Question

what is one real-world example of combining public choice and rent seeking to evaluate and why do you think your example is a combination of public choice and rent-seeking?

Answer 1

Rent seeking means the attempt to gain a legal privilege that then makes you money. Public choice is just about saying that politicians and bureaucrats have economic self-interest. Quite obviously it's therefore possible for the two to combine and the seekers to pay the politicians for the privilege

An example of this is Don Boudreaux talking about his former colleague, Gordon Tullock:

Economists have long understood that people with special privileges – say, producers protected from foreign competition by tariffs – act in ways that generate outcomes that are less valuable than are the outcomes that would be generated in the absence of such privileges. But in 1967 Gordon said, in effect, ‘The costs of those long-understood inefficiencies, while real and regrettable, are small in comparison with the wastes of resources used when people strive to get such privileges – that is, to seek rents.’ If, say, U.S. tire producers expect that their profits will rise by $200 million if Uncle Sam slaps a punitive tax on Americans who buy non-American-made tires, these tire producers won’t sit around twiddling their steel belts hoping that Uncle Sam will impose such a tariff. These tire producers will actively seek such a tariff; they’ll lobby for it.