WHY PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY MATTERS. Folkbum recommends a Matt Taibbi column expressing little surprise that health insurance reform morphs into corporate welfare.

Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something.

Perhaps there is an alternate universe in which wise experts pass laws in the general interest to which wise citizens submit, recognizing that the limitations being imposed on their freedom of action are for their own good and for everybody else's.

It doesn't surprise me that in this universe, citizens, wise or otherwise, act in what they perceive to be their best interest, which includes but is not limited to influencing the actions wise experts, or whoever happens to be In Authority at the moment, might take. That, as I understand things, is at the basis of enumerating and limiting the powers of government: it being understood that interests will use the government to take advantage of voters, limitations imposed on the freedom of action of the legislators is for the good of the voters, and of the legislators.