… is from page 15 of my emeritus colleague Gordon Tullock’s 2000 monograph, The Theory of Public Choice, which is included in Government: Whose Obedient Servant? (Gordon Tullock, Arthur Seldon, & Gordon L. Brady, eds., 2000):
The student of public choice is unlikely to believe that government officials are overly concerned with the public interest. Since they operate in an area where information is very poor (and the proof that the voters’ information on political issues would be poor was one of the first achievements of the public choice theory), deception is much more likely to be a paying tactic than it is in the market-place. Therefore, one would anticipate more dishonesty in government.
