Why Government Institutions Fail to Deliver on Their Promises: The Public Choice Explanation
Chairman Issa, Ranking Member Cummings, thank you for the opportunity to testify today regarding the limitations of government intervention.
Despite Washington’s recent focus on the disastrous Affordable Care Act website rollout, policymakers are missing what the rollout glitches symbolize: the fundamental flaws that imbue government intervention.
The work of public choice economists such as Nobel laureate James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Mancur Olson, and William Niskanen has shown that, despite good intentions and lavish use of taxpayer resources, government solutions are not only unlikely to solve most of our problems–they often make problems worse.
Public Choice Economics: Politics without Romance
Congress spends a great deal of time discussing the need to address market failures such as monopolies and pollution.
However, even when such a problem does exist, the policies implemented to address it are often ineffective or undesirable.1 That’s because, as public choice economists have pointed out, while there may be market failures, there are also government failures. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, popularized in his famous essay “Public Choice: Politics without Romance,” James Buchanan explains why looking to government for solutions often results in more harm than good.2
