice.

James Buchanan said that public choice was politics without romance. And in the essays that are up on liberalism.org, notice it's not classical liberalism.org, we're trying to reclaim liberalism. to have the same meaning as in the rest of the world. I, I, I'm, it's aspirational. I, that may not work. Well, it, it, the, some things that are hopeless still happen, so there, it, it is worth a shot.

So on liberalism.org, I, I've written a series of essays, and in one of them, I was interested in the kind of romance that public choice is not. The kind of romance that we're talking about here, we, we might define, and I, I defined this in the essay, let me read it, it's from William Burke. So Burke claimed, Edmund Burke, Burke claimed that custom and loyalty to nations is a, what we now think of as a romantic inheritance, because these are inherited traditions.

Quoting now. In this choice of inheritance, we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearts, our sepulchers, and our altars.

So church, family, state, those are all the same things. That's romanticism on the conservative side. Now, famously, and this is a quote that may have appeared ten times on EconTalk, but it maybe can't be said enough, Friedrich Hayek pointed out that we can't really do these, that we have to keep those things separate. So Hayek, quoting now, the structures of the extended order are made up not only of individuals, but also of many often overlapping suborders, within which old instinctual responses such as solidarity and altruism continue to retain some importance by assisting voluntary collaboration, even though they're incapable by themselves of creating a basis for the

more extended order. So pausing the quote for a moment, as Adam Smith said, it is important that we have brotherhood, fellow feeling. If I work in a business, it is important that I treat people well, but that doesn't really work at scale. So now going back to, and this is from the fatal conceit, part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts, and our emotions in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders, according to different rules.

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the microcosmos, i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families, to the macrocosmos, our wider civilization, as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet, if we're always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them.

So that's the argument against romance.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and I, I, I want to, I want to pause you on that, and I, I, I want to, I don't think that quote's been said enough, even close, because I haven't thought of it in a while, and,

it's, it, it has a lot of relevance for this current moment, I think, in domestic policy in the United States and in the West, Western democracies. but, but I just want to try to restate what he's saying, because it's Hayek's prose is sometimes... It was a bunch of

Speaker 2

words.

Speaker 1

Yeah, is a little prolix, I think is the right word. So what he's trying to say is that, you know, we have an extraordinary,

imperfect, but extraordinary connection to our family members, our, our spouse, our children, our parents. And the extraordinary part of it is there's an emotional connection, and there's an immense amount of information that's, that I have about my kids, what they care about, what they understand, what they might not understand, what they are desperately craving.

I know a lot about their preferences, especially when they're little. And I, I allocate goods to them effortlessly. Many of the time I don't divide things equally because I know that one kid has had a harder time than the others that day or are struggling with some issue, doesn't matter what the reason is. I am a dictator. My wife and I were dictators.

But

Speaker 2

you're substituting goodness for fairness because you're in a position of saying this is what is good, not some abstract rule of fairness.

Speaker 1

And we cared about them deeply. And to take an example, I may have mentioned once on the program before, when I got a note from the governor of Missouri that I needed to vaccinate one of my children,

this was when vaccination was not controversial.

I was offended because the implication was I didn't know my children well enough or love them enough or care for them enough, and the governor of the state had to weigh in and

admonish me about my duty as a parent. And, what Hayek is saying there is that the natural impulse to treat the people that I'm not close to, that I know almost nothing about, is very,

the natural impulse to treat them the way I treat the people close to me, because it's very powerful and wonderful, is very destructive.

in a piece that my wife forbade me from publishing, I invited the governor to come babysit for our kids so he could learn their names. It would be a good starting point, I suggested. So I never ran that piece, but,

Speaker 2

Yeah, exactly. Well done.

Speaker 1

but that's what Hayek's saying. He's saying that you cannot treat,

the, the world writ large like a family, even though there's a very natural impulse to do so. And then the reverse. You can't treat your family like a firm, like a business where you're maximizing, profit or, you know, it's like, oh, I should, profit's good, I should charge my children for their rent, for their rooms.

so.

Speaker 2

Again, a frequent theme on EconTalk, if one were to give one's spouse a gift card to Best Buy for their birthday, obviously that means they can buy whatever they want.

Speaker 1

And it has to be better. At best, I would pick the gift they would want, but I might not, then this gives them the chance to pick something they'd want even more than what I would pick. It has to be welfare improving.

Speaker 2

I can, I can draw the indifference curves and the budget set and prove this definitively. It is always better or at least no worse for me to give the gift card. And yet. That would be a raised eyebrow at least, and probably worse, would be the result if I were to give that to my spouse. Because we can't take the rules and understandings of the larger commercial extended order and bring them down to the family.

So there has to be some sort of understanding that we live in several worlds at once. And liberalism, classical liberalism, is to me the idea that we have to, at least as a matter of aspiration, keep those worlds separate.

Speaker 1

And that brings us back to romance, because the romance we're talking about is the sweet emotional comfort that comes from a familiar norm or behavior that works beautifully in one order, but not so well in that other order. And, Talk about what politics without romance would be then.

Speaker 2

Well, I was interested in what romance actually is. there is my, my, our mutual friend, Pete Becke, who has...

Becke's rule is that we should always understand that in order to understand a theorist, we have to look at who they're arguing against. So the, the, the sort of Cambridge contextualism, Quentin Skinner came up, with, at, with the idea of contextualism. To understand a thing, you have to understand what they're arguing against. So I spent some time trying to figure out what is the romance that public choice is not.

And what's, the, the, the simple version of it is that the romance in public choice, that public choice is against, is there, we have a realistic conception of the warts and problems with markets. So in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a theoretical development of what is called the market failure theory. And there are four main failures of markets.

