Brother, can you consider the paradigm or refrain from signing?
Blogger Janet Bufton writes in a recent post:
The second path to lasting change is to do the work of convincing them. [the changes] through democratic politics, or about the best approximation that people can tolerate. This method does not save anyone from the political problems that public elections usefully identify. However, unlike solutions that prevent political outbreaks, democratic persuasion maintains the decentralization of power and treats people equally with their own movement principles.
What I took away from her post is that people can get so caught up in the public choice paradigm that they don’t even consider the idea of leveraging the system to bring about good change or prevent bad change. That means there is. In the near future, I will be posting about some of my experiences through the political system, mainly about preventing bad change.
But for now, I would like to talk about one thing that I am trying to make a positive change. It’s also a story about someone so steeped in public choice thinking that he won’t take even a second to support the changes he agrees with. I was reminded of this when I saw Janet’s post.
In the summer of 1973, I was a summer intern at President Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers. I am from Canada and had an F-1 student visa. (I mention this because looking back, even if there was a law prohibiting political activities by non-permanent residents, they may have violated it without knowing it.)
I thought it would be a good idea to write a brief statement calling for an end to the U.S. postal monopoly and send it to someone in Congress. So I wrote it and sent it to Milton Friedman and asked him to sign it. A few days later, Milton’s signed copy arrived in the mail. I encouraged some other economists to send me this book, so I did. I also had my own list of people whose work I respect, people who I thought would definitely agree with this idea.
One of them was a young economics professor at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. His name was Thomas Ireland. This is his resume. He took the time to write me a letter explaining why he would not sign. It wasn’t because he didn’t agree with the goal. Agreed. However, Mr. Ireland explained that because U.S. Postal workers are a concentrated interest group and we, the consumers, are a dispersed interest, there is no point in pushing for such a change. I think he thought I didn’t know about this argument. But in the years I started studying economics on my own (1970-1971), which I wrote about in The Joy of Freedom: The Adventures of an Economist, I discovered public choice and the Buchanan And not just Tulloch, but Anthony Downs as well. The Irish side claimed Mr. Downs.
Here’s what I wondered. In Ireland, it would have taken me at least three minutes to write a few paragraphs explaining Downs’s concentrated profits and distributed costs paradigm. That’s 180 seconds. It would have taken him about a second to sign the statement. he didn’t. To that extent, he remained firmly committed to the public choice paradigm.
