James Buchanan Quotes

Frémont failed in his presidential bid, losing the 1856 election to his Democratic opponent, James Buchanan.

Know what the best thing about morning sex is?" Caesar snorted and pinched Nate's hip. "Sex?" "No," Nate laughed, "nobody has to sleep on the wet spot.

It was difficult to know which part of the government would ignite first. The Supreme Court had plenty of dry kindling: most of its justices were old men born in the previous century. Congress was eternally bickering. And no executive had ever underperformed quite as spectacularly as James Buchanan.

Suck me off in the car on the way over and you call me horny?" Nate growled again. "Get out of those fucking jeans!

James Buchanan's niece: "He often worked just for work's sake.

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.

The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens...If it can not live in the affections of its people, it must die.

Something just ain't right about thanking the Lord for sending you an opportunistic pretty boy who carried a string of condoms and single use packets of lube in his pocket. Still, I did it.

I kissed him for a long, long while. My hands wrapped on either side of his face pinned him and wouldn't let him pull away. I didn't want Kabe to ever pull away from me. Let the mountains fall and the stars burn out, I'd never let him go.

Suck my balls, rim me like a pro, then stick your prick up my ass, and you got a problem with the word 'fuck'? Man, you got issues.

Easy issues are at the heart of what sociologist James Davison Hunter (119911) forecast as the emerging polarization of American politics. In Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, which is often cited as the impetus for Pat Buchanan's fiery speech at the 1199z Republican National Convention and the dawn of polarized politics, he suggests that the emergence of new social issues, such as abortion, the death penalty, and gay rights, make polarization inevitable.

Still, my fascination with Buchanan did not abate, nor was I able, as the Seventies set in, to move the novel forward through the constant pastiche and basic fakery of any fiction not fed by the springs of memory -- what Henry James calls (in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett) the "fatal cheapness [and] mere escamotage" of the "'historic' novel.

Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.

My momma always said bossy was good for a deputy and bad for everything else.

Because," I tried to tame that whole whirlwind into a sentence, "when you smiled at me right then, I saw something." I'd seen more than just something, I'd seen a possibility of everything.

The elementary and basic approach that I suggest places “the theory of markets” and not the “theory of resource allocation” at center stage. My plea is really for the adoption of a sophisticated “catallactics,”…

I knew-exactly-the moment I fell for him. "When we're up on the mountain getting ready to go down for that woman's body, you remember, you smiled at me." It was like the sun hat touched the earth and been born in his body. "That's when I think I really lost my reason.

Fuck, he couldn’t. But Brandon knew that he’d never forgive himself if he didn’t do everything in his power. Even if it failed, he had to try. It had to be worth it. “Jeff.” He swallowed his fear. “You asked me today if this relationship I’m in was the one…well it is. And the chick I’ve been seeing, the one from San Diego, she ain’t no gal. I can’t lose Nicky. I’m going to lose him. I got nothing if you don’t help.

The same cannot be said of James Buchanan. His impact is still being felt today. For it was Buchanan who guided Pinochet’s team in how to arrange things so that even when the country finally returned to representative institutions, its capitalist class would be all but permanently entrenched in power.

I may not believe in God, but I believe in the Wow! That day you kissed me on the ledge, that was it." A light, like I'd seen in the eyes of those testifying on their faith, it lit him up. "We're tiny out there. In a million years what we do ain't going to matter worth shit and that's still going to be there. I think the Wow will make it better.

You scratch my back, I scratch yours." The smile faded into a leer. "No, you suck my dick, I'll suck yours.

I may not believe in God, but I believe in the Wow! That day you kissed me on the ledge, that was it.

It ain't nothing but you and the heavens and they're so big and so bright that you realize just how little some things matter. And then sometimes, you realize how much little things matter.

