so, if an environmentalist group doesn't follow a hard-core neoclassical perspective (points 1, 2, & 3 below), it's a "special interest group"?
do the George Mason University Law School and Economics Department analyze themselves in these terms? are they rent-seeking?
------------------------
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
> This article provides a first effort at testing the
> implications of public interest versus private interest models
> of environmental interest groups. In particular, it specifies
> three testable implications of a public interest model of the
> activities of environmental interest groups: (1) a desire to
> base policy on the best-available science; (2) a willingness to
> engage in deliberation and compromise to balance environmental
> protection against other compelling social and economic
> interests; and, (3) a willingness to consider alternative
> regulatory strategies that can deliver environmental protection
> at lower-cost than traditional command-and-control regulation.
> On all three counts, it is found that the public-interest or
> "civic republican" explanation for the activities of
> environmental interest groups fails to convincingly describe
> their behavior. On the other hand, the evidence on each of these
> three tests is consistent with a self-interested model of the
> behavior of environmental interest-groups. Their activities can
> be understood as being identical to those of any other interest
> group - namely, the desire to use the coercive power of
> government to subsidize their personal desires for greater
> environmental protection and to redistribute wealth and power to
> themselves.
