Lamenting that Democratic politicians up and down Pennsylvania Avenue have lost their enthusiasm for radical health-care ‘reform,’ Paul Krugman today maintains that “politics is supposed to be about achieving something more than your own re-election.â€This notion of politics is absurdly unrealistic. Public-choice economics – pioneered by my colleagues Jim Buchanan (who boasts his own Nobel Prize) and Gordon Tullock – uncovers overwhelming evidence that politics, in fact, almost exclusively is about achieving election and re-election. So to insist that politics should be about something other than what it is really about makes as much sense as insisting, say, that snow...