Supposing in the fictional country of Tomania, there are a group of pure-blooded Free Market Senators in the legislature.
Tomania has a history of passing a large number of anti-market, anti-business legislations. They have badly hurt commercial development in Tomania - there is a high Total Cost from these legislations, which is much greater than the Total Benefit.
However, there are proposals for a bipartisan legislation. The other parties have agreed to remove price controls on medical insurance, pharmaceuticals, and specialist fees, in return for a complete nationalisation of cardiological care.
The Marginal Cost in this case, the deterioration in quality of treatment of heart problems, is much lower than the Marginal Benefit - the removal of many severe shortages of medicines, available professionals, and insurance policies.
So in this…political context, would these Senators incur another great Marginal Cost to the already great cost of many anti-market legislations in the past, just to get this one single Marginal Benefit? Or is it that in the context of real life politics, individual legislators are not concerned with societal costs and benefits, no matter how altruistic they are?
Would or should they nonetheless still reject this legislation outright, simply because the Costs are more certain than the Benefits?
This question came to my mind, after reading Rothbard’s statement that people with a passion for justice should be outright abolitionists - although students of economics accept marginalism as a reality of how people work, is it that those very people can not afford to be marginalists in their own personal morality and conviction?
I’m not really sure of what you’re asking. If it is determined the marginal benefit is greater than the marginal cost, then obviously the actor in question would make that choice.
If you are instead intending to focus on the political activism aspect, then whether they would depends on the value judgements of the individual senators in question. Whether they should under the terms of Rothbardian ethics is much simpler: Yes. Under the Rothbardian system more freedom is always better than less. If supporting the new measure would decrease the total size of the state then they should. However this does not mean they should be satisfied with this one reduction alone.
Being a politician is a very well paying job, mostly from bribes. So that’s the ultimate goal, collect the bribes.
But there is also another goal, mainly to make sure you keep on getting re-elected, so the cornucopia of bribes doesn’t close up. One might think this means benefiting the electorate, but that is not neccesarily the case, as will be explained.
A third goal is, like every thriving business, to expand. Meaning to get more power and control over things so that more people will want to bribe you to help them.
So that a politician looks at every political decision he must make, such as the ones in your post, and asks himself 3 questions:
What vote will get me money from some wealthy special interest? 2. What vote will get me re-elected? 3. What vote will increase my power?
Note that 1. and 3. need real world results. He has to benefit his bribees in a real concrete way. That’s what he is paid for. Also, his power has to be real, or it is of no use. But 2. is much more malleable. If he can lie to the electorate and convince them he is benefitting them when actually he is not, that is usually good enough. So that if 1 and 3 come into conflict with 2, he will try to sooth his voters with pretty words.