"Power is contingent," he said.
"The power of these client groups turned out to be stronger than I
realized. The client groups know how to make themselves heard. The problem
is, unorganized groups can't play in this game."- David Stockman,
(Ronald Reagan's Director of the Office of Budget and Management in 1981 in a
December 1981 piece in The Atlantic by William Greider entitled "The Education of David Stockman")
Certainly another classic collective action problem... whether it's the "commons" really depends. One might think of the federal budget (or different interest groups' access to tax revenues) as a "common pool resource", then interest groups have incentives to play the allocation game.
ReplyDelete