Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 51-52 of my late Nobel laureate colleague Jim Buchanan‘s important 1979 article “Politics Without Romance,” as this article is reprinted in volume 1 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan: The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty:

But the 19th- and 20th-century fallacy in political thought was embodied in the presumption that electoral requirements were in themselves sufficient to hold government‘s Leviathan-like proclivities in check, the presumption that, so long as there were constitutional guarantees for free and periodic elections, the range and extent of governmental action would be controlled. Only in the middle of this century have we come to recognize that such electoral constraints do not keep governments with the implied “contract” through which they might have been established….