How can we ensure that government officials use their powers in the public interest?
Advocates of Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) lament that it is too often used simply to defend decisions that an agency has already made, rather than to inform decisions as it makes them. This is a fair criticism, but a bit naïve. If an agency did not have to defend its decision on benefit-cost grounds, why would it bother to use BCA at all? Agency heads and program managers have varied backgrounds, but typically have lots of the specialized subject-matter expertise that we hear so much about, and will often have strong opinions about what options they would like to pursue. Some of them may be predisposed to use economic analysis, but probably not very many. If they have broad authority to make decisions and if their decisions are not going to be questioned, they may simply default to some version of the “dictator” paradigm: “My own preferences are rational (i.e., transitive), so we’ll just go with those.”
But our government is one of checks and balances, rather than independent decision makers. Government is force, in the words of George Washington, and the use of force – particularly by a government against its own citizens – must be justified. Agency officials are not principals; they wield whatever power they have as agents of the people. They ought to be able to demonstrate that their discretionary official actions serve the public interest, or promote the general Welfare, or otherwise advance the common good.
