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What is it about government budgets? Why with all the partisan sound and fury are they so similar in content and rhetoric? The politicians don’t mean to do it or know they have. So who’s writing these things?

It could be Anthony de Jasay. He’s a Hungarian-born economist and political philosopher with no public post. But his 1985 book The State predicted the current situation with uncanny precision

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The State isn’t exactly a smooth read. But it’s an important book, because it sets out to imagine political life from the point of view of government, a sprawling, messy corporate entity full of self-interested people confronting voters who are “political hedonists,” that is, who understand good government to mean government that gives them stuff.

Competition among politicians seeking power and prestige, de Jasay argued, would lead them to promise ever more attractive benefits to an ever-wider electoral coalition while alienating as few people as possible. And public servants seeking salary, security and trouble-free days would implement and refine those pledges.