# Politics As a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy **URL:** **By** Richard E. Wagner, Trevor Burrus, Aaron Ross Powell **Published:** September 30, 2016 --- Richard Wagner provides an overview of public choice economics and considers how limited governments can morph into destructive regulatory systems. Is an economy like a machine or a tropical rainforest? Is it more like a mechanical device that can be maintained by an exogenous force (government), or is it more like a diverse ecology, one that includes government actors? Richard Wagner joins us this week to discuss his new book, [_Politics As a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy_](https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Peculiar-Business-Entangled-Political/dp/1785365479) (2016). Wagner concludes that modern governments function much the way a business enterprise does, albeit a strange one. He also theorizes about what happens when government becomes entangled in the same incentive structures it claims regulatory power over.