Reference no: EM133701545

Problem

President Ronald Reagan made a famous speech in Berlin where he urged Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," meaning of course the Berlin Wall. Gorbachev was pursuing glasnost and perestroika reforms in the Soviet Union and Reagan wanted to remind everyone what opening and reform, taken to their logical conclusion, meant. At the time of President Reagan's speech it was viewed as idealistic and naïve. And yet a little more than two years later, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall did indeed come down.

Economics uses the production possibilities frontier to distinguish between quantities of goods that are feasible and infeasible. This graph I think helps many people understand the idea of feasibility in economics: that the available resources and technology place a limit on how much a society can produce, even if establishing exactly where the frontier lies is difficult. Ultimately, Brennan and Buchanan argue that reform of the rent seeking dilemma within the rules of majoritarian politics is not politically feasible, making constitutional level reform imperative.

Furthermore, disagreement as to whether any policy change is truly infeasible in a democracy where government is by the people I think leads many critics to view the constitutional economics project in very hostile terms, as "giving up on democracy."

Is the concept of political feasibility equally clear in politics? Can we ever truly know that reform within the rules is not politically feasible? Does the example of the fall of the Berlin Wall illustrate that political feasibility is poorly understood and perhaps incoherent?