Marketizers

A genealogy of the now pervasive idea that politics is a marketplace and that public goods and services should be privatized.
Since the 1980s, governments have been reinvented on the model of the market. This shift would have been unimaginable without the emergence of public choice theory in postwar America. The separation of provision and production in public services, the introduction of market-like competition between bureaus and municipalities, the treatment of citizens as customers, and the use of performance incentives all have origins in the writings of public choice theorists. From the 1940s through the 1980s, these economic thinkers gradually eroded the differences between politics and the market as they applied the tools of economics to problems usually considered the purview of political scientists and political philosophers. Deploying the market as the best