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The professor paces with purpose before his pupils. āAsk yourself,ā he intones, āwho should decide things: Private investors who can go bankrupt and are responsible for the risks they take, or the State?ā A student offers, perhaps tentatively, perhaps with confidence, āWell, the State, because it wants what is good for us in the long run. The market is just about selfishness.ā The professorās steel trap of logic slams shut. āWhere is this state you speak of?ā he retorts. When they say, āThe state should have the power to direct resources, and the market should be suppressed,ā they should remember to take out āThe stateā and replace it with āPeople chosen by parties and elected by voting dominated by large corporate interests.ā
āIn fact,ā he continues:
you should replace āThe stateā with āDonald Trump.ā Say it with me: āI think that corporate CEOs and professional investors should have all their funds taken away at gunpoint, and then all investment decisions, for the whole U.S. population, should be made by Donald Trump. He wants what is best for all of us, and he has a longer-term perspective.ā
This tale is neither satire, nor a liberal fever-dream, nor a surreptitiously recorded exchange. It is the proudly self-reported pedagogy of Michael Munger, professor of economics and political science at Duke University, former president of the Public Choice Society, and a former editor of the journal Public Choice. His binary choice between āprivate investmentā and āthe whims of Donald Trumpā to ādecide thingsā is a perversion of so-called āpublic choice theoryāāone all too familiar to anyone who engages in policy debates with market fundamentalists.
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