Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 68-69 of Viktor Vanberg’s 2023 paper “Public Choice, Behavioral Symmetry, and the Ethics of Citizenship,” which is chapter 5 of The Legacy of Richard E. Wagner (Peter J. Boettke and Christopher J. Coyne, eds., 2023) [footnotes deleted]:

In a sense, the public-choice outlook at politics was meant to mirror the way welfare economists looked at markets. Just as the latter diagnosed real-world markets to be plagued by “failures” when compared with the ideal of perfectly working markets, public-choice economists insisted that real-world politics likewise “failed” when measured against its ideal image. Yet, unlike welfare economists, who considered such diagnosis of “market failures” a sufficient basis for recommending government intervention, public choice scholars did not draw symmetric conclusions. Rather, the point they sought to make was that measuring either real-world markets or real-world politics against unrealizable ideal standards is of no help whatsoever for answering the question of how problems a society faces ought to be dealt with. The only meaningful way to seek answers to such questions is, from a public choice perspective, to compare and evaluate feasible institutional arrangements, both in markets and in politics.

DBx: Pictured here are Jim Buchanan and Viktor Vanberg.