Public Policy

Modern government policy is Get Used To It Suckers. So says Mark Steyn. He is right.

Public Policy ex Wiki
Public policy is the principled guide to action taken by the administrative executive branches of the state with regard to a class of issues, in a manner consistent with law and institutional customs. The foundation of public policy is composed of national constitutional laws and regulations. Further substrates include both judicial interpretations and regulations which are generally authorized by legislation. Public policy is considered strong when it solves problems efficiently and effectively, serves justice, supports governmental institutions and policies, and encourages active citizenship.^[1]

Other scholars define it as a system of "courses of action, regulatory measures, laws, and funding priorities concerning a given topic promulgated by a governmental entity or its representatives."^[2] Public policy is commonly embodied in "constitutions, legislative acts, and judicial decisions."^[3]

In the United States, this concept refers not only to the result of policies, but more broadly to the decision-making and analysis of governmental decisions. As an academic discipline, public policy is studied by professors and students at public policy schools of major universities throughout the country. The U.S. professional association of public policy practitioners, researchers, scholars, and students is the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Government actions and process of public policy making
Public policy making can be characterized as a dynamic, complex, and interactive system through which public problems are identified and countered by creating new public policy or by reforming existing public policy. ^[4] Public problems can originate in endless ways and require different policy responses (such as regulations, subsidies, quotas, and laws) on the local, national, or international level.^[5]

Public policy making is a continuous process that has many feedback loops. Verification and evaluation are essential to the functioning of this system.^[6] The public problems that influence public policy making can be of economic, social, or political nature.^[7] Each system is influenced by different public problems and thus requires different public policy.^[6]

In public policy making, numerous individuals and interest groups compete and collaborate to influence policymakers to act in a particular way.^[8] The large set of actors in the public policy process, such as politicians, civil servants, lobbyists, domain experts, and industry representatives, use a variety of tactics and tools to advance their aims, including advocating their positions publicly, attempting to educate supporters and opponents, and mobilizing allies on a particular issue.^[5] Many actors can be important in the public policy process, but government officials ultimately choose public policy in response to the public issue or problem at hand. In doing so, government officials are expected to meet public sector ethics and take the needs of all stakeholders into account.^[6]

Since societies have changed in the past decades the public policy making system changed too. Today, public policy making is increasingly goal-oriented, aiming for measurable results and goals, and decision-centric, focusing on decisions that must be taken immediately.^[6] Furthermore, mass communications and technological changes have caused the public policy system to become more complex and interconnected.^[9] The changes pose new challenges to the current public policy systems and pressure them to evolve in order to remain effective and efficient.^[6]

 

Public Interest ex Wiki
Public interest, according to the Random House Dictionary, is "1. the welfare or well-being of the general public; commonwealth. 2. appeal or relevance to the general populace: a news story of public interest."^[1]

Economist Lok Sang Ho in his Public Policy and the Public Interest (Routledge, 2012, published 2011) argues that the public interest must be assessed impartially and, therefore, defines the public interest as the "ex ante [ assumed before the event ] welfare of the representative individual." ^[2] Under a thought experiment, by assuming that there is an equal chance for one to be anyone in society and, thus, could benefit or suffer from a change, the public interest is by definition enhanced whenever that change is preferred to the status quo ex ante. This approach is "ex ante", in the sense that the change is not evaluated after the fact but assessed before the fact without knowing whether one would actually benefit or suffer from it.

This approach follows the "veil of ignorance" approach, which was first proposed by John Harsanyi but popularized by John Rawls in his 1971 Theory of Justice.^[3] Historically, however, the approach can be traced to John Stuart Mill, who, in his letter to George Grote, explained that "human happiness, even one's own, is in general more successfully pursued by acting on general rules, than by measuring the consequences of each act; and this is still more the case with the general happiness, since any other plan would not only leave everybody uncertain what to expect, but would involve perpetual quarrelling..."^[4]

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales argues that applying a detailed definition is likely to result in unintended consequences, in Acting in the Public Interest (2012). Instead, each circumstance needs to be assessed based on criteria such as the relevant public, wants, and constraints. The key to assessing any public interest decision is transparency of the decision-making process, including balancing competing interests.

 

National Interest ex Wiki
The national interest, often referred to by the French expression raison d'État ("reason of State"), is a country's goals and ambitions whether economic, military, or cultural. The concept is an important one in international relations where pursuit of the national interest is the foundation of the realist school.

History of the concept
In early human history the national interest was usually viewed as secondary to that of religion or morality. To engage in a war rulers needed to justify the action in these contexts. The first thinker to advocate for the primacy of the national interest is usually considered to be Niccolò Machiavelli.

The practice is first seen as being employed by France under the direction of its Chief Minister Cardinal Richelieu in the Thirty Years' War when it intervened on the Protestant side, despite its own Catholicism, to block the increasing power of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. At Richelieu's prompting, Jean de Silhon defended the concept of reason of state as "a mean between what conscience permits and affairs require."^[1] The notion of the national interest soon came to dominate European politics that became fiercely competitive over the next centuries. It is a form of reason "born of the calculation and the ruse of men" and makes of the state "a knowing machine, a work of reason"; the state ceases to be derived from the divine order and is henceforth subject to its own particular necessities (E. Thuau, 1966).

