"I see at least six James Buchanans: 1. The brilliant academic thinker behind the genius insights of Calculus of Consent. […] 2. The academic operator seeking to get money from ex-Governor and U.Va. President Darden for the great public choice research project by overpromising how useful his Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy would be in providing intellectual weapons to strengthen the political causes of Darden and his friends. 3. The academic operator going beyond what I, at least, regard as the permissible academic pale by imposing a political-ideological litmus test on who he invited into the public choice circle—i.e., not Mancur Olson, or any Olson students or potential Olson students (like me, in my younger days). […] 4. The grandson of Kentucky Governor John Buchanan, offended that Yankees would dare tell southern gentlemen how to deal with their "peculiar institutions". (And just what are these "Western traditions"? And how near to the core of these "Western traditions" is white supremacy anyway? That the language here is Aesopian is not to Buchanan's credit.) 5. The friend of plutocrats or would-be plutocrats buying into the Hayekian idea that political democracy was, fundamentally, a mistake because the plebes would vote themselves bread-and-circuses and so ultimately destroy civilization. 6. The right-wing activist seeking, in a von Misian or Rothbardian way, to harness and in fact mobilize racial evil to the service of what he regarded as the good of stomping the New Deal and Keynesian economics into oblivion."
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Nobel laureates from the United StatesLibertarians from the United StatesEconomists from the United StatesNobel laureates in EconomicsPeople from Tennessee
Original Language: English
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J. Bradford DeLong, "Six Faces of Right-Wing Chain-Forging Economist James Buchanan" (November 16, 2017)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_M._Buchanan
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James M. Buchanan
James McGill Buchanan, Jr. (3 October 1919 – 9 January 2013) was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics.
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