In The Calculus of Consent Buchanan and his colleague Gordon Tullock had employed an assumption of methodological individualism and the tools of basic game theory to arrive at the conclusion that “majority voting will tend to cause overinvestment in the public sector relative to the private sector.” In his work on regulatory agencies, Stigler had determined that industries in demo cratic societies tended to capture the entities created to regulate them. Both analyses depicted politicians as actors who pursued their rational selfinterest, and both found that the inherent logic of the po liti cal pro cess led them to implement policies that were against the best interests of the broader public.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 481