… is from page 132 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan’s 1991 paper (co-authored with Viktor Vanberg) “Constitutional Choice, Rational Ignorance and the Limits of Reason,” as this paper is reprinted in Choice, Contract, and Constitutions (2001), which is volume 16 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan (footnote deleted):
One of the most familiar principles in Public Choice is the rational ignorance hypothesis, which states that in large electoral constituencies it is privately rational for a single voter to remain ignorant about the alternatives of collective choice because of the negligible influence of his or her own vote on the outcome.
DBx: It is a ceaseless source of mystery to me why so many mainstream economists bend over backwards to find alleged instances of market failure – often when no such failure really exists – but remain completely oblivious to sources of very real political failure, such as the one described above by Vanberg and Buchanan.
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Since delusional political beliefs are free, the voter consumes until he reaches his “satiation point,” believing whatever makes him feel best. When a person puts on his voting hat, he does not have to give up practical efficacy in exchange for self-image, because he has no practical efficacy to give up in the first place.
Any restriction that in form restricts only disposition by the owner perforce limits the rights of others to acquire property in exchange for their cash, property, and perhaps labor.
When prices are manipulated [by government diktats], however, these “signals” indicating relative scarcity cannot be detected. It becomes impossible to distinguish real signals from artificial, manipulated one. Shortages become common because firms are not induced by higher profitability to expand their supply. Black markets emerge to meet the demands of customers who would otherwise have to suffer long delays on the delivery of commodities at the controlled price. Firms that would be fully profitable under a freely-adjusting price mechanism are squeezed out of production or are not induced to enter artificially depressed prices.
Lying at the end of a narrow, muddy lane, his rambling edifice of thatch, wattles, mud, and dirty brown wood was almost obscured by a towering dung heap in what, without it, would have been the front yard. The building was large, for it was more than a dwelling. Beneath its sagging roof were a pigpen, a henhouse, cattle sheds, corncribs, straw and hay, and, last and least, the family’s apartment, actually a single room whose walls and timbers were coated with soot. According to Erasmus, who examined such huts, “almost all the floors are of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for twenty years, harboring, there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer … remnants of fishes, and other filth unnameable. Hence, with the change of weather, a vapor exhales which in my judgment is far from wholesome.”
According to American theory, all power is in the hands of the plain people, and according to American legend they always exercise it wisely. The theory, of course, is almost as absurd as the legend. The plain people, in fact, can only exert their power through agents, and in the election of those agents they seldom face a clear choice between a good candidate and a bad one, or a wise idea and a foolish one. In the normal case both candidates are frauds and both ideas are idiotic.
