Quotation of the Day…
Posted By Don Boudreaux On April 1, 2012 @ 7:48 am In Civil Society,Other People's Money,Politics,Reality Is Not Optional | Comments Disabled
… is from page 226 of James Buchanan [1]‘s 1979 collection What Should Economists Do? [2] (H. Geoffrey Brennan & Robert D. Tollison, eds); specifically, it’s from Buchanan’s May 1978 American Economic Review essay “Markets, States, and the Extent of Morals”:
What can a person be predicted to do when the external institutions force upon him a role in a community that extends beyond his moral-ethical limits? The tension shifts toward the self-interest pole of behavior; moral-ethical principles are necessarily sublimated. The shift is exaggerated when a person realizes that others in the extended community of arbitrary and basically amoral size will find themselves in positions comparable to his own.
Comments
Article printed from Cafe Hayek: http://cafehayek.com
URL to article: http://cafehayek.com/2012/04/quotation-of-the-day-249.html
URLs in this post:
[1] James Buchanan: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Buchanan.html
[2] What Should Economists Do?: http://catalog.libertyfund.org/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=1109&vmcchk=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7] Image: http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Url=http%3A%2F%2Fcafehayek.com%2F2012%2F04%2Fquotation-of-the-day-249.html&Title=Quotation%20of%20the%20Day...
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12] Tweet: https://twitter.com/share
Click here to print.