Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 186 of James Gwartney’s insightful 2013 paper “The Public Choice Revolution and Principles of Economics Texts,” which is chapter 13 of Public Choice, Past and Present: The Legacy of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (Dwight R. Lee, ed., 2013):​

In essence, public choice applies the tools of economics to both the market and political processes. Without having knowledge about the operation of both, one is in a poor position to understand how alternative institutions and policies will affect outcomes.

DBx: Indeed so. Yet most economists continue to ignore public choice or to discount its significance. The sad result is that most economists have no adequate understanding of how governments work in reality compared to how markets work in reality.