Selling Anchovy Ice Cream

Check out this piece by Russell Roberts of George Mason University, Selling Anchovy Ice Cream. If you would prefer to listen, then here is the radio broadcast. I recently shared some of my own thoughts on this topic in the comments section of Russell Roberts' blog, Cafe Hayek.

It is worth remembering that what politicians say and what politicians do, are quite different. The purpose to both what they say and what they do are to gain and maintain power, but the incentives acting on each are not one and the same. If you take everything which politicians say at face value, then you would expect each administration to be radically different from its predecessor, but this is rarely the case. The rhetoric changes, of course, but the actual policies change very little.

I find it a disturbing tendency of political discourse, particularly in the mainstream media, to treat each electoral candidate as a potential King or Queen, who would wield a royal prerogative to override and implement any policy they might want on a whim. Thankfully, the reality of political office is quite different to the fantasy implicit in much of the rhetoric of the electoral race, a reality of institutions and incentives that will be almost identical for whoever wins, and which will produce similar results.