… is from my late Nobel laureate colleague Jim Buchanan’s 1963 Presidential address to the Southern Economic Association – a profound address entitled “What Should Economists Do?“; this quotation is from page 38 of the version that appears in volume 1 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan: The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty:
The motivation for individuals to engage in trade, the source of the propensity, is surely that of “efficiency,” defined in the personal sense of moving from less-preferred to more-preferred positions, and doing so under mutually acceptable terms. An “inefficient” institution, one that produces largely “inefficient” results, cannot, by the nature of man, survive until and unless coercion is introduced to prevent the emergence of alternative arrangements.