There's asymmetric information, externalities, public goods, and natural monopolies. Those are all technical conditions. They're real. They are ways that markets might... The functioning of markets alone will result in outcomes that appear improvable.

And then the romance was to say, and we will take this perfect organization called government that will step in and will correct those things. Now, I argue in this essay a couple places that all institutions should be understood as seeing with two eyes, information and incentives. And the problem with saying that the government has the perfect information and the perfect incentives runs afoul of Respectively, Austrian economics, which questions the information that government has because it doesn't use prices, and public choice, which raises questions about the incentives that government faces because we can't assume romance.

I've proposed immodestly the Munger test as a way of thinking about public choice. The Munger test is, and this happens all the time, and I've had people get quite angry at me for doing this,

which, as you might imagine, happens often. So they'll say, I think the state should be in charge of deciding what people can say on the internet. And I'll say, wait, stop,

take out state because it doesn't exist, and put in Donald Trump, and see if you still believe it. Oh, no, no, absolutely not. Well, there's no such thing as the state. That's a romantic notion. The people who run the state are the same people who run corporations. Now, they may face different incentives, they may behave differently, but in terms of self-interest and their ability to get information and the incentives that they face, we have to put them in a context where we're comparing a real market setting with a real government setting, and then see if you believe it.

Speaker 1

Just a couple of clarifying things, reminding listeners that when you talk about markets, you don't mean stock markets, you mean the decentralized way that we produce and buy and sell most of the things that we buy. I

Speaker 2

should

Speaker 1

call it commerce. Yeah, well, but markets is a good sub, is a good shorthand, but that's what it means. I want to take your point about the two eyes, which is very cute, the incentives and information, and bring it back to the family situation. When I'm allocating goods of the family, I have the information because I live with them. I also have the incentive because I care deeply about them.

Now, it's imperfect. I may care sometimes about my own desires relative to theirs in a imperfect way, but probably better than the governor of the state I'm living in. So that's just an application of, of, of what you're talking about. And, the, I'm going to, and now let's come back to the Munger test. The, the,

it's extraordinary the romance we do have about government. Forget the academic, scholarly, market failure, government failure thing, and we'll come back, I'm sure, and talk about it in different ways. But

most, many times, people can divide the world up between greedy corporations Who are out to hurt you, and public servants who are there to protect you. And I think what, what public choice says is that often we are, public choice says, sure, corporations are run by people who are self-interested and maybe sometimes even selfish. What protects you from them might be the, the government.

It also might be competition, other norms and, norms and so on. And the government that's going to protect you from that and intervene in that process is a human being. You picked Donald Trump, but, you could pick... I

Speaker 2

could have picked Nancy Pelosi. I'm not trying to make a partisan point.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

So pick a real human.

Speaker 1

And, and I just want to come back because, you know, there is a, a great richness to the fifty-two conversations we've had. recently, two, a year and a half ago, you, you, you used a beautiful metaphor. You said, you don't want to forge a sword. That you would want to see your opponent wield. Right after

Speaker 2

the next election.

Speaker 1

Yeah, you, you might believe that your side is so obviously right, coming back to our, your opening point, you may be so convinced of your side's righteousness, your view's righteousness, that it will persist forever. But a little bit of empirical evidence suggests that's not the case. And therefore, you should be very wary of giving power to,

people that you will not like. And I think, and you said there's no such thing as government. People said, well, that's silly. Of course, there is such a thing. That's true. There is such a thing. But to use it in a sentence as the, subject, the government will do X is not really quite right. It's a group of people. The government

Speaker 2

wants something. The government will do something. Treated as an organic unitary actor is the mistake. You're right. There is a thing called government.

Speaker 1

And, and lastly, The other piece of this romance, which, I think it's important to put on the table, is that the romance we have about democracy, whichever system we're in, you're living in a republic, I'm living in a parliamentary democracy here in Israel,

it's very easy to remember some of the, flaws of these two systems, but the, I think the conceptual thing to, to focus on is that it does not, what government does does not represent the will of the people.

it, it is the outcome of a complex set of institutions and norms that, and the incentives that the individuals inside those institutions and norms face, and there's no reason to think that it will reflect What people want, and even more strongly, people almost always want more than, they don't want the same thing. So what could it possibly mean to say it reflects the will of the people? What it does is it reflects an imperfect, by definition, process by which group decisions are going to have to get made.

And having said all that, and then I'll let you respond, having said all that, this doesn't mean that government intervention is a bad thing, it doesn't mean the market's always right, it doesn't mean capitalism is perfect or should be left to run amok or run free or whatever

way you want to describe it. It just, all, to me, all public choice does is take the romance out. So I, I think it's really important. It just says, be realistic, don't be romantic.

Speaker 2

And that, that, that it is well said that,

public choice, another thing people say that public choice is, is politics as exchange. So it is something we participate in as a group because it makes it all better off. And in the essay, I talk about a, I don't know if you'd call it a metaphor or an example, but suppose we all wanted to go to lunch.

And there is, and notice I said we all want to go to lunch, not I want to go to lunch, you want to go to lunch, you want to go to lunch, because each of us individually is hungry. So that's the individualist part of this. But generally, I would prefer to go to lunch with a group of people whose company I enjoy, even if we go to a restaurant that is not my favorite.

It's good enough, but I have a favorite restaurant, and I would like to go to lunch with everyone at that restaurant. You would like to go to lunch with everyone at your favorite restaurant, and we disagree about the restaurant. One possibility is we all go to lunch by ourselves. That's not the way groups work. Usually what happens is we all want to go to lunch together, but then we have to make some sort of decision about where it's going to be.