Almost from the moment votes are counted, lame-duck chief executives invariably recede into superfluity, but Lincoln’s hapless predecessor, James Buchanan, made procrastination into an art form. He could not have excused himself from responsibility at a more portentous moment, or left his successor with graver problems to address once he was constitutionally entitled to do so.

how a man who had sworn to uphold the Constitution, and maintain the laws of the country could, at such a time as that, be receiving the felicitations of a rebel cause…yet so it was, and there they all went, drunk and sober, to call upon James Buchanan at eleven o’clock at night, when he should have been in session with his cabinet, calling out his armies and manning the Navy,

So have you found God?" I thought Kabe was going to swallow his straw. ""So have you found God?" I thought Kabe was going to swallow his straw. I had no idea what was about to come out of his mouth. "Joe's been talking to me about religion. Out alone, having some real deep, personal conversations. I think Joe has figured out how to get right inside me and know what I need.

That's the Devil talking in you , Joe. To his way of thinking that's likely what was happening. "No,"I let go my grip. No need to crush my own hard head when it was someone else's that deserved it. "It's Joe talking.

For a moment my heart stopped beating. “It’s not the fall you know.” His breath was all warm on my cheek. “It’s that sudden stop at the end that does it.” Just before I kissed him, I whispered, “I hope it doesn’t hurt much.

The human mind has not yet discovered the way of counteracting promptly the effect of the bold lie propagated by the prominent man History is full of pertinent illustrations. If representative government has a nemesis, this is probably it.

Democracy,” the towering African American historian John Hope Franklin observed in the midst of World War II, “is essentially an act of faith.”96 When that faith is willfully exterminated, we should not be surprised that we reap the whirlwind. The public choice way of thinking, one sage critic warned at the time James Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is not simply “descriptively inaccurate”—indeed, “a terrible caricature” of how the political process works.

You know," Kabe tugged his shirt off and tossed it on the floor. "The whole innocent thing is kinda cute." Shirt halfway up my middle, I stopped. "I'm nothing like cute." My glare told him I'd hurt him if kept it up. "Me and cute don't add up.

You come to me three, four months ago, knowing it, and I might have said you're right. God meant me to not love anyone. Be a rock. Don't be touched by no one. But now I've been touched, in here." I tapped my chest. "There is no fear in love, but love casteth out fear.

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.

The U.S. Supreme Court found openly anti-black ordinances unconstitutional in 1917 in Buchanan v. Warley, but sundown towns and suburbs nevertheless acted as if they had the power to be formally all-white until at least 1960; informally, some communities have never given up this idea. The federal government was hardly likely to enforce Buchanan v. Warley until after World War II; on the contrary, it was busily creating all-white suburbs itself until then. After 1917, most sundown suburbs resorted to restrictive covenants. Covenants were usually private, part of the deed one signed when buying from the developer. Like the Great Retreat, restrictive covenants first targeted Chinese Americans in the West, originating in California in the 1890s, and then spread to the East, where Jews and blacks were targeted for exclusion.

One of the leading intellectuals of the libertarian movement, Nobel laureate in economics James Buchanan, outlined the guiding principle lucidly. In his major work Limits of Liberty, he pointed out that the ideal society should accord with fundamental human nature, which makes good sense. And then went on, reasonably, to ask the next question: What is fundamental human nature? He had a very simple answer: “In a strictly personalized sense, any person’s ideal situation is one that allows him full freedom of action and inhibits the behavior of others so as to force adherence to his own desires. That is to say, each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.

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.

What may surprise many is that one of Lincoln’s greatest obstacles in preserving the Union was anti-war sentiment from folks not in the South, but in the North. Many Americans in the North saw no reason why States could not withdraw peacefully, if they wanted, from a political union freely entered into. These persons were called “Copperheads” by abolitionists and all others who supported Lincoln’s war policy. What is not well known is the fact that the four living former presidents of the time (Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan) all supported the Southern cause and disagreed with Lincoln’s aggressive policies. (John Brechinridge, Vice-President under Buchanan, 1856–1860, became a Confederate General in November of 1861.) They all recognized the Constitutional principle that the federal government does not have the authority to force a State to stay in the Union. Was

