Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on May 29, 2018
… is from page 178 of my late Nobel laureate colleague Jim Buchanan‘s 1977 paper “Criteria for a Free Society: Definition, Diagnosis, and Prescription,” as this paper is reprinted in James M. Buchanan, Federalism, Liberty, and Law (2001), which is volume 18 of the Collected Works of James M. Buchanan:
In its most elemental meaning a constitution is a set of rules which constrain the activities of persons and agents in the pursuit of their own ends and objectives. To argue directly or by inference that the constitution in itself embodies or should embody a “social purpose” is to negate its very meaning.
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