The problem here is that the only institution that does have an interest in the long-term health of the entire population and does have the ability to overrule the interests of the coal plant owners—the state—is crippled under a liberal democracy because its members only have an interest in being re-elected.
Actually I think the state’s interest in the long-term health of the population isn’t really an enduring feature, its more of a plausibly useful strategy.
A state can reasonably defined as a local monopolist of violence, generally speaking its long term interest is basically to maintain that monopoly. There are imaginable scenarios where this involves hurting the long-term health of its entire population if say the result makes the population more docile or if they improve rent extraction that the state needs to maintain its monopoly ect.
Its even possible to imagine stable states that hurt the long-term health of their citizens so much that they die too fast for fertility to compensate, or rather infertility rates rise until they are sub replacement. Since its easy to import new workers (who may or may not be citizens). The obvious example of this seems to be places where the state relied on the slave owning class and the nature of the work produced by the slaves was so demanding it required constant new imports to maintain populations. A hypothetical (or so I hope) example would be a state using dietary and industrial regulations to ensure that the population as a whole was more docile than average due to hormonal and developmental changes while suffering greater infertility. The slow bleeding of citizens seem easy to replace with hard working first generation immigrants who might not be motivated to cause a fuss over any faults in the system because the system is overall much better than the one they came from.
I’m pretty sure public choice theory does not adopt the intentional stance with regards to institutions, and so does not assume that they have interests.
The problem here is that the only institution that does have an interest in the long-term health of the entire population and does have the ability to overrule the interests of the coal plant owners—the state—is crippled under a liberal democracy because its members only have an interest in being re-elected.
Actually I think the state’s interest in the long-term health of the population isn’t really an enduring feature, its more of a plausibly useful strategy.
A state can reasonably defined as a local monopolist of violence, generally speaking its long term interest is basically to maintain that monopoly. There are imaginable scenarios where this involves hurting the long-term health of its entire population if say the result makes the population more docile or if they improve rent extraction that the state needs to maintain its monopoly ect.
Its even possible to imagine stable states that hurt the long-term health of their citizens so much that they die too fast for fertility to compensate, or rather infertility rates rise until they are sub replacement. Since its easy to import new workers (who may or may not be citizens). The obvious example of this seems to be places where the state relied on the slave owning class and the nature of the work produced by the slaves was so demanding it required constant new imports to maintain populations. A hypothetical (or so I hope) example would be a state using dietary and industrial regulations to ensure that the population as a whole was more docile than average due to hormonal and developmental changes while suffering greater infertility. The slow bleeding of citizens seem easy to replace with hard working first generation immigrants who might not be motivated to cause a fuss over any faults in the system because the system is overall much better than the one they came from.
I’m pretty sure public choice theory does not adopt the intentional stance with regards to institutions, and so does not assume that they have interests.