Whose interest?

Posted by Marc Hodak on February 4, 2008 under Revealed preference | Read the First Comment

McCain gets down to brass tacks:

“I can lead this nation and motivate all Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest,” he said while campaigning at a fire station in New Jersey.

So, what could he mean by that?

A) Some other individuals’ interest (not you or me or John McCain)
B) Some collective interest
C) John McCain’s self-interest

“A,” of course, is a dummy variable that makes this list comprehensively exhaustive; we can safely dismiss it out of hand. It’s highly unlikely that John McCain intends to make your or my self-interest subservient to some particular for John Smith’s self-interest.

“B” seems plausible. Almost everyone falls for it, but it can’t be “B.” “Interest” is a characteristic of consciousness, and a collective has no consciousness. No matter how much we’re “all in it together,” we can’t taste each other’s food, experience each other’s triumphs, or (no matter how much our politicians try) feel each other’s pain. Collective “interests” can be more loosely defined as the product of decision rules accounting for the interests of distinct individuals, but even with that semantically sloppy substitution of one kind of “interest” for another, that doesn’t save “B.” Decision rules can’t yield rational results without defaulting to the decisions of a dictator. In other words, the “collective interest,” if we attempt to glean it through a collective decision-making process like voting, is really just the leader’s interests in disguise, or, at best, the interests of the most powerful agenda-setters.

So, the correct answer is pretty close to “C.” Fortunately, it’s easy to understand what John McCain’s self-interest is; John McCain is all about getting elected. No one gets this far in politics by accident, without being acutely, intensely aware of where their personal interests intersect with the voter’s willingness to hand them power–not McCain or Romney or Hillary or Obama. Each of these politicians has survived this far in an extraordinarily demanding tournament for power by selling the interests that motivate them as somehow more noble and worthy than yours or mine. Amazingly enough, they achieved this by disguising their self-interest as “something larger than our self-interests.” And, more amazingly enough, tens of millions of individuals buy it.

UPDATE: BTW, Mr. McCain, Reagan would not have said that. His pitch was about how the government should serve the people (largely by getting out of their way), not the other way around.