Statists rule

The Economist includes a nice summary of Pigouvian taxes (or subsidies) as a straightforward remedy to the problem of uncompensated externalities. When market coordination is missing for any  reason, here is the (seemingly) simple policy fix.

But missing from the discussion (almost all such discussions) is the politics. Who administers the tax? How do they choose who and how much to tax, when and where.

Public choice economics points to a non-trivial answer:  crony capitalism and the threat of regulatory capture are always in play.

Today's NY Times Book Review includes a review of Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.  The print edition uses the lede, "Minority Rule: How the economist James McGill Buchanan laid out the game plan for the radical rights." This is turn-off laced with smear job. The electronic version switches to "How the Radical Right Played the Long Game and Won."

This is all bizarre and I have no plans to read the book. Don Boudreaux has been tirelessly exposing MacLean's errors and misconceptions at Cafe Hayek.

Are the problems of democracies and majorities really new and arcane for anyone?  We learn about the Bill of Rights at a very early age.  Limiting majoritarianism addresses a very old and well known problem and is not a part of some vast right wing conspiracy.

The Economist and a string of others are strangely resistant to public choice analysis, as the many discussions of the elixir of Pigouvian taxes indicates.

I do not get it. Are we to maintain a blind faith in the ability of elected officials to somehow divine the "public will"? And do so while maintaining a near-virginal innocence? And these are the people we see in the news all day?

How obsessed and blinkered a statist does one have to be to go on living and believing that way?