And usually what happens is we don't formally vote, but we will make arguments, oh, the line is too long there, that's too far, that's too expensive, and we'll come to some kind of consensus. So that's politics as exchange. There's a shared, there's a goal that we all agree on, we'd like to go to lunch together. And then we have a process of revealing information about what each of us believes and wants, and we all have the incentive to come to an agreement because we have a shared goal, and that is we want to go to lunch together.

So then maybe we notice that it's important that each of us has the exit option. We decide we want to go to some place that I just hate, and I say, well, heck with you, I'm going to go by myself. And I go get takeout, and I go to my office, and like Achilles in his tent, I pout in my office and eat my takeout with my plastic fork. Maybe not exactly like Achilles, but something, I wanted to get an, an, an Odyssey, well, I wanted to get a,

Speaker 1

an Iliad, Iliad

Speaker 2

reference in here somewhere, somewhere. So,

we get to the restaurant, and how do we decide what each of us is going to eat? We could, each person could look at the menu and make a proposal. We can discuss the merits of the different dishes, and then we could vote about which of those all of us will order. And so that is- And then share

Speaker 1

them equally, very carefully, parceling out to each person their share. And of course, no one has ever, well, economists might have a meal like this sometimes, but real human beings don't eat this way, right? So carry on.

Speaker 2

But the, the, the question is why? It's not obvious that you wouldn't. After all, you're a group. And so the big problem that public choice faces, that public choice focuses on is An informed, unromantic choice between what is mine and what is ours. Not between what's mine and what is yours. This is not a property rights question. This is a negotiation that we as a group are going to make.

So the ours part is, what restaurant will we go to? The mine part of it is, each of us gets to order what we want off the menu, and we may have different things. And so the line...

Speaker 1

But we may also decide we're going to share today, and we're going to have to decide which dishes to order, and as the group gets bigger, this gets unwieldy, and it's difficult, and...

But as you said, I might decide I don't really like raw tomatoes, but I know most of the people in the group like salad, with tomatoes in it, not on the side, and so we order a salad, I don't... I kind of pick around it, or I don't eat the salad that day, and I get, quote, taken advantage of, but it's worth it, because the whole group is happy, and I like eating, and they're my friends.

I'm happy to see their happiness. That This is where the, by the way, sorry to take your, your example and run, run off the rails with it. This, this is one of the problems, this example, which is trying to get at how politics involves horse trading, compromise, exchange, and sometimes allowing people to exit.

By definition, this very example of five people sitting around a table at lunch has some romance about it, because we actually like each other. And the political process of many of the people at the table, I can't see them. And some of them I don't like.

Speaker 2

You, you, you raise an important point, so let me say two things about that.

one is we're still having to deal with the problem of information and incentives. We have solved the incentive problem here because this is a microcosmos problem, we all like each other, and so that means that we're solicitous of it. If you tell me you're allergic to tomatoes, for example, then I'm probably going to say, all right, we're not going to choose a dish where you have to eat that or have nothing.

The other thing is, though, that this is an information problem. So if we see with two eyes, it's information and incentives. Suppose we go to an ethnic restaurant that I have no experience, or a tapas restaurant, and I don't know the dishes, but one person is a regular. I might very well put myself in that person's hand. You choose the, some of the best meals I've ever had have been with someone who really knows that cuisine and say, why don't you order for all of us? And then we all share, and those are terrific.

So all of those things are negotiable in this little setting of five people. But that is an example of politics as exchange. Question is, does it scale up? And generally the answer is going to be no, because we don't have the same incentives, and we don't have enough information. And so saying that that example works at the micro level, you would want a different set of institutions, and you might be skeptical.

So there's more to public choice than just politics as exchange, and the politics without romance part says that we're going to have to add some other aspects. And those might include, and I'll run through them very quickly, for public choice, it's methodological individualism and behavioral symmetry. And methodological individualism means that we have to assume that the locus of choice and the locus of enjoyment or disappointment is the individual.

We can't say the government acts, the government thinks. What, what, what the government is, is a collection of people who come up with some aggregate process where we look at the information that people have, and often we do this through voting. We might do it in a bureaucracy by gathering information, looking at the rules, maybe getting public comment, but the methodological individualism means that as a matter of constraint, we can't just assume that a group of individuals can be treated as an organism.

Speaker 1

And before you go on to the behavioral symmetry, I, I just want to try to get at that a little deeper. we will say after that lunch to someone who wasn't there and asks, how was it? I'll say, we had a great time. But what I mean, what I mean by that is each of us individually enjoyed ourselves. If there was a person who had a allergic attack, But it was only one of the group.

The, the rest of the people thought it was the be- one of the best meals he's ever had. It would be bizarre to tell the, the, the questioner, yeah, we had a great time. Well, that one guy had to go to the hospital, but, but, but we, whatever that, and my point is it doesn't mean anything in that particular example. If we're all alike, which would be, in a, in a way, the, the essence of that individualism approach is to say we're never alike.

We're all different. Whether it's our preferences, our opportunities, our, aspirations, our moods, we're all different. And so to say we all had a good time is a generalization that presumes that most of us individually had a pleasant experience. If that wasn't the case, it would be absurd, this part says, to say we had a good time, because I'm just going to aggregate over all of us.

That'd be strange.

Speaker 2

And one of the reasons that what you just said is important is that it actually rules out ethical individualism. Methodological individualism does not imply ethical individualism. Ethical individualism means if you ask, how, how was it for the group? And it was good for me, I just get to say, well, it was great because it was good for me.

