A strange story echoed Newsweek it suggests that most people have never thought about how democratic politics works, or perhaps confuse politics as they wish it should be. The magazine writes (“Donald Trump Threatens With New Investigation,” May 11, 2024):
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, has threatened former President Donald Trump with a new investigation into his reported promises to Big Oil.
The Washington Post reported this week on a deal that Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, reportedly offered to top oil executives at a Mar-a-Lago dinner last month – to raise $1 billion for his campaign and would roll back a number of President Joe Biden’s environmental laws and block new regulations, according to for people with dinner experience.
According to the SubmitSources, Trump said giving him $1 billion would be a “deal,” because of taxes and regulations they won’t have to worry about if he’s in office. …
“Put those things together and it starts to look very sinister,” Whitehouse said.
In fact, bribes, solicited or offered, are the bread and butter of politicians. They promise political favors in return for some kind of support or another, or they respond to the support of interest groups with positive interventions. These deals represent the political form of economic exchange, which is why social choice theorists speak of the “political market.”
Joe Biden openly seeks the support of labor unions and members to restore “worker-centered” policies. Perhaps Donald Trump is too obvious. And he’s playing the game on the side of different special interests—though, as any celebrity worth his salt, he’s also trying to bribe workers at the expense of consumers and importing businesses. Qualifications are necessary: political bribery aimed at extending freedom of contract to everyone equally—which we don’t often see these days—should not be condemned; it is the system that creates this need that is discarded.
Political bribery also occurs when a politician offers a certain class of voters to favor their interests or ideas or feelings—and they are often the same thing—in exchange for their support of his personal interests in power gains. Bribery is at the heart of big politics. The consequences for public and private ethics, and for the survival of a free society, are far from trivial.
The more powerful the state, the more widespread such official corruption is. A defining feature of the classical tradition of liberalism and liberalism has been opposition to state power, democratic or not.
James Buchanan, who received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986, proposed one solution through a “legal political economy” developed on the basis of public choice economics. The solution revolves around constitutional limits on everyday politics and is specifically aimed at stopping the gross redistribution game and the exploitation of political losers by political winners. Buchanan and his collaborators argue that it is only at the level of constitutive rules that are unanimously accepted in the visible social contract that political exchange can be non-exploitative; at this level (“constitutional stage”), he says, politics is like an economic transaction in the interest of everyone. It is not exploitative because, in theory, any individual can veto a system of laws that would have greater costs than benefits. about him. (See his The Limits of Freedomhis life The Calculus of Consence and Gordon Tullock; and his own The Reason for the Laws and Geoffrey Brennan; links to my reviews of these books.)
The most serious attack and rebellion against big politics in the open sense of freedom can be found in the writings of another economist and political philosopher, Anthony de Jasay, including his aptly titled book. We are against politics (link to my review).
If we wish to piece together a picture of the main strands of liberal political philosophy in the 20th century, we might add Friedrich Hayek’s critique of mass democracy. In the pursuit of expediency (cost-benefit analysis sounds great), democratic politics destroys the common law that created the self-regulated social order. (See notably his Laws and Order again The Mirage of Social Justice; links in my reviews.)
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