Take George W. Bush: He was an unpopular two-term president. Three times, his approval rating dropped to 25 percent. [To be fair, he also had the highest approval rating of all time, very briefly. But that was immediately after 9/11 — and in the wake of domestic terrorism, a well-dressed mannequin’s approval rating might have hovered around 50.] During his last two years in office, he was hammered nonstop, periodically classified as the worst U.S. president since Ulysses Grant or James Buchanan. Yet was Bush a villain? No. He was not. He was never, ever calculating. He didn’t know the most (which is not to say he was dumb), and he didn’t care the least (which is not to say he was a paragon of empathy). He was just the guy who ended up with the job. The villain of his administration ended up being Vice President Dick Cheney, a frosty puppet master who radically expanded the powers of the presidency even though he was not the president.

Progressives today are quick to fault “America” for slavery and a host of other outrages. America did this, America did that. As we will see in this book, America didn’t do those things, the Democrats did. So the Democrats have cleverly foisted their sins on America, and then presented themselves as the messiahs offering redemption for those sins. It’s crazy, but it’s also ingenious. We have to give them credit for ingenuity. The second whitewash is to portray the Civil War entirely in terms of the North versus the South. The North is supposedly the anti-slavery side and the South is the pro-slavery side. A recent example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article about the Confederate battle flag in The Atlantic.3 Now of course there is an element of truth in this, in that the Civil War was fought between northern states and southern states. But this neat and convenient division ignores several important details. First, the defenders of the Confederate cause were, almost without exception, Democrats. Coates cites many malefactors from Senator Jefferson Davis to Senator James Henry Hammond to Georgia Governor Joseph Brown. Yet while identifying these men as southerners and Confederates, Coates omits to identify them as Democrats. Second, Coates and other progressives conveniently ignore the fact that northern Democrats were also protectors of slavery. We will see in this chapter how Stephen Douglas and other northern Democrats fought to protect slavery in the South and in the new territories. Moreover, the southerners who fought for the Confederacy cannot be said to have fought merely to protect slavery on their plantations. Indeed, fewer than one-third of white families in the South on the eve of the Civil War had slaves. Thus the rigid North-South interpretation of the Civil War conceals—and is intended to conceal—the active complicity of Democrats across the country to save, protect, and even extend the “peculiar institution.” As the Charleston Mercury editorialized during the secession debate, the duty of the South was to “rally under the banner of the Democratic Party which has recognized and supported . . . the rights of the South.”4 The real divide was between the Democratic Party as the upholder of slavery and the Republican Party as the adversary of slavery. All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery—Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy—were Democrats. All the heroes of black emancipation—from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln—were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.

[James M. Buchanan] directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became businessmen, and "the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of others" became those who gained anything from government without paying proportional income taxes. "The mighty struggle" became one to hamstring the people who refused to stop making claims on government.

We'd gone at it like jackrabbits the night before...hard and fast. This felt nine kinds of different. Relaxed, familiar, comfortable-scared me to my bones.

Lust is a terrible powerful thing and I could hear it in his voice. I couldn't fathom that I inspired it in him.

New experiences, what my Grams says, keeps us from going bat-shit in old age.

Why what are you going to do?" "I'm going to suck your dick." There's times and places for everything. Ten stores above the canyon, I don't know if it really qualified as either.

That's when the bear in me came out-and not like those internet picture types of furry chests needing to shed the winter pounds...more the grizzly that eats crazy climbers for lunch species.

You can just take your prejudice and shove it where the sun don't shine." One of the hardest things I've ever said. Took every ounce of will in my body to get it passed my teeth.

Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe.

While these tax cuts starved the government, George Mason also belittled its role philosophically. A star on its faculty was James Buchanan, the founder of “public choice” theory, who often described his approach as “politics without romance” because he categorized elected officials and public servants as just another greedy, self-aggrandizing private interest group, a view popular with antigovernment libertarians.

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.