So there, there, there is, there, there is an entity. You can't even call them clubs. One of the things that's mentioned in the Nobel Prize announcement Was that there are these voluntary, maybe evanescent groups called clubs, and you can exit, but I participate in this group, and we can talk about the quality of the experience that people have in the club.

It is not necessarily ethical individualism. We're all I care about is myself. I might very well care about the other individuals, but we are acting as individuals in a group, and that group is constituted with a small c. So that small c constitution is we invite people who we like, maybe someone else shows up and we roll our eyes and say, okay, yeah, sure, you can come along.

But the way that these groups form is kind of spontaneous, they're voluntary associations, but even though we're assuming methodological individualism, we're not assuming ethical individualism. I

Speaker 1

think it's really important because I think a lot of times when people talk about, say, classical liberalism, They presume it means, every man for himself, or every woman for themself. I don't know how to de,

I don't know how to improve that. But the expression every man for himself is, you know, I care about me. So if I had a good time, it was a good choice. That's bizarre. Most human beings don't feel that way. There are certain settings where it's appropriate. but in general, just because we're making these, claims that we've been making about the importance of individuals and the limits on what we can say about the group as a whole, does not mean that we are atomistic or that we can't join together, that we can't ally ourselves with people with similar preferences or causes or organizations that, that are trying to solve a problem we care about.

But almost, it's almost the opposite. We're going to associate with other individuals and create something larger than ourselves, but we're going to limit what we say and how we describe that thing we create together, and we're not going to be romantic about it. We might be with our, when we're laying in the, in the dark before we go to sleep, we might get great satisfaction that our, that our little league team played well today, but, but that's not, the point is it's not all about me.

This allows for altruism and love and the freedom to associate with people who care about the things you care about, to do those things even better than you can do them on your own. And that begins to open a question about what is the scope Of our activities as in groups, either in voluntary groups or in political groups, and the choices we make to what we put under public policy's purview is, is, is then crucial.

And, and recog-it recognizes that because the groups don't always work as well as we might like, doesn't mean we should do everything in a group, and we certainly shouldn't do everything alone.

Speaker 2

The reason we're spending so much time on this, the listeners may think you're just, you're, you're arguing about a tiny point. That is usually the claim that is made about public choice is that you're saying that people are selfish. What we're saying is that they're self-interested, and that that self-interest often contains an important social aspect.

And the participation in groups that are larger than myself. Now, calling it politics as exchange might be rather odd, because maybe it's politics as cooperation or politics of choosing in groups. So the reason that my Cambridge book was titled Choosing in Groups was I wanted to look at the analytics of how people choose collectively. But I've actually come to think that politics as exchange means that I want to participate in this group with you, and I want you to be in it because I think we will both be better off as a result.

And that's kind of just the essence of exchange. The question is, how do those institutions work that is different? And so you said, don't be romantic about it. And I went to look at what romanticism means, because romanticism is, well, it was a philosophical movement, particularly German idealism, and above all, Hegel. So in 1821, Friedrich Hegel published a book, The Philosophy of Right.

And he advanced a, we don't have time to say much about it, but he advanced a doctrine that in German is Sitlichtkeit, Sitlichtkeit, which, is ethical life, ethical customness, even the march of God in the world. And his claim is that as human beings develop, the state has a will and purpose of its own, and it's irreducible to individual wills.

And so romanticism would say that the state is an organic entity, that we should, and that's, that's actually the highest purpose. And what's interesting is that Edmund Burke thought that also. So Hegel is an essentially, conservative, religious view where you, you have a combination of the, the Volksgeist, the spirit of the people, and it is embodied in the state.

And so what we need to do is create better and better institution. So we start with the family, we move to civil society, but ultimately the state, and the state is not a contract among pre-pre-existing individuals. The state is the actualization of freedom itself. The state is, according to Hegel, an ethical substance with its own rational structure.

And so again, the, he uses the phrase, the march of God in the world. And so that idea of romance, if the state is, sytlichkeit, actualized, the concrete, historically developed, ethical substance of the people, rather than a set of offices held by ambitious, budget-maximizing, vote-seeking individuals, then you can talk about what the state would will.

And so that is literally the kind of romance that Buchanan is arguing against. And it's actually obscure. So the, I mean, I realize I used a bunch.

Speaker 1

Say it again.

Speaker 2

Well, the state is the concrete, historically developed, ethical substance of the people. So the state actually is the embodiment of the people. It's not a set of offices that are held by ambitious, budget-maximizing votes, vote-seeking individuals. So the state is, and quoting, although it's English, not German, it is the actualization of freedom itself.

The state is an ethical substance with its own rational structure. It is prior to and higher than the individuals who compose it.

Speaker 1

Is that Hegel?

Speaker 2

That is, that is a paraphrase of Hegel.

Speaker 1

Okay. So, a recent episode hasn't aired yet, so you, you have, would not have heard it.

I mentioned reading the Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, and,

it's hard to read that book and maintain much romance about the state. It's a, it's a portrait of Austria-Hungary and the Emperor Franz Joseph,

they're in the background. It's actually about the lives of a, of a, of a family, but in the background ever-present is the state, one of the, the father is a bureaucrat, the son is a soldier, and the,

the grandfather, the father's father was a soldier, and so they are entangled emotionally, practically, in all kinds of ways with, with the emperor and with the regime, the empire, and they have a lot of romance about it. It's a

Speaker 2

family. It, it is a family sort of metaphor.

Speaker 1

And what that book is about, I'm just realizing it now to some extent, is the loss of romance, the inevitable loss of romance when the illusions that the people have about the, the state have been shattered.

