This article by Randall Holcombe suggests that “the public chocie revolution has been stopped short of total victory” “because the lessons of public choice are ignored by policy makers and academicians, who too often argue that government will pursue the optimal policy even when there is insufficient information to find it, and when policy makers do not have the incentive to implement it even if they know what it is.” The way in which this is wrong clarifies something for me.

I hereby call on some libertarian-sympathetic graduate student who is smarter than I am to undertake an Arendtian critique of public choice theory– not as being predictively false, but as being the kind of third-person behavioralism that it makes no sense to think about agents adopting in a first-person way.