It has been said, indeed, that the faith of the primitive Church was extremely simple, — that it was ‘a life rather than a creed,’ — that few, if any, of the doctrines of Scripture had as yet been developed and defined, — and that Theology had not then assumed a systematic form. This statement is true, so far as it is meant merely to affirm, that the articles of faith were less rigorously reasoned out, and often more vaguely stated, before they were subjected to the ordeal of controversial discussion; for this holds good of every age; but it is not true, if it be understood to imply, either that the primitive Church did not believe, in substance, the self-same doctrines which were afterwards defined, or that her members were incapable of giving a sufficient reason for the hope that was in them. The primitive Church was instructed by the ministry of the Apostles, and continued to be nourished by the Gospels and Epistles; she was the aggregate of all those individual churches, — at Rome, at Ephesus, at Corinth, at Philippi, at Colossae, at Thessalonica, — to whom Paul addressed his profound arguments, in the confident persuasion that they would be understood by those to whom he wrote; and the controversies with false teachers, which were expounded in his writings, were surely sufficient to give them clear and definite views of the doctrines of Grace. The doctrine of Justification, in particular, was so thoroughly discussed in the writings of the Apostles, and that, too, in the way of controversy both with Jews and Gentiles, that their immediate successors had no occasion to treat it as an undecided question; — they found it an established and unquestioned article of the common faith, and they assumed and applied it in all their writings, without thinking it necessary to enter into any formal explanation or proof of it.

By Lawrence Van Alstyne December 24, 1863 As tomorrow is Christmas we went out and made such purchases of good things as our purses would allow, and these we turned over to George and Henry for safe keeping and for cooking on the morrow. After that we went across the street to see what was in a tent that had lately been put up there. We found it a sort of show. There was a big snake in a showcase filled with cheap looking jewelry, each piece having a number attached to it. Also, a dice cup and dice. For $1.00 one could throw once, and any number of spots that came up would entitle the thrower to the piece of jewelry with a corresponding number on it. Just as it had all been explained to us, a greenhorn-looking chap came in and, after the thing had been explained to him, said he was always unlucky with dice, but if one of us would throw for him he would risk a dollar just to see how the game worked. Gorton is such an accommodating fellow I expected he would offer to make the throw for him, but as he said nothing, I took the cup and threw seventeen. The proprietor said it was a very lucky number, and he would give the winner $12 in cash or the fine pin that had the seventeen on it. The fellow took the cash, like a sensible man. I thought there was a chance to make my fortune and was going right in to break the bank, when Gorton, who was wiser than I, took me to one side and told me not to be a fool; that the greenhorn was one of the gang, and that the money I won for him was already his own. Others had come by this time and I soon saw he was right, and I kept out. We watched the game a while, and then went back to Camp Dudley and to bed. Christmas, and I forgot to hang up my stocking. After getting something to eat, we took stock of our eatables and of our pocket books, and found we could afford a few things we lacked. Gorton said he would invite his horse jockey friend, James Buchanan, not the ex-President, but a little bit of a man who rode the races for a living. So taking Tony with me I went up to a nearby market and bought some oysters and some steak. This with what we had on hand made us a feast such as we had often wished for in vain. Buchanan came, with his saddle in his coat pocket, for he was due at the track in the afternoon. George and Henry outdid themselves in cooking, and we certainly had a feast. There was not much style about it, but it was satisfying. We had overestimated our capacity, and had enough left for the cooks and drummer boys. Buchanan went to the races, Gorton and I went to sleep, and so passed my second Christmas in Dixie. At night the regiment came back, hungry as wolves. The officers mostly went out for a supper, but Gorton and I had little use for supper. We had just begun to feel comfortable. The regiment had no adventures and saw no enemy. They stopped at Baton Rouge and gave the 128th a surprise. Found them well and hearty, and had a real good visit. I was dreadfully sorry I had missed that treat. I would rather have missed my Christmas dinner. They report that Colonel Smith and Adjutant Wilkinson have resigned to go into the cotton and sugar speculation. The 128th is having a free and easy time, and according to what I am told, discipline is rather slack. But the stuff is in them, and if called on every man will be found ready for duty. The loose discipline comes of having nothing to do. I don’t blame them for having their fun while they can, for there is no telling when they will have the other thing. From Diary of an Enlisted Man by Lawrence Van Alstyne. New Haven, Conn., 1910.