I want to say one other thing. I want to talk, I want to give a different example of romance,

that's, also might be helpful. Listeners know I'm a, I'm a Patriots fan. So I have a lot of romance, and most people do, about their sports teams. You know, Tom Brady was accused of, of inflating the footballs in, against the regulations. I know that was wrong, because Tom Brady would never do anything wrong. And I believe deeply in my heart that if Tom Brady were sitting in my office with me, he'd be a swell fellow.

And he might be, I don't know, he might actually be. But by definition, almost, franchises, sports teams, traffic in romance. They create the aw shucks charm of Tom Brady's successor, Drake May, who's, who's just a, a, a good guy. I, I, I can tell. We have this about our movie stars and our, our pop stars often, and when they fall, when we find out they have feet of clay, we're, we're very disillusioned.

But it's pretty harmless to believe that your sports team could do no wrong and that its players care about you or that, and I'll say, by the way, hey, we won this weekend to my brother, who's also, how weird is that? We didn't play. What a great game we played, I'll say to him. So we have a romance that we are part of this collective that is clearly irrational.

And it's an irra, it's a harmless irrationality. It, it adds a richness to life that, that's just, that's delightful. It's not healthy to do it about politics.

Speaker 2

Why? Why is it not? Human beings are literally evolved. To feel embedded. So the reason that you can take advantage of sports teams is that we are evolved to feel like part of something larger than ourselves. So the- That's Hayek's point.

Speaker 1

That's Hayek's point. We're taking our, the, the, the, you know, my, my parents would never do anything to hurt me, and neither would Tom Brady or, or Bill Belichick.

Speaker 2

Well, but the, notice, notice the, and, and Hayek calls this an atavism. So an out of ism is a vestigial element of something that was once adaptive. So the Dunbar number is something like 150. That's the number of people who can live together in a hierarchically flat society and keep track of reputations. So hunter-gatherer societies, clans, they could go up to about 150 people.

And if you were to act badly, I could keep track of it. And one of the reasons that human beings like to gossip is that, so we actually get pleasure from gossiping because that allows us to keep track of the reputations of other people in our clan. If you act badly, if you don't say, oh, we won, or be sad that we lost, you get put outside the wall and there's big animals out there.

You won't last long by yourself. So the people who did that, they went away and they're, that's not. Well, that's not an evolutionarily successful. So we have a brain architecture that makes us want to be part of teams. And sports teams are a harmless and in fact, I would say, a healthy way of having that attachment. But when that becomes an attachment to the state, as if it were an organism, so the at the Patriots game, maybe at the first game of the year, there's a flyover of a bunch of Delta Airlines jets.

No, wait, those are US Air Force jets. And I, my, my, my throat swells and I am pleased to be part of something larger than myself. This militaristic, jingoistic display makes me happy. And so maybe he said this, maybe he didn't. Napoleon Bonaparte said that his particular military genius was his ability to make men die for little pieces of ribbon.

And that if he had had more ribbon, he could have won more battles.

Jeez, that's cynical. Adam Smith talks about the fact that, in Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith talks about the fact that the soldier, when he imagines his death and funeral, thinks about the applause that he will receive. Because people will be, and he won't be there, but we have this ability to say we want to be some part of something larger than ourselves.

That's all great. However, we have to have a society that recognizes the importance of individuals, rather than saying you have to subsume your interests and self to the Volksgeist, to the larger, and it, I'm not trying to make a Nazi point here. The point is that most of idealism is German idealism is a reaction of Marx to Hegel. And so all of the words, all of the technical words that we use to describe this, but this long predates, and there, there, there have been, there have been many other nationalistic expressions, and it is quite possible that the United States is now, is now guilty of that.

We've talked a fair amount about what public choice is, and I have given some definitions of the parts of public choice. In the essay on liberalism. I'm

Speaker 1

sorry, do you want to say something about behavioral symmetry? We went off into a rather lengthy tangent. Before you go on, do you want to add anything about that?

Speaker 2

Yes. I

Speaker 1

don't remember what that is.

Speaker 2

Right. So behavioral symmetry is, in another way, it is a key aspect of public choice that we can't do without. and it is an obvious, the, Alistair Cooke, when he was talking about the Nobel Prize in Economics on, BBC4, said that public choice is, after all, the rather homely observation that politicians are just like you and me. Well, they actually aren't like you and me, they are you and me.

So if, if, if you have, there, there, there's this difference, but they're basically like us. They're, they're us.

Speaker 1

Yeah, gorillas are like you and me. Yes,

Speaker 2

they, they have important similarities.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2

So if a corporate CEO becomes a US senator, they don't have a new soul implanted. They're basically the same person. If a consumer who is too dumb to know what size Coke they're going to buy in New York at the 7-Eleven, Walks into the voting booth, they don't become a genius and now understand the niceties of foreign policy. So these are the consumers, and voters are the same people, and economic leaders and political leaders are the same people.

Now, I wrote a piece with Jeffrey Brennan and Cameron Tilley about behavioral symmetry, where we argued that maybe it should be called motivational symmetry. Because behavioral symmetry doesn't mean, economics doesn't say that people act the same in all situations. In fact, what economics says is that people act differently according to the incentives.

It may be that in politics, the incentives are quite different than they are in commercial settings, and so my behavior might be different. So we don't have behavioral symmetry. What we really have is motivational symmetry. However,

I am motivated by self-interest. And that self-interest might include concern for others. So the behavioral symmetry might say, you know, in markets, we should recognize the fact that people might have concern for others. They're not narrowly self-interested. And in politics, they're like that. But in both cases, we need to make the same assumptions about human motivation.

So that's all that all the claim is.

