Working for Change in Democratic Politics

Brother, can you paradigm, or spare a signature?

In a recent post, blogger Janet Bufton writes:

The second way toward lasting change is to do the persuasive work that would have brought them [the changes] about—or the best approximation that the people can bear—through democratic politics. This method does not save anyone from the problems in politics that public choice so usefully identifies. But unlike a solution that prevents politics from breaking out, democratic persuasion keeps power dispersed and treats people as equals, with principles of motion of their own.

What I got from her post is that one can be so trapped in the public choice paradigm that one doesn’t even consider the idea of working through the system to effect good change or stop bad change. I’ll be posting in the near future about a few experiences I had through the political system, mainly in preventing bad changes.

But for now, I’ll tell one story about my trying to effect good change. It’s also about someone who was so imbued with the public choice view that he wouldn’t take even one second to support a change that he agreed with. Janet’s post caused me to remember this.

In the summer of 1973, I was a summer intern with President Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers. I was from Canada and was on an F-1 student visa. (I mention that because it’s conceivable to me, in retrospect, that I unknowingly broke a law, if there was one, against political activism by a non-permanent resident.)

I thought it would be a good idea to write a succinct statement calling for ending the U.S. postal monopoly and send it to someone in Congress. So I wrote one up and sent it to Milton Friedman for his signature. A few days later, I got Milton’s signed copy in the mail. He recommended a few other economists to send it to and so I did. I also had my own list of people whose work I respected, people I thought would certainly agree with the idea.

One of them was a young economics professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His name was Thomas Ireland. Here’s his CV. He was generous enough with his time to write me a letter explaining why he wouldn’t sign. It wasn’t because he disagreed with the goal. He agreed. But, Ireland explained, workers in the U.S. Post office were a concentrated interest group and we consumers were a dispersed interest and so there was no point in pushing for such a change. I’m guessing he assumed that I didn’t know this argument. But in the year I took off to study economics on my own (1970-71), which I’ve written about in The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey, I had come across public choice and had read not only Buchanan and Tullock, but also Anthony Downs. It was Downs who made the argument that Ireland made.

Here’s what I found strange. It had to have taken Ireland at least 3 minutes to write the few paragraphs in which he explained the Downs concentrated benefit/dispersed cost paradigm. That’s 180 seconds. It would have taken him about 1 second to sign the statement. He didn’t. That’s how tightly he held on to the public choice paradigm.