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… is from page 308 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan [2]’s 1980 paper “Procedural and Quantitative Constitutional Constraints on Fiscal Authority,” as this paper is reprinted in Choice, Contract, and Constitutions [3] (2001), which is volume 16 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan [4]:
The very purpose of rules, of constitutions, is to prevent us from making decision in an overemotional or overpragmatic response to particular situations.