Speaker 1

And in another episode that hasn't aired yet with Adam Mastriani, he makes the claim that incentives are for losers.

And by that, what he means, and I want to apply it now to this example you just gave,

you just recognize the reality that a corporate individual who goes into politics doesn't get a soul implant or a

brain surgery. They're the same person. But what economists are like to point out Correctly, is that the incentives for good decision-making, both those eyes, if the information that person has and the incentives they have to, to do something are, might be very different. Public choice tends to emphasize that it's not so important who's in the job, it's more important about what the incentives are.

What Adam was pointing out in that episode is that you don't have to follow the incentives. And, and the romance we might have, I'm not suggesting Adam has it, the romance we might have about politics is believing that once you become a US senator or a representative or president of the United States, while the incentives might be the same, you can, for whoever else could have won, you are free as a, as an individual to make the choice that you think is the right, is to do the right thing.

And, and I think the clash between public choice And what we might call the street, view of politics is that the street view of politics tends to assume that people will rise above the incentives, and the public choice view tends to say, no, they're going to be enslaved by the incentives. I think the truth is in between. I'm not a,

I think believing in incentives that the only thing that matters is not a bad starting place, it's not a good finishing place. But I think that distinction of the two extremes that, no, people will do the right thing because they're public servants versus, no, they're going to serve their own self-interest like they would if they were in the corporate CEO, the C-suite.

So I think the reality is, is somewhere in between. We like the idea that politics selects for people who are good-hearted and good-spirited, and we're tempted to believe that business selects for people who are rapacious and greedy. I think neither is true. I think the truth is in between, and the, what makes a society successful are, are the norms and the, the regulations, both the enforceable laws, legislation, and the unenforceable norms that affect how people behave in those different situations.

And they're, they're not exactly the same. The norms are different in politics versus business. But they emerge from culture and time passing and so on, and when they're, if they're good norms, you tend to have effective political outcomes and good marketplace commerce outcomes, and if they're not, you're in trouble.

Speaker 2

That is nicely done because it does set up the, in my view, crushing counterpunch that public choice has to that argument.

Speaker 1

Let's hear it.

Speaker 2

So, Newt Vixell is in some ways the urtext of public choice because James Buchanan in the famous incident of serendipity found Newt Vixell's dissertation on the shelf at the University of Chicago and he, he was, he was, he could read German and so he finds it, he takes it down and a big part of what Vixell is talking about is that economists have generally taken the view that they should advise the state as if whoever's in charge is an omniscient, benevolent dictator that knows everything and wants the right thing.

Now, let's suppose that there is a king and the king doesn't have to answer to anyone. That means that the, that the king is free to do the right thing.

Do you think a US senator is free to do the right thing? What disciplines corporations? Well, the answer is competition. What disciplines US senators? The need to seek re-election. There is no way in hell.

It, and it is competition, and there is no way in hell that a senator gets to do the right thing, because the senator lives in a world where political power is exercised by concentrated interests. Most people in the United States cannot name even one senator. they don't know very much, and that's actually rational. They're responding to incentives.

So the lack of information is rational. If I'm a US senator, I have to seek re-election, and I'm going to seek re-election in a system that's dominated by organized interests, where most people don't have much information. And our mutual friend, Brian Kaplan, has talked about the fact that this means that people can have irrational beliefs, and I'm going to substitute the word romantic.

I can have romantic beliefs about what senators say, candidates for senators say they're going to do. And so what, if I buy a car, and it's a bad car, I have a bad car. I have reasons to do, to do research.

Speaker 1

I may have romance about the backseat being big enough for my family of six, but, reality will hit me in the face.

Speaker 2

I, I... There is some immediate feedback for making bad choices. And I get to make the choice about what car I'm going to buy. When it comes to a US Senate race, then there are most states, millions of other people that are also going to vote. There is no chance of my vote influencing the outcome. And so politics and elections are dominated by organized interests that are able to influence in disproportionate way the outcome.

And so there is an alternative to this, and we said before that Edmund Burke was a romantic in his speech to the Bristol electors, and I hope you'll put up a link to the speech to the Bristol electors. Edmund Burke talks about the fact that what a elected official owes to the people is his judgment. not just simple compliance with their wishes.

And in fact, if the elected official believes that the right thing to do is different from what the voters want, he should do the thing that is right, not what voters want. And that's basically the claim that we often hear, the romantic claim. And what's important is that in historical detail, in that election, Burke lost. He was taken out.

So he makes this famous argument that people cite, and they're trying to use it as a defense of the romantic claim that I'm hoping that the legislator will do the right thing. He lost that election. So it is simply not true that people in government are free. They may be less free than corporate CEOs. A corporate CEO, if they want a new product, they say, well, we're going to do this.

And people will say, yes, sir, and we'll borrow money and we'll start doing it. If I'm a senator and I have a good idea, it won't pass the Senate. And if it does, it won't pass the House. And if it passes that, the president will veto the bill. So the ability of individuals in government to do the right thing is less, not more, even if they wanted to, which they don't, because people who are active are going to become corporate CEOs, not senators.

If you, the people who become senators are the ones who like to spout nonsense to cameras, in my personal opinion, because the incentives reward that kind of behavior. The main thing is that you have to get reelected. So the public choice insight here is, yes, behavioral symmetry means we're going to get different behaviors given the difference in incentives.

But the incentives in politics are pathological. They actually rule out the romantic notion that officials want to do the right thing.

Speaker 1

So I'm going to disagree with you, which is really uncomfortable, but

such is life. So if I want to get reelected, I do what the will of the people. Now, you're suggesting sometimes the people might want unethical things. I would argue, as I did earlier, that there's no such thing as the will of the people. There's some people want one thing. Take one of our favorite examples. If you're a senator from Florida or South Dakota, Strangely enough, you're going to be persuaded that it's really an unhealthy thing to have sugar coming into the United States.

