Public Choice from an Austrian Perspective

Tate Fegley surveys the big ideas of public choice—politics analyzed with the tools of economics—and shows where an Austrian approach sharpens them. Rational ignorance, concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, rent-seeking, the transitional gains trap, budget-maximizing bureaucracies, and the logic of collective action each get a turn, illustrated with sugar tariffs, million-dollar taxi medallions, and Sowell's Benedict Arnold thought experiment. Fegley's throughline: public choice is strongest when it drops the neoclassical assumptions of perfect knowledge and static equilibrium and grounds itself in Austrian subjectivism.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.