Elizabeth Warren -- Public Choice Posterchild

Elizabeth Warren is an outspoken critic of big business. She believes that businesses and the rich should pay their fair share. She is a proponent of Obamacare, which included many anti-business cost savings measures. ...Except when that business is from Massachusetts, whose Senate seat she is hoping to fill.

In her op-ed for Mass Device (a trade publication for medical device manufacturers), Warren comes out in favor of repealing the medical device tax, a major cost-savings measure included in Obamacare, and increasing government handouts to those companies for R&D. She proposes nothing to offset this large government giveaway to big business. The reasons she gives for her position sound as though they are taken from industry lobbyist boilerplate.

Not only is it fun to watch hypocrisy in action, but it is such a crushingly potent argument for public choice theory. One of the main objections I hear to the idea that politicians are generally self-interested and only motivated by increasing personal wealth and power is that we need to elect the right people who will not fall victim to these incentives. What Warren's op-ed so potently points out is that no one, not even a severe (to use RMoney's word) Progressive like Elizabeth Warren, is immune from promising handouts to major industries in her home state.

What does it say for the prospects of Obamacare's cost-savings measures when even Warren is coming out against them? I disagree with her on everything, but in this case, you would at least expect her to stand on principle. Unless, of course, you are a student of public choice and you realize that she does not do it from avarice, malice, or personal corruption. She is merely a state actor acting in her own best interest, according to the incentives within the system.