James Buchanan, noted
Economist, died yesterday at the age of 93.
To quote an editorial in the 1/10/13 issue of the WSJ:
Though
a free-marketeer to his bones, [Buchanan] made his biggest mark and won the
Nobel Prize in 1986 for his work studying economic incentives in government.
With
Gordon Tullock, Buchanan developed what became known as “public choice theory”. Buchanan described it as the application of
the profit motive to government: “It presupposes that if there is value to be
gained through politics, persons will invest resources in efforts to capture
this value”.
In other words, Buchanan
theorized that public officials often act in their own self-interest rather
than the public’s interest.
While that might seem a
quaint notion to my younger readers, it was ground-breaking theory at the
time. I grew up in the 60’s, in Alabama.
To paraphrase the Chinese proverb, they were indeed “interesting times”. Civil
rights, Women’s rights, Vietnam, rampant drug use – so many social issues that
roared to the forefront of American consciousness. Previously, Americans really did believe that
public officials were more nobly motivated and trustworthy than were business and
other private-sector people. We believed
that public officials acted only in the public interest.
Then came Nixon. Slowly, Americans woke up to the reality that
public officials didn’t deserve our blind trust.
Buchanan’s thoughts
seem as relevant today as in 1986.
Witness the paralysis in Congress in its “handling” of the fiscal cliff. It had nothing to do with serving the
American people. It was about political gamesmanship.
“The only thing new in this world is the
history that you don’t know” … Harry S. Truman
