Bonus Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on July 5, 2017
… is from page 16 of my late Nobel laureate colleague Jim Buchanan’s 1983 article “The Public Choice Perspective,” as this article is reprinted in James M. Buchanan, Politics as Public Choice (2000), which is volume 13 of the Collected Works of James M. Buchanan (link added; original emphasis):
“What Should Economists Do?” – my 1962, as well as my 1982, response to this question was and is to urge that we exorcise the maximizing paradigm from its dominant place in our tool kit, that we quit defining our discipline, our “science,” in terms of the scarcity constraint, that we change the very definition, indeed the very name of our “science,” that we stop worrying so much about the allocation of resources and the efficiency thereof, and, in place of this whole set of ideas, that we commence concentrating on the origins, properties, and institutions of exchange, broadly considered. Adam Smith’s propensity to truck and barter one thing for another – this becomes the proper object for our research and inquiry.
DBx: I challenge anyone to find within these words – within either their direct meaning or within their broader implications – any of the hidden racism or the fuel for oligarchs’ plans for world domination that Nancy MacLean ludicrously claims to lurk in the work of Jim Buchanan.
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