Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I am still seeing a lot of confusion in the public choice community about what it means to say that politicians or government employees are "self-interested." For instance, I just read a (draft) paper by someone prominent in the public choice world who wrote (I quote from memory): "Government officials don't pursue the common good. They are no better than anyone else: they are just out to realize their self-interest as well." I offer a real-world happening for your contemplation in this regard: While living on the corner of Court and Atlantic in Brooklyn, a number of years ago, I noticed that the light was designed wrongly: the green light on Atlantic would turn to yellow and then red, and then, after a couple of seconds, the traffic on Atlantic would get a green arrow to turn left onto Court. This was a problem, because when pedestrians saw the light turn red, being New Yorkers, they would start to cross Atlantic right away, without waiting for the cross w...

"We may approach the matter in this way. The paradox is, that if you scrutinise the acts which have made States, and which carry them on, or which go on under and within them, you will every where be able to urge that they spring from self- interest and ambition not from a desire for the common good. How then can we say that the State exists for a common good? Hegel's large conception of a social fabric and the temper of mind which maintains it should have done some thing to meet this problem. But we may come a little closer to the precise difficulty. "Nothing is so fallacious as mere psychological analysis applied to the estimation of the purposes which rule a mind. In every act there is necessarily an aspect of the agent's particular self. One way or another he is satisfied in it. So the pessimistic or superficial psychologist can always -- not in some acts merely, but in all -- discover a form of self-seeking. Life is a whole made up of particul...