James Buchanan Economist Quotes

Political economists stress the technical economic principles that one must understand in order to assess alternative arrangements for promoting peaceful cooperation and productive specialization among free men. Yet political economists go further and frankly try to bring out into the open the philosophical issues that necessarily underlie all discusions of the appropriate functions of government and all proposed economic policy measures. They examine philosophical values for consistency among themselves and with the ideal of human freedom.

I want economists to quit concerning themselves with allocation problems, per se, with the problem, as it has been traditionally defined. The vocabulary of science is important here, and as T. D. Weldon once suggested, the very word "problem" in and of itself implies the presence of "solution." Once the format has been established in allocation terms, some solution is more or less automatically suggested. Our whole study becomes one of applied maximization of a relatively simple computational sort. Once the ends to be maximized are provided by the social welfare function, everything becomes computational, as my colleague, Rutledge Vining, has properly noted. If there is really nothing more to economics than this, we had as well turn it all over to the applied mathematicians. This does, in fact, seem to be the direction in which we are moving, professionally, and developments of note, or notoriety, during the past two decades consist largely in improvements in what are essentially computing techniques, in the mathematics of social engineering. What I am saying is that we should keep these contributions in perspective; I am urging that they be recognized for what they are, contributions to applied mathematics, to managerial science if you will, but not to our chosen subject field which we, for better or for worse, call "economics.

Bork, along with economists like F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan—figures whose work I had never studied or even read until after that night in Harlem—advocated not the conservation of traditional structures but the abolition of them; they wished to eliminate all real checks on private enterprise; and they believed, in contradiction not only to all common sense but also to Gödel’s theorem, that the Market could be depended on to regulate its own aberrations and idiosyncrasies. In other words, however much Bork and others like him may have inveighed against personal liberties in the public sphere, they were positively gaga over individualism’s most wanton, unfettered forms in the private sector. Indeed, I’ve come to think that the central political paradox of our time is that the so-called conservatives of the past half century have sought to conserve almost nothing of the societies they inherited but instead have worked to remake them with a vigor reminiscent of the leftist revolutionaries they despise.