By Randall G. Holcombe
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Pp. xv + 200. $34.99 paperback.
Some scholars criticize the Public Choice approach for being too pessimistic about government (generally) and democracy (in particular). But James Buchanan, one of the founders of Public Choice, thought that democracy was not just useful, but indispensable for a prosperous and free society. In fact, he characterized Public Choice as conceiving of “politics as exchange” as the ideal system of government, and constitutional democracy was the institutional foundation of that system. Buchanan thought the democratic Leviathan should be harnessed, not caged.
Randall Holcombe—perhaps because he is James Buchanan’s student—has a simlar love/hate relationship with democracy as a process of discovery and governance. In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, which I reviewed in this journal’s Winter 2020/21 issue), Holcombe identified a direction of development for “political capitalism” where the system of “exchange” results in substantial rents to corporate actors and political elites, but at the cost of dissipating more than all the benefits created in bidding over the right to rewrite the rules. Political capitalism is not a mixed system, but rather a robust (though pathological)
