Cafe Hayek: politics differs categorically from markets

MD: DBx has been working very hard on helping Jim Buchanan to become a Mises Monk saint. Lets see what pearls he brings us today.

 

… is from page 56 of my late Nobel laureate colleague Jim Buchanan‘s 1979 article “Politics Without Romance,” as it is reprinted in volume 1 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan: The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty:

But politics differs categorically from markets in that, in political competition, there are mutually exclusive sets of losers and winners.  

MD: Yeh … like with the Harlem Globe Trotters and the Washington Generals are in basketball competition.

Only one candidate or party wins; all others lose.  Only one party is the governing party.  One way of stating the basic difference here is to say that, in economic exchange, decisions are made at the margin, in terms of more or less, whereas in politics, decisions are made among mutually exclusive alternatives, in terms of all-or-none prospects.

MD: I vote that Buchanan disqualifies himself for sainthood with that quote. He didn’t know theater when it was bashing him across his nose.

DBx: In markets, consumers who don’t like, say, the service or style of Trump hotels can avoid those hotels and instead stay at the Four Seasons, Hyatt, Holiday Inn, or wherever – or not stay at hotels at all – even while other consumers continue to stay in Trump hotels.  In politics, every U.S. citizen must live under a Trump presidency if Trump convinces a significant sub-set of U.S. citizens to vote for him.

MD: That’s what you’re going to get when you employ democracy in a fashion in which it has no hope of working … i.e. with more than 50 people involved.

And unlike with hotels (and other goods and services supplied by the market), no two presidents or prime ministers or senators or governors actually perform in competition with each other side by side, at the same time, under the same circumstances.  It’s much more difficult to judge the performance of a politician than it is to judge the performance of a private business.

MD: Iterative secession. The more spaces we have, the chance we have of finding a space that is corrigible to us as individuals. Globalism is the exact wrong way to go.