States could now openly embark on wars purely out of self-interest. Mercantilism can be seen as the economic justification of the aggressive pursuit of the national interest.

A foreign policy geared towards pursuing the national interest is the foundation of the realist school of international relations. The realist school reached its greatest heights at the Congress of Vienna with the practice of the balance of powers, which amounted to balancing the national interest of several great and lesser powers.

Metternich was celebrated as the principal artist and theoretician of this balancing but he was simply doing a more or less clean copy of what his predecessor Kaunitz had already done by reversing so many of the traditional Habsburg alliances and building international relations anew on the basis of national interest instead of religion or tradition.

These notions became much criticized after the bloody debacle of the First World War, and some sought to replace the concept of the balance of power with the idea of collective security, whereby all members of the League of Nations would "consider an attack upon one as an attack upon all," thus deterring the use of violence for ever more. The League of Nations did not work, partially because the United States refused to join and partially because, in practice, nations did not always find it "in the national interest" to deter each other from the use of force.

The events of World War II led to a rebirth of Realist and then Neo-realist thought, as international relations theorists re-emphasized the role of power in global governance. Many IR theorists blamed the weakness of the League of Nations for its idealism (contrasted with Realism) and ineffectiveness at preventing war, even as they blamed mercantilist beggar thy neighbor policies for the creation of fascist states in Germany and Italy. With hegemonic stability theory, the concept of the U.S. national interest was expanded to include the maintenance of open sea lanes and the maintenance and expansion of free trade.

Relationship with the Rule of law
The majority of the jurists consider that the "national interest" is incompatible with the "rule of law".^[2] Regarding this, Antonino Troianiello has said that national interest and a state subject to the rule of law are not absolutely incompatible:

While the notion of state reason comes first as a theme of study in political science, it is a very vague concept in law and has never been an object of systematic study. This obvious lack of interest is due to a deliberate epistemological choice - a form of positivism applied to legal science; and as a result legal science affirms its autonomy regarding other social sciences while constituting with exactness its own object - law - in order to describe it. In doing so it implies deterministic causes which have an influence on its descriptive function. This method which puts aside state reason is not without any consequence: the fact that state reason is not taken into account by legal science is to be integrated within a global rejection of a description of law as presented in political science. A fundamental dynamic in modern constitutionalism, "the seizure of the political phenomenon by law" is all the more remarkable when it claims a scientific value, thus a neutrality aiming at preventing all objection. This convergence of legal science and constitutionalism has the tautological character of a rhetorical discourse in which law is simultaneously the subject and the object of the discourse on law. Having as a basis state reason, it allows a reflexion on the legitimacy of power and authority of modern Western societies; this in connexion with the representations which make it and which it makes "state reason and public law."

(Troianiello, p. 690)

As a euphemism
Today, the concept of "the national interest" is often associated with political realists who fail to differentiate their policies from "idealistic" policies to seek to inject morality into foreign policy or promote solutions that rely on multilateral institutions which might weaken the independence of the state.

As considerable disagreement exists in every country over what is or is not in "the national interest," the term is as often invoked to justify isolationist and pacifistic policies as to justify interventionist or warlike policies. It has been posited that the term is a euphemism used by powerful countries for geopolitical aims such as nonrenewable natural resources for energy independency, territorial expansionism and precious metals in smaller countries.^[3] In that case, euphemism usage is necessary to stifle voices opposed to an interventionistic or warhawk foreign policy.^[4]

 

Common Good ex Wiki
In philosophy, economics, and political science, the common good (also commonwealth or common weal) is a term of art, referring to either what is shared and beneficial for all or most members of a given community, or alternatively, what is achieved by citizenship, collective action, and active participation in the realm of politics and public service. The concept of the common good differs significantly among philosophical doctrines.^[1] Early conceptions of the common good were set out by Ancient Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato. One understanding of the common good rooted in Aristotle's philosophy remains in common usage today, referring to what one contemporary scholar calls the "good proper to, and attainable only by, the community, yet individually shared by its members."^[2] The concept of common good developed through the work of political theorists, moral philosophers, and public economists, including Thomas Aquinas, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Madison, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, and many other thinkers. In contemporary economic theory, a common good is any good which is rivalrous yet non-excludable, while the common good, by contrast, arises in the subfield of welfare economics and refers to the outcome of a social welfare function. Such a social welfare function, in turn, would be rooted in a moral theory of the good (such as utilitarianism). Social choice theory aims to understand processes by which the common good may or may not be realized in societies through the study of collective decision rules. And public choice theory applies microeconomic methodology to the study of political science in order to explain how private interests affect political activities and outcomes. It aims to investigate whether and how various private interests aid or impede public pursuit of the common good.