To paraphrase William Mitchell’s (2001: 5) apt analogy, if orthodox welfare economics can be thought of as a pathology of markets, public choice is a pathology of politics. Scholars working in the tradition of Pigou (1920) seem to find market failures demanding remedial government action on every street corner; scholars working in the public choice tradition seem to find the seeds of government failure in every public program and policy. As a matter of fact, ‘one of the most important contributions public choice has made to our understanding of how political systems work has been to demonstrate the serious shortcomings of the simple majority rule’ (Mueller, 1997: 137).