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Bonus Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 60 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan’s May 1988 American Economic Review paper, “Contractarian Political Economy and Constitutional Interpretation,” as this paper is reprinted in Choice, Contract, and Constitutions (2001), which is volume 16 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan:

The contractarian or catallactic approach to economic interaction suggests that systems or subsystems be evaluated in terms of the comparative ease or facility with which voluntary exchanges, contracts, or trades may be arranged between and among members of the community. Normative judgments take the form of statements that array “better” and “worse” processes (rules, laws, institutions) within which exchanges are allowed to take place. These judgments are categorically distinct from those that array and evaluate results or outcomes.

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