Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on November 5, 2018
… is from page 272 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague Jim Buchanan’s 1978 paper “Public Choice and Ideology,” as this paper is reprinted in Jim’s 1979 collection, What Should Economists Do? (original emphasis):
It seems extremely difficult for anyone to adopt a socialist position and at the same time be familiar with and accept the analysis of public choice. Here I use socialist in the sense that this term was employed in the 1930s, when [Oskar] Lange, [Abba] Lerner, and others convinced so many of their colleagues that socialism could work. No more than a smattering of sophistication in public choice (or in ordinary common sense, for that matter) is required to suggest the absurdity in that position. Once any thought at all is given to the actual processes of collective decision-making, the claims for efficiency-generating properties of the socialist alternative collapse of their own weight.
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