I'm sure you can take it, from other places because the sugar, cane and the sugar beets grow in Florida and they grow in South Dakota, and as you suggested in passing a few minutes ago, the people who grow those sugar cane and grow the sugar beets are really focused on the foreign sugar coming in and keeping it out. And the average consumer pays ten, twenty-five, whatever it is, percent more for their products that contain sugar, not paying so much attention.

It's not, there's no incentive for them to pay the amount of attention they need to pay to, to do something about it. And so we get restrictions on imports of sugar in the United States, and it enriches a very small group of people, and it impoverishes a very large group of people a small amount. so senators, yes, they, they, they often will do those things.

To protect certain groups, and, and there's no will of the people that they're failing to respond to. What they're failing to respond to is the majority of their people that might be failing to respond to a utilitarian case. But I'm talking about just their effectiveness on the job. You're making a, you're making it sound like they're, they're clowns who, who, who enjoy preening in front of the camera and being popular.

Well, there's some of that, of course, we're, we're all human beings. But I, I, I don't, do you really want to argue, and I don't think you do, because I know you pretty well, do you really want to argue that all of political outcomes are a cesspool of, of failure because of the, the horrible incentives and the, ability of politicians to exploit the imperfect information and incentives of their constituents, the I, the, the two eyes?

Speaker 2

I don't think they're exploiting the information. I think they are facing the fact that they can't get around the ignorance of voters. So I'm convinced a lot of senators would like to pass legislation that they think is needed by the country.

In the last close to 10 years, there has been very little legislation passed by the US Congress. We are more and more ruled by executive order. And that was true under Obama, that was true under Trump one, Biden, and under Trump two. And the reason is the incentives that now face the US Senate, the US House are so pathological. Most of them, if they were to take a principled position, would lose the primary because the parties are so extreme.

Voters have very little information. There is no way for me to inform voters. And as you said,

the idea of the will of the people is nonsense, but this is not even a majority of citizens. In primaries, maybe 15 or 20% of the population turns out, and they are the, in some ways, least informed and most ideological. And so I have to pass, I have to win the primary, and then I have to win the general election. So the, sure, there are individual politicians that are principled.

You talked to Ben Sasse a couple of weeks ago. It just came out recently at the time that we're now recording this. There are some great people. They don't last. They get frustrated because of their inability to act. So I'm convinced that many people who stay in the Senate, the ones who stay in the Senate for a long time, are the ones who are interested in power, not in the ones who are interested in being effective.

Speaker 1

So I'm going to give you my summary take, and then I'm going to invite you to give yours,

unless you want to lay some more groundwork. Do you have other groundwork you want to lay?

Speaker 2

No, this is, we're good.

Speaker 1

Okay, so I have no romance about politics. That's a, that's the product of my economics education,

my interest in this field that we're talking about called public choice.

But I'm not, I'm not so cynical. I don't rule out the possibility of people in politics who are,

say, let's call it public-spirited. And All I get from that is what, our friend Dan Klein called, when talking about Adam Smith, a presumption of liberty. It means the default should be give people the freedom to make their own choices, which includes what they buy, where they work, and it also includes their ability to give to charity, it includes their ability to start nonprofits that would help people who are struggling.

It is not a dog-eat-dog, free market capitalist, free-for-all, which is, the, the, the parody, the caricature, excuse me, of, of those of us who, who like liberty a little more than other things. At the other end, I understand that there are sometimes when government involvement makes the world a better place, at least as I would define it.

And while I'm skeptical about its ability to do it regularly for the reasons we've been talking about,

I don't look on the political world with, and the outcomes with the disdain that I used to have when I was younger.

I'm a little more, I don't know, I don't know what the word would be, tolerant, accepting. I do think I have a presumption of liberty. I think that's the default, but I would not, I would not say, I would, I would not say that public choice by definition pushes you to,

to leave almost no role for the state other than, say, the night watchman role of, of, of security, national defense, and say police.

Speaker 2

That's certainly fair, and I have elided two things, so you are right to call me out on that. There is nothing inherent in public choice that would say it is not possible for the state to make good choices and improve things.

it- You've said that

Speaker 1

many times on the program, which is why- So the-

Speaker 2

There is nothing in public choice that makes that. However, in the current situation in the United States, I think it has become impossible, and maybe a dialectic process means that there will be a response. But, I mean, I know we don't want to name specific people, this is not a politics podcast, but in the current round of elections, several people who were the sort of person that you're talking about, who believed in limited government, who thought about individuals and emergent institutions, have lost in primaries.

Because the current situation in the United States, and so this is the two things I was, there's nothing inherent in public choice. The current incentives do in fact, and I would double down, current incentives do in fact rule out anyone winning an election who has the point, the point of view that you and I think is the correct approach to politics.

Now, I've run for office many times, and I will run again. I, I actually switched my registration to be a member of one of the two state-sponsored parties, so that now instead of getting three percent, I might get thirty. And I would be happy to, to win, and I would be happy to serve. And I'm pretty confident that if I did, I would last one election, and then I'd lose a primary.

Because the The current atmosphere, the current notion of the centralization of power in the executive and the power of the executive to say, I endorse this one and I do not endorse that one, means that our system is not capable of not only not the will of the people, it's a tiny majority that are in charge. That's not inherent in public choice, but the United States is facing the problem that we have not been able to maintain the, the, my goals of liberalism, which are humility and tolerance.

