What James Buchanan Told Me....

... and everyone else in class.

     I took two classes with James M. Buchanan.   The first was in the late seventies at Virginia Tech and the second in the early eighties at George Mason.    He was also a member of my dissertation committee.

     Anyway, in class he explained that when he was in the Navy in WW2, he learned to follow instructions completely.   After the war, when he was at Chicago, he was given a complete bibliography of Public Finance and he took it to be the class reading list, and so he read it all.  (Well, maybe he didn't say he finished it all, but he was working at it when the instructor explained that it wasn't intended to be the reading list for his course.)

     Included on that list was a work by Knut Wicksell.   Wicksell is a quite famous monetary economist, but he also wrote a book on public finance.   Buchanan was especially taken by Wicksell's "A New Theory of Just Taxation."   He told us that his contributions to Public Choice were little more than an elaboration of Wicksell's approach.

      I think he was being more than a bit too modest, but he didn't mention John C. Calhoun or the Southern Agrarians as inspirations.   Looking at his early publications, sure enough, soon after graduate school in the late forties and early fifties  he appeared to be applying the Wicksellian insights.

     The Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy started in 1957.    Here is Buchanan's contemporary description of what it was about.

    Nothing there about protecting states' rights or the desirability of segregation.   I find it hard to see anything "between the lines."   There is just an express support for individual liberty and the free enterprise system.

     Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains is not consistent with the James Buchanan I met in the late seventies and I have seen nothing that suggests that the early Buchanan was much different.