The addition of the law was not intended to alter either the ground or the method of a sinner's justification by substituting obedience to the law for faith in the promise; for the law which was originally 'ordained unto life' was not found, by reason of sin, 'to be unto death'; but it was now 'added', and promulgated anew with awful sanctions amidst the thunderings and lightnings of Sinai to impress the Jews, and through them the church at large, with a sense of the holiness and justice of him with whom they had to do; of the spirituality and extent of that obedience which they owed to him; of the number and heinousness of their sins; and of their utter inability to escape the wrath and curse of God otherwise than by taking refuge in the free promise of his grace.

Wiping his mouth and tossing the napkin on the table, Wake leaned on his elbow and studied Kabe, long and hard. Long and hard enough that Kabe started to stare back. Finally, Wake blurted out, "So have you found God?" I thought Kabe was going to swallow his straw. Kabe licked his lips. "Joe's been talking to me about religion." I had no idea what was about to come out of his mouth. "Out alone, having some real deep, personal conversations. I think Joe has figured out how to get right inside me and know what I need." "We all need to hear it." "Touched me real far inside," My chest tightened up. I twisted my ankle and dropped my boot heel onto the arch of his foot. He yanked it back and leaned over the table a little. "All burning with it." My chair scraped the floor as I stood. "Know what, we need to be heading out.

It always ends in a fight.

To the new president, Abraham Lincoln: Sir, if on attaining the presidency you are as happy as I am upon leaving it, then, sir, you are a happy man indeed.

And I loved the mountains, loved 'em like my own life. Nothing in the world could compare to a huge sky miles from any hint of civilization. Reminded me of sex...the openness of it, the forgetting yourself in the moments of it, losing your soul to something bigger and touching creation for just a second. Closet romantic, me.

Really, I wouldn't lie to a guy with a gun." "I'm not armed." "No, but you got one hell of a gun and you handle it good." "Like to play with your pistol a bit more.

Before I put that plan into motion, I had to et over the big hump of there's a guy in my bed. There ain't never been a guy in my bed-at least not one under my roof, in my house. And yet, it just felt so darned right. Like things had always been this way. The little things, that's what did it.

Yeah, that's what they claim...we'll accept you so long as you don't go out and get laid. Sucker you into a good ol' feeling of acceptance and then kick you harder and harder in the balls as they try and wean you off of your desires. I believed I could convince a dog to turn into a cat.

I couldn't move. Never been hit by anything that powerful. Overwhelmed. Lost. Falling. My chest heaved. I shook. I pulled Kabe hard against me, turned my face into his chest. My eyes burned, my chest seized and I bawled like a baby.

I can't believe I can buy a shotgun at the sporting goods counter," he waved back at the entrance, "but the safe sex shit is like hidden in this little corner." "Welcome to Utah.

The only thing I ever did wrong was what I did right... loving someone like Kabe.

There is a big difference between wishing you was doing something and the actual getting it done. And this wasn't no back room in a bar or glory hole where I didn't even have to look at who I was with. This was Kabe.

We don't love a God who puts people in a position where they never can love.

I know you, you believe that God tests people and you have to have faith that things are going according to His plan.." "God is not in my bedroom." That was just nine kinds of wrong.

See, look, you don’t know how black it got.” I stepped up next to him. Didn’t touch him, but my voice dropped low. “I’d get so, I don’t know, but I’d get to a point where I’d head into Vegas, maybe meet up with Dev and go hunting tail.” I’d never, ever told nobody what I was telling him. “It felt so desperate. I’d come home and well, while I didn’t have blue balls anymore, I probably felt worse than when I left.

Richess. He

All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery—Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy—were Democrats.

