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WEEK OF DECEMBER 7, 2025
** This Week on Public Choice and the Dynamics of Risk
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** Free Markets, Public Pensions & America’s Appetite for Risk
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This week’s feature is our newest episode of The Future of Liberty, which reflects on America’s evolving relationship to risk in a wide-ranging conversation between Gov. Mitch Daniels and Allison Schrager, economist, author and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Listen Now ([link removed])
** What insights might the public-choice tradition offer about managing political risk and preserving a society in which individuals can govern themselves?
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** “Market competition is the only form of organization which can afford a large measure of freedom to the individual.”
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** – Frank Knight
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Public-choice analysis offers a compelling framework for understanding the promises and perils of life in a free society. What safeguards help preserve liberty when power, information, and risk are unevenly shared? This week, we explore these questions through a selection of Liberty Fund pieces that illuminate the complexities of collective decision-making, the vulnerabilities that can emerge within democratic systems, and the enduring importance of building institutions that channel human action toward freedom rather than coercion.
** Articles
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** Aurelian Craiutu, “Tocqueville’s New Science of Politics Revisited” ([link removed])
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Aurelian Craiutu, Online Library of Liberty ([link removed])
A close reading of Craiutu’s account of Tocqueville’s new science of politics shows how Tocqueville anticipated public-choice insights by examining incentives, institutional dynamics, and risks shaping political life.
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** Risk, Uncertainty and Profit 100 Years Later ([link removed])
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Alex J. Polluck, Law & Liberty ([link removed])
A revisiting of Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit shows how the limits of prediction shape economic action and expose societies to risks that neither markets nor political institutions can fully control.
** Public Pensions, Public Choice, and the War Against the Young ([link removed])
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John O. McGinnis, Law & Liberty ([link removed])
Public-choice theory reminds us that when political incentives favor short-term gains, governance costs fall on those least able to resist, and the pension crisis shows how promises burden the young tomorrow.
** Public Choice Doesn’t Require Us to Assume People Are Evil ([link removed])
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Art Carden, Econlib ([link removed])
Rather than assuming malice in public life, this essay demonstrates how public choice uses everyday self-interest to account for the risks embedded in political institutions and practices.
** Risk, Uncertainty, and the Lies We Tell Ourselves about the Difference ([link removed])
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James R. Rogers, Law & Liberty ([link removed])
Tracing the gap between measurable risk and uncertainty, this review shows how quantifying the unquantifiable breeds misjudgment and leaves markets and political institutions exposed to failures they cannot withstand.
** Podcasts
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** Russ Roberts and Luca Dellanna on Risk, Ruin, and Ergodicity ([link removed])
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EconTalk ([link removed])
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** Philip Hamburger on the Unlawful Administrative State ([link removed])
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The Law & Liberty Podcast ([link removed])
** Videos
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** The Intellectual Portrait Series: A Conversation with James M. Buchanan ([link removed])
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Online Library of Liberty ([link removed])
In this wide-ranging conversation, Nobel-laureate economist James M. Buchanan reflects on the foundations of public choice, outlining how his exchange theory of economics and constitutional thought explains the ways individual incentives carry over into collective political arenas and create the risks embedded in public institutions.
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