… is from page 308 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan’s 1980 paper “Procedural and Quantitative Constitutional Constraints on Fiscal Authority,” as this paper is reprinted in Choice, Contract, and Constitutions (2001), which is volume 16 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan:
The very purpose of rules, of constitutions, is to prevent us from making decision in an overemotional or overpragmatic response to particular situations.
