Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 100-101 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague Jim Buchanan’s July 25th, 1982, speech in Blacksburg, VA, “The Dishwater of Orthodoxies,” as the transcript of this speech is published, for the first time, in The Soul of Classical Political Economy: James M. Buchanan from the Archives (2020) (edited by Peter J. Boettke and Alain Marciano) (link added):

The [Public Choice] center’s work, and public choice more inclusively considered, have challenged the orthodoxy of democratic socialist mythology. We are heretics to all those who hold as sacrosanct the efficacy of majoritarian democracy or the necessary efficiency of modern bureaucracy. And despite our very considerable success in shifting ultimate academic and public attitudes, we have been treated as heretics have been treated throughout the ages. We have been excommunicated and reviled. In my own quite recent efforts to present the simple and straightforward case for changes in our fiscal and monetary constitution, for imposing new limits on the excesses of ordinary politics, I have, on more than one occasion, been charged with “intellectual fascism.”

DBx: Jim Buchanan died on this date nine years ago. Had he lived long enough to encounter them, Jim would not have been surprised by the scurrilous lies told about him and his work by a Duke University “historian” (so-called).