wedded to the idea that capitalist economics is indeed the best possible way of
arranging our economic life. From this position they arrive at the premise that
behaviour which would be considered less than optimal in an economic
system, must also be judged so in a political system. Not surprisingly the
public choice industry is almost entirely to be found in American academe,
although its founding fathers, who had rather more modest aims and more
tolerant moral preferences, were in fact British.
One characteristic of public choice theory is that it has to assume that the
motivations of important political actors, whether they be cabinet members,
party leaders or civil servants, are the same as those of leading businessmen. Or
rather, that they are the same as leading businessmen who are operating by
strict, perfect competition motives. Thus, a party leader is thought to be only
interested in getting elected; a bureaucrat who tries to enlarge the influence of
his department is compared unfavourably with the businessman, forgetting that
company growth is often more of an incentive to a corporate CEO than profit
maximization. Very little of interest to mainline political scientists has ever
come out of public choice theory, but the public choice theorists, with greater
mathematical training than most social scientists, are usually content to dismiss
this fact on the grounds that their colleagues cannot understand them.
Public Interest
Public interest is one of a family of related terms, withcommon goodand
general will, which are used to distinguish the selfish or personal interests or
cares of individuals or groups from the best interests of society as a whole. The
public interest refers to some policy or goal in which every member of a society
shares equally, regardless of wealth, position, status or power. Most political
theorists today are sceptical of the existence of more than a very few goals that
might, in the long term, really be seen as ‘in the public interest’. Partly this is
because there is almost always the possibility of arguing that, were society
reformed or changed in some fundamental way, then it would be obvious that
most people would not benefit from the relevant policy, or that the policy was
only solving a problem that need not exist at all were such reform to be carried
out. Thus a major campaign against crime, for example, otherwise a fairly
obvious example of a public interest (we are probably all equally likely to be
mugged), is not in the public interest in the long term if one takes the view that
violent crime is the result ofalienationcaused by an exploitative society. Even
military defence, often used as the single clearest example of a public interest,
can be attacked on the grounds that it is not in the interest of those badly
treated by society that the political system should be protected from its
enemies. However, the basic distinction between policies that are equally
useful to all citizens, and those that are only for the good of a few, is clearly
Public Interest