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36 Cato J. 535 (2016)
The Peculiar Business of Politics

handle is hein.journals/catoj36 and id is 566 raw text is: THE PECULIAR BUSINESS OF POLITICS Richard E. Wagner This article stems from Jim Dorn's invitation to encapsulate my recent book, Politics as a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Econtomy (Wagner 2016). Where standard political economy treats states as singular entities that intervene in economies, I treat states as networks of peculiar enterprises that operate inside a society's market arrangements. This peculiar quality ramifies throughout a society. To be successful, political enterprises must raise sufficient revenue to return profits to investors. Those profits are disguised through indirect transactions and ideological formulations, but are profits all the same. There is thus a simple explanation for why political enterprises grow relative to commercial enterprises: they grow because they offer higher returns to relevant investors than what those investors could obtain through commercial enterprises. The analytical challenge a theory of entangled political economy must face is to explain the profit-seeking reality of the sub- system of political enterprises that operates inside a society. This arti- cle sketches the main conceptual issues with which a theory of entangled political economy must contend, and closes by considering possible implications for efforts to limit the reach of the political within society. To start, equilibrium theory and its associated method of com- parative statics is incapable of conveying the analytical vision of Cato Journal, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Fall 2016). Copyright © Cato Institute. All rights reserved. Richard E. Wagner is the Hobart R. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and Distinguished Senior Fellow in the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

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