Over at the Library of Economics and Liberty, there’s a section on public choice theory.
Here’s a definition from that website:
As James Buchanan artfully defined it, public choice is “politics without romance.” The wishful thinking it displaced presumes that participants in the political sphere aspire to promote the common good. In the conventional “public interest” view, public officials are portrayed as benevolent “public servants” who faithfully carry out the “will of the people.” In tending to the public’s business, voters, politicians, and policymakers are supposed somehow to rise above their own parochial concerns.
In modeling the behavior of individuals as driven by the goal of utility maximization – economics jargon for a personal sense of well-being – economists do not deny that people care about their families, friends, and community. But public choice, like the economic model of rational behavior on which it rests, assumes that people are guided chiefly by their own self-interests and, more important, that the motivations of people in the political process are no different from those of people in the steak, housing, or car market. They are the same human beings, after all. As such, voters “vote their pocketbooks,” supporting candidates and ballot propositions they think will make them personally better off; bureaucrats strive to advance their own careers; and politicians seek election or reelection to office. Public choice, in other words, simply transfers the rational actor model of economic theory to the realm of politics.
There’s nothing new about this — either as a field or as a practical understanding. (In fact, it’s clear that America’s Founders understood self-interest in politics very well. It’s impossible, for example, to understand clearly a collection like the Federalist Papers otherwise.)
Unfortunately, there’s nothing new about the opposing, airy, and vainglorious notion that public officials are benevolent “public servants” who faithfully carry out the “will of the people.” The politician/bureaucrat-as-altruist is a false, self-serving notion. A public official espousing these airy notions is either dishonest, dim, or deluded. (That’s why someone who declares, “I represent this or that constituency, etc.” is admirable. So much better to say: here’s what I advocate, specifically, narrowly, concretely.)
Yet, in some places great and small (Whitewater, Wisconsin being among them), the notion of public office as a nearly holy order persists. It’s no more believable than the now-discarded notion that the earth must be flat. It persists as much from a bureaucrat’s vanity as anything else. (When politicians and bureaucrats describe themselves as though they were of the clergy, they don’t lift themselves up; they bring the clergy down.)
America’s greatest men and women have always been serious, thoughtful, and honest. They deserve better from us than officials’ airy & selfish ideas, servilely accepted.
A private man or woman who contributes to the community without office or official position is preferable to a career bureaucrat. We have many such private men and women, but not so many as we need, as the loss of even one is a hardship.