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Mike Munger

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Mike Munger is a professor of political science, economics, and public policy at Duke University, a senior fellow of the Independent Institute, a writer for the American Institute for Economic Research, and a former president and chair of the Public Choice Society. He was the Libertarian candidate for governor of North Carolina in the 2008 presidential election and worked as a staff economist for the Federal Trade Commission during the Reagan administration. He appeared on The Bob Zadek Show to discuss campaign finance, Public Choice economics, cronyism, and the constitutional limits on government power Troubleshooting the Constitution (2022).

Campaign strategy and party organization

In a 2015 episode on political money, Munger argued that party organization, not candidate quality, drives turnout. He dated the shift to 1828 and the election of Andrew Jackson, with Martin Van Buren contributing by 1840 to building parties as organizations. What a party does, he said, is get its members to go vote; he compared it to a Duke–UNC basketball game, where the matchup rather than the individual players draws a crowd. In 1840 that meant a wagon and a barrel of whiskey; now it means an earnest young person knocking on doors to ask whether you have voted. Either way, Munger said, the question is whether an organization can induce its partisans to reach the polls, and that has nothing to do with the abilities of the candidate Who Wants to Buy a Politician? With Mike Munger (2015).

From that premise he drew a campaign finance proposal: no contributions to candidates at all, only contributions to parties. His reasoning was that voters are really choosing a party rather than a candidate, and that parties given the money would have more incentive to state a program. He added that this is not what anyone on the left wants, because eliminating money from politics would advantage unions and other labor organizations that tend to have more volunteers — a position he called craven. He gave MichaelMunger.com, a blog called Kids Prefer Cheese, and the Twitter handle @mungowitz as places to follow his work Who Wants to Buy a Politician? With Mike Munger (2015).

Public Choice theory

Munger described Public Choice as an approach to political science rather than to economics, one that refuses to assume virtue or good action on the part of the state. It was devised in the late 1950s and early 1960s against a functional political science that described how the President and the Congress serve us; Public Choice replied that government is not aggregate institutions but individual people with their own goals and incentives. The field studies the interaction between rules for choosing and the likely behavior of the real human beings who occupy offices, merging psychology, political science, and economics, with aggregation as a central concept Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019).

He contrasted aggregation in markets with aggregation in politics. In a market, the baker makes bread and the butcher provides meat, and the price mechanism means self-interested actors benefit others; Public Choice asks whether the same is true in politics, and his answer was generally no unless the rules are good. He credited the U.S. Constitution with a set of protections for political and economic rights that led politicians acting in their own self-interest to benefit the public interest, calling it either a work of genius or great good fortune. The simple characterization he offered was that you cannot assume the self-interest of members of government and the public interest of citizens are identical Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019).

Cronyism as a problem of government

Munger equated crony capitalism with bribery writ large, but when Bob Zadek objected that bribery is illegal, Munger agreed and drew the distinction sharply: bribery is illegal, while cronyism is not illegal, only immoral. The problem, he said, is that government makes these favors legally available — and democratic governments in particular do so. He offered Singapore as an example of a capitalist country that is not a democracy, and asked why anyone would not expect democratic governments to hand out favors. Because accepting a bribe or a campaign contribution would require good people, and Public Choice holds that good people are the one thing we cannot assume, the remedy must be rules that prevent bad action even when officials lack a strong moral sense Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019).

He was careful to say that self-interested officials are not per se bad. What becomes bad is the intersection with a system in which favors can be offered to capitalist companies. People pursuing their own interest within institutions designed to channel that interest toward the public good is the goal; assuming altruism, he said, is the path to destruction. He also noted a paradox: Public Choice simultaneously says you cannot assume good people will be in government and that good people are needed, or else favors will be offered to corporations Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019).

The Munger Test and the COVID response

In a 2022 episode, Munger applied Public Choice to pandemic policy and to the question of who should be in charge of healthcare. He described a verbal test: when someone says the state should be in charge of something, take out the words “the state” and substitute actual politicians elected in a system dominated by organized private interests such as unions and corporations. If the answer to “who should run healthcare” is scientists, he said, that means suspending democracy and letting scientists act without democratic accountability — which he called fascism; if it is not scientists, then it is Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi, actual real people. The point was that people should be more humble about handing authority to the state Troubleshooting the Constitution (2022).

He defined Public Choice in that episode as the science of understanding institutions in terms of the incentives they create, rather than in terms of the motivations one would like to attribute to the people who work in the system. He stated flatly that it is simply not true that politicians are public-interested. Bob Zadek’s introduction to that episode noted Munger’s earlier book Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy, his senior fellowship at the Independent Institute, and his writing for the American Institute for Economic Research Troubleshooting the Constitution (2022).

Across episodes

The same question — whether government officials can be trusted to act for the public — runs through the 2017, 2019, and 2022 episodes, and the treatment does not change: in 2017 Munger framed Public Choice as the importance of rules and praised a nurse who invoked the protection of the individual against the state; in 2019 he located the cronyism problem in government’s legal power to grant favors; in 2022 he reduced the argument to the Munger Test. The 2015 episode touches the topic only through party organization and campaign finance, and the excerpts show no development between the earlier and later treatments.

What the sources do not cover

The excerpts do not describe Munger’s early life, education, or academic appointments beyond the titles given in the episode introductions. They do not report the outcome of the Utah confrontation between the nurse and the police detective, or the legal basis on which it was resolved. They do not state what Tomorrow 3.0 argues beyond its subtitle and its framing as a third economic revolution, nor do they give the contents of Is Capitalism Sustainable? beyond the cronyism discussion. The excerpts also break off mid-sentence in several places, and nothing is reported from those passages.

Episodes

4 appearances, 2015–2023.

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