Sarah wrote to the president himself, Zachary Taylor. He refused. Did that stop Sarah? No! She waited for the next election and wrote to the new president, Millard Fillmore. He said no, too. Did that stop Sarah? No! She was bold, brave, stubborn, and smart. Sarah wrote to the next president, Franklin Pierce. Wouldn’t a national day of thanksgiving be wonderful? No, Pierce grumped. Sarah penned an elegant letter to President James Buchanan. She gave all the reasons why America would be better off if everyone gathered on the fourth Thursday in November to give thanks. President Buchanan disagreed. He had other things on his mind. Sarah felt like the stuffing had been kicked out of her. Everything was going wrong. America was at war, the North against the South. States that had promised to celebrate Thanksgiving changed their mind. The country was falling apart. It was a bleak and scary time. Did that stop Sarah? No way! Nothing stopped Sarah! Superheroes work the hardest when things get tough. She picked up her mighty pen and wrote another letter, this time to President Abraham Lincoln. America needed Thanksgiving, now more than ever. A holiday wouldn’t stop the war, but it could help bring the country together. She signed the letter, folded it, and slid it into an envelope. She wrote Mr. Lincoln’s name and address on the envelope and stuck on a stamp. She mailed the letter. She waited. And she waited. And then… LINCOLN SAID YES! LINCOLN SAID YES!

James Buchanan’s collegiate record for “spirited” rambunctiousness arguably rivals that of George

James Buchanan’s collegiate record for “spirited” rambunctiousness arguably rivals that of George W. Bush while a student at Yale.

It was only then that Major John James realized that he was quite alone—whereupon he pulled the oldest trick in the book. Spurring Thunder on, he shouted, “Come on, boys! Come on! Here they are! Here they are!”28 The now thoroughly demoralized Tories leaped onto their horses and fled again, their leader joining them.

Or why did they say that boys shouldn’t have sex with one another and that God would be angry when that wasn’t referenced until the King James version in 1946? Did God come down again and whisper in some old man’s ear that he didn’t like it? I highly doubted it.

The art of being wise,” the American philosopher and psychologist William James once wrote, “is the art of knowing what to overlook,”16 and this book is about a terrific step along the scientific road of learning what to overlook. It is about the discovery of a profound similarity not between triangles or moving objects, but between the upheavals that affect our lives, and the ways in which the complicated networks in which they occur—economies, political systems, ecosystems, and so on—are naturally organized.

The behavior of Douglas, Pierce, Buchanan, and the Supreme Court (presided over by Roger B. Taney) aroused Lincoln’s suspicion. “These things look like the cautious patting and petting a spirited horse, preparatory to mounting him, when it is dreaded that he may give the rider a fall,” he said. Switching the metaphor, he continued: “We can not absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert.” Nevertheless, “when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen [Douglas], Franklin [Pierce], Roger [B. Taney], and James [Buchanan], for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few—not omitting even scaffolding—or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in—in such a case, we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.

In this chapter we discuss this stillbirth of the Virginia School by focusing on two of the approaches developed in Virginia at that time. We label one the Coasian institutionalist approach (named after Ronald Coase). We see this particular methodology as a clear attempt to maintain the sort of Classical Liberal thought fashioned in an earlier period by Frank Knight. The other, which we denote as the Buchanan political economy approach (named for James Buchanan), also had a stronger commitment to Classical Liberal methodology than did the Stigler/Friedman/Director version rapidly spreading within the Chicago campus.

James Buchanan looks like a dude who knew how to party,

At noon, an open horse-drawn carriage pulls up in front of the Willard Hotel. Out of it steps current President James Buchanan, who will serve as Lincoln’s escort to the Capitol several blocks away. When Lincoln emerges from the hotel, the two men shake hands and step up into the horse-drawn barouche. The scene is witnessed by scores of advisors and reporters. The passage together of the current and future President is a symbol of the peaceful transfer of power—an ideal that both men want to reinforce in public during the current political moment.

week. I knew the actual fifteenth president of the United States wasn’t a ghost out to get me, but I still balled my fist and hissed, “James Buchanan!

Nobel Prize for Economics, once awarded to James Buchanan for his theory that most of us are parasites, was more recently awarded to Elinor Ostrom, the great theorist of the commons. What she found, across societies and historical eras, was that communities were quite capable of commonsense cooperation—the “tragedy of the commons” was usually not a tragedy at all, as long as no one decided they had to have it all.