… is from page 33 of my emeritus colleague Richard E. Wagner’s and the late James D. Gwartney’s excellent 1988 essay “Public Choice and Constitutional Order,” which appears as chapter 2 in Gwartney & Wagner, eds., Public Choice and Constitutional Economics:
In effect, constitutional order is a mutually advantageous treaty among what would otherwise be warring factions – a treaty which promotes the substitution of wealth-creating trade for wealth-reducing plunder.
DBx: Yes. Yet constitutional order requires a constitutional morality and not only ink on parchment.
