A licence to meddle

Thursday October 27, 2011

Eamonn Butler explains the ‘public choice’ problem of how campaigners get politicians to interfere with our lives

Not content with advising us to moderate our alcohol intake, doctors are now telling us that we should have two or three completely alcohol-free days a week. They’re quite right of course, and otherwise hard-drinking medic friends of mine do precisely this. The liver is a very resilient organ, they say (after all, its job is to clean up all the garbage you throw into yourself), but it does need the odd day to recover.

Still, if we don’t watch it, the politicians will soon be declaring Mondays and Thursdays alcohol-free and making the pubs shut their doors. An exaggeration, perhaps, but we’ve seen no less absurd and illiberal things before. I cite the smoking ban in evidence: even if you, your chums and all the staff around you are perfectly happy, even if the air conditioning is so fantastic that the air is cleaner inside than on the street outside, you still can’t light up in a pub. That (and ridiculous employment regulations) is why, by the time the politicians do close the pubs on Mondays and Thursdays, most of them will probably have gone out of business anyway.

It’s what economists call the public choice problem. Small interest groups can have a political power far beyond their numbers, because their interests are concentrated, whereas the general public’s interests are – well, more general, more diffused. Small groups who want to dictate how other people should live – folk who hate tobacco smoke, or want to save us from fatty food or drugs or binge-drinking, are very focused in what they seek. And that makes them very good at manipulating the political process. It means they think it is worth their time, energy and money campaigning for these things, causing a fuss, phoning journalists, writing in to the newspapers. That’s why small pressure groups are so visible.

By contrast, nearly everyone enjoys a drop now and again, but that’s probably all that drinkers have in common. As consumers, they are harder to organise. And as taxpayers too: for the same reasons, interest groups are very motivated and effective at getting government grants and subsidies to promote their shared concern – getting taxpayer funds for climate-change research, anti-smoking groups etc. Each proposal may add a few pence to people’s tax bill, but that is hardly enough to bring taxpayers out onto the barricades. They do not have the same strength of interest. The trouble is that those pennies add up as one group, then the next, then the next, then the next… all raid their pockets.

The politicians, meanwhile, are happy to give in to the lobby groups because it is they – and not the general mass of consumers or taxpayers – who are hitting the headlines. And the interest groups form coalitions so that their political impact grows even stronger. You campaign for my pet measure, I will campaign for yours. And in Parliament it is the same – MPs cajole their friends to support their proposal for some new law or regulation, fully expecting to have to repay the favour when their friends have some favourite measure to push through. The result is that we get more law and more regulation than anyone really wants. That’s politics.

Eamonn Butler is director of the Adam Smith Institute and author of Public Choice – A Primer (IEA, forthcoming)