Is Government Like These Signs?

Why buy into the tenets of public choice (politics-as-exchange, rational choice, methodological individualism)? While it doesn't give us a romantic vision of the world we want to rule--and I use the word "rule" deliberately, noting with H.L. Mencken that "the urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it"--it gives us the tools we need to understand the world we inhabit. We can get a lot of explanatory power by thinking of a government as a unitary revenue maximizer (Douglass North did), but that only goes so far. Past some point, it's a mistake to think of a GOVERNMENT as a unitary actor with coherent goals. One government agency is putting up a sign that says "DO NOT ENTER." Another puts up a sign prohibiting U-turns. A third puts up a sign saying "NO STOPPING ANY TIME."

You laugh until you're looking at a cop asking, "do you know why I pulled you over?"

Near the end of 2023, I called this the "Can Conundrum" based on a few articles in the Wall Street Journal describing government agencies and programs working at cross purposes. It probably appears more frequently than we think.