Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on May 11, 2018
… is from page 254 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan’s Fall 1991 Cato Journal paper, “The Minimal Politics of Market Order,” as this paper is reprinted in Choice, Contract, and Constitutions (2001), which is volume 16 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan:
My purpose here is to suggest that over-attention to, and over-concentration on, the efficiency generating features of the market economy may prompt neglect of the closely related corollary feature that is equally, if not more, important. The economy that is organized on market principles effectively minimizes the number of economic decisions that must be made politically, that is, through some agency that acts on behalf of the collective unit. In practical terms, we may say that an economy organized on market principles minimizes the size and importance of the political bureaucracy.
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