In a thoughtful editorial praising the performance of a few politicians while in office, the News & Observer's Jim Jenkins remarks:
In all these cases (in politics enemies are inevitably made, so not all will agree) we had people who enjoyed the game of the race and building a base, but who liked the service, too. Surely they had egos, and enjoyed power. But they wore it well.
And they don't deserve to be joined with the scoundrels whenever a political roundtable is convened.
Agreed. (About his final statement, not necessarily about the specific individuals he cites.)
Only the most fundamentalist of anarchists would argue that all politicians are always scoundrels and we should therefore have no government. And they delegitimize their argument by stating so.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are statists who, while not admitting all men (or women) are angels, believe that government with plenary powers can and should work, you just need the "right" people in charge.
To the contrary, as public choice theory explains, human beings are fallible: they possess limited and decentralized knowledge & information, and are by their nature self-interested.
The question is not whether individuals act at times out of altruism or are eternally self-absorbed. Instead, it is asking, under which institutional structures - market capitalism (the real capitalism, what we currently have bolsters my argument) or a collectivized and centrally controlled system through government (even democratically elected government) - are individuals best motivated to promote the interests of their fellow human being? This isn't to say that it's an all-or-nothing outcome; we lie along a spectrum between anarchy (all market exchanges and no government) and Leviathan (complete government control and no markets). Public choice theory simply seeks to understand and explain, at what point along that spectrum - what mix of markets and government - are the constraints strongest for minimizing self-serving behavior.
Under which system are the incentives most likely to promote discovery and innovation? Under which system are the constraints most effective for each person to serve the interests of others and sufficient enough to bring about a peaceful social order and improve the human condition? In other words, under which system is individual behavior best constrained so as to deter serving one's self at the expense of others, and best rewarded for promoting the interests of others as well as one's self?
Without question it is market capitalist institutions - albeit with limited constraints - that channel self-interested behavior in a way that promotes the interests of others. For disbelievers, show me a country suffering from too much market capitalism and not enough centralized command and control planning. I can't come up with one. But the history of humankind is littered with examples of large numbers of people suffering from too little capitalism and too much centralized command and control decision making. In this country, Edgar Browning argues that per capita GDP would be 25% greater today had we not embarked on the path that created the welfare/entitlement state.
This is not to say that public choice theorists accept no role for government, though some certainly might. It simply means that given man's fallibility, his lack of complete knowledge & information, and his inclination to pursue his own self-interest, it is folly to bestow plenary powers upon an individual or a group of individuals and expect them to use such powers judiciously and to best serve the interests of society at-large rather than him or herself.
Because we are human we are all fallible. When individuals make decisions in competitive markets, it is that competition that allows them to almost always escape outcomes potentially unfavorable to them. When decisions are made collectively through the political process, however, they are rarely ever able to escape outcomes potentially unfavorable to them, except at great cost. We can therefore expect people operating within a competitive market structure to generally - not always - act in ways that promote the interests of others while serving their own interests (i.e., a positive sum game), but when operating within a collectivized and centrally planned system, they are more likely - not always - to pursue more narrowly defined individual interests at the expense of others (i.e., a zero or negative sum game).
