Main Street, Wall Street, and City Hall: exploring their entanglement

Abstract

It is customary for economists to conceptualize politics as operating independently of or orthogonal to markets. In contrast, this book recognizes that politics is a peculiar form of commercial practice that is organized through peculiar forms of transaction. Those transactions are undertaken by political enterprises that lack some of the tools of economic calculation that commercial enterprises use. What results is a form of parasitical relationship between market enterprises and political enterprises. The political portion of this entangled system of political economy resembles a shell game in that the language by which political programs are described is one that misdirects the attention of observers.