2)

Respond to the response below:

• What is the public choice idea or theory?

Choosing is simply deciding to select something over something else. Public choice is when an individual makes a selection that will affect themselves as well as others. The individual is making an assumption that the other people they are selecting for have the same views as they do. This is not always true.

• Explain what rent seeking is.

Rent seeking is when a person or business is the dedication of limited resources to gain returns created artificially (Amacher & Pate, 2019). Rent seeking could be described as creating a narrative that would cause a business to benefit from the artificial need for a product that they want to produce.

• How can you combine the ideas of public choice and rent seeking?

From a business perspective, if a political person has been receiving financial backing from a business, they could make a campaign that will focus on the need to have something that the business relationship will benefit from. If you look at the self-interest of politicians, they are usually tied to an organization that contributes to their campaigns. For instance, there was a politician who wanted to gain the favor of the gun manufacturerin my local town, so the politician stated that there was an increase in the possibility that the next legislative session would vote to ban certain types of weapons that could be purchased. This was an untrue statement by the politician, but he knew it would increase the demand for firearms, benefiting the local gun manufacturer, who was his main contributor.

• Explain one real-world example of combining public choice and rent seeking.

Back in the seventies and eighties there was this massive war on drugs. The pharmaceutical companies have known for a long time that if marijuana became legal, more people would not need to purchase their prescription drugs because marijuana serves as a substitute for hundreds of medications. The politicians start making claims that marijuana causes all sorts of unfounded complications. These politicians created this theory because some of their main contributors were the politicians who made up these false claims. The longer marijuana remained illegal, the more money the pharmaceutical companies would benefit from the false claims made by the politicians.