Another way of describing “Public Choice” is how Government employees use their position within Government to get what they want instead of concentrating on serving those that pay their salaries.
When government is spoken of explicitly by the intelligentsia, it is often depicted as if it is simply an expression of a Rousseauian “general will,” rather than a collection of politicians, bureaucrats and judges, responding to the incentives and constraints confronting politicians, bureaucrats and judges. That there should be a separate specialty as “public choice” economics, in which government officials’ actions are analyzed in terms of the incentives and constraints of their circumstances, is a sign of how atypical such an approach is among intellectuals.
-Prof. Thomas Sowell (Intellectuals and Society)
That SIG in the title, and the best-known example of it, are the Teachers Unions who, in both large and small cities and towns, are often the largest and most active voter block in their locality.
They can often control elections, budgets, and the working conditions to fit THEM over the interests of those that employ them – us.
The Pandemic has made it startlingly clear how unions made it both far more difficult for a lot of working families and brought home to those families by Zoom, GoToMeeting, Google, MS Teams, and other conferencing software what is really going on in schools.
And until the MSM decided “oops, have to protect our Left flank” and stopped reporting on it, we saw Parents going after School Boards for putting THEIR concerns into the trash can.
“Schoolies” (teachers, school workers, their friends, and families) have shown themselves to be THE largest voting block to both bully everyone else and gain a financial standing that is often much larger than the median income of the families in their locales.
Self-interest, indeed.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