Everybody thinks they're right. They have no tolerance for the beliefs of others because they're mistaken.

Speaker 1

Okay, so let's, let me close with a, with a question.

when you were talking about how our principles of, say, classical liberalism have no purchase in today's, political marketplace, can't get a foothold, can't get a toehold.

that's been true almost our whole lifetime.

it's ebbed and flowed how often they get discussed, whether they're on the table in some sense. And, you know, I think our side, so to speak, our philosophical approach to government and, and policy has to reckon with that in some sense, that reality. It, it should bring one up short if you were a tolerant, humble person.

But what I would say, I'd say something different on top. So first point is, there's nothing new there, unfortunately or not, but it's just the reality. But something else has changed, and I, and I want you to react to it, which is,

the issues that motivated voters in most of our lifetime aren't what motivates them anymore. When I was younger, people cared about So to say guns and butter is a silly simplification. Should the defense budget be bigger? Should we pay more attention to consumers and, and, and to private consumption? These are the kind of issues, what fiscal policy, monetary policy, how much economic freedom there should be, what should the minimum wage be, how deregulated or regulated should transportation be? These were the big issues that have been in part of the United States conversation for sixty years.

They're not the big issues anymore. They're, they're not what people care about. And we're in a world where it's not just that, you know, this, the freedom-oriented perspective that we sometimes care deeply about doesn't win. The, the other side isn't just,

doing better. It's radically different, right? We have candidates, at least within primaries and sometimes elections, who are espousing, radical restrictions on economic liberty and

socialism and so on. so that's, why, why is that happening? Is that, is that, what does public choice have to say about that? Is that the, has the, has the electorate moved to the, to the left, away from freedom, away toward more control by the government, bigger swords? what do you personally think we ought to be doing as citizens, if you care about those things, to, to deal with them? You know, some people would say this is a huge improvement.

We're, we're heading toward a much better world, finally. But I'm curious why. What, what has happened here?

Speaker 2

That's a great question. The, the sort of, to me, unexpected return, resurrection of romanticism on the right

is, I think, the result of the abdication of, and I would say people like me, that is, academics, people who write about public choice and classical liberalism, who until recently simply ignored the moral parts of our life. We just talked about consequentialism. If we all have markets, you'll all be rich.

The problem is we didn't make the moral argument, and Adam Smith makes both parts of the argument. We, for the most part, if you look at the sort of triumphalism following the collapse of the Berlin Wall,

the end of history, the idea that liberalism was triumphant, that liberal democracy would always win, we didn't take up the part of the argument that satisfies people's desire for a positive, optimistic vision of the future. Not just you'll have a better microwave and a better cell phone. So the, our abdication of the responsibility to talk about people's hunger for meaning and a yearning for belonging to something larger than themselves has resulted in a kind of atomism.

That's the reason that I cite Patrick Deneen. I think he has partly correctly diagnosed this problem. I, as I had said before, president of the Philadelphia Society. And I have seen something in the past three years that actually has made me much more frightened and much more militant. And that's why I think I, whereas I used to agree with you and be more optimistic, I'm now pretty pessimistic.

And the difference is this. The young conservative people, 25, 30 years old, and there's dozens and dozens of them in the room. If I sit with them at lunch, if I talk with them, used to be that they would have on a coat and tie, and they would have in their pocket the little red copy of the Cato Constitution. And they would pull it out, and they would be able to talk about it, and they were basically Reagan Republicans.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's the Cato Institute's additional constitution. It's the US Constitution.

Speaker 2

Right, and I'm making an analogy to Mao's little red book, and it is an impious one. But the people had the little red book that they would pull out, but it was the US Constitution. And the thing is that the US is different from other countries. The US has a liberal tradition. The Bill of Rights in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, that is a liberal tradition.

The United States, in the United States, conservatism used to mean conserving a liberal tradition.

Now all of the young conservatives, they still have on the coat and tie, they do not have a copy of the constitution in their pocket. In fact, they will say the constitution is a dead letter. We are fighting with one hand behind our back, and what we need to do is take over all of the institutions and centralize power in the hands of a good president.

And as long as we can continue to do that, we can win and we can impose the policies that we want. And what we need to do is to get rid of these restrictions that the constitution place on our ability to act. And what I find frightening about that is you have already cited, they think they'll win forever because everyone that they talk to agrees with them.

But there's a lot of people that don't agree with them, and sometime they're going to lose an election. Maybe not this time, maybe not next time. But you should never make a sword so large, powerful, and sharp that you don't expect to see it wielded against you immediately after the next election. So liberalism is what Thomas Sowell called a constrained vision.

It means that I want to do good things, and if I could make the government more powerful when I control it, I could do those things. I'm going to have to accept the fact that there's some good things I will not be able to do because I want to prevent bad things from being done in the future. And by bad, I mean my own assessment of those things.

They're not objectively bad, but I disagree with them. We're going to have to, instead of wielding power, we're going to have to wield persuasion. We're going to have to be humble and believe that maybe I'm wrong, and we're going to have to be tolerant and believe that maybe the other side is right. So accommodation and persuasion need to come back.

I think we're moving in the wrong direction because the young people on the left and the young people on the right, who soon will be the middle-aged people on the left and the middle-aged people on the right, we're seeing a generational replacement. So the ones who thought that government is a shared enterprise for trying to work out the best compromises that we can for the country, they're disappearing.

What's replacing them is people who think that we have to win. And the idea that you have to win is probably going to lead to losing.

Speaker 1

And I guess today has been Mike Munger. Mike, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Speaker 2

A pleasure as always, Russ.

Speaker 1

This is EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more EconTalk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for EconTalk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.