Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 9 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague Jim Buchanan’s 1968 paper “An Economist’s Approach to ‘Scientific Politics,’” as this paper is reprinted in James M. Buchanan, Politics as Public Choice (2000), which is volume 13 of the Collected Works of James M. Buchanan:

How are we, as external observers, to know when a person is, in fact, better off or worse off? Here there admits only one answer. We can judge the better offness and worse offness only by observing individual choices. If a man is observed to choose situation A when he could have remained in situation B, we say that he is better off in A, as revealed to us by his own actions. This is not, of course, to say that individuals do not make mistakes or that they know with certainty which of a set of alternative outcomes will make them better off ex post facto. The implication here is only that the individual, observed to make his own choices, is a better judge of his own better offness than is any external observer of his behavior. This implication amounts to an explicit value judgment, admittedly so, but it is the value judgment upon which Western liberal society has been founded.