39. Diagnosing the Electorate: James Buchanan in the Role of Political Economist

It is possible that Buchanan’s description of the moral obligation as being ‘to believe’, which suggests this interpretation, is an inadvertent misrepresentation of his position. What could be obligatory is not belief as such, but rather to act as if one believed that reform were possible: to not withdraw from political and intellectual engagement. This obligation could flow from the need to forestall classical liberalism being extinguished in the kind of behavioral cascade Buchanan (1968a) worried could result from sufficiently large minority defections from a previously shared norm in “A Behavioral Theory of Pollution.”

C.f. Buchanan’s similar charge in his essay from several years earlier, The Soul of Classical Liberalism (Buchanan 2000).

I would argue Buchanan’s diagnosis is incorrect, for reasons which would take another essay to develop fully. Two brief objections: (1) Buchanan’s notion of parentalism conflates desire to avoid consequences (the protective role of the parent taken on by the state) with the desire for meaning and meaningful communities not predicated upon market interactions (the family outside of the parent/child relation, the church, etc.), simultaneously exaggerating the extent of the former and misunderstanding the nature of the latter (2) Buchanan both underestimates the continued relevance of paternalistic control over individuals and, in viewing dependency as a product of ‘bottom-up’ desire to abdicate responsibility, does not account for the ‘top-down’ reinforcement of dependency not motivated by paternalistic substitution of elite preferences for those of others, but by a desire on the part of elites for others to be dependent upon them, another source which mitigates the extent to which we ought to view the ‘mass polity’ as motivated by a desire to abdicate responsibility.

A topic we will consider in more detail in the following sections.

A few of these more isolated examples include Buchanan’s work as a consultant for the Council of Economic Advisors under Eisenhower and his participation in an ICC test-case dealing with pricing in transportation economics in the late 1950s.

The experience of the UCLA year may be the most significant influence upon the direction of Buchanan’s research program subsequent to his years at Chicago: beyond Academia in Anarchy, his theoretical papers during this period all have antecedent roots in the same events (discernable for instance in both A Behavioral Theory of Pollution and The Samaritan’s Dilemma), as does much of his work in the first half of the 1970s.

Although this lecture was prior to his move to UCLA (which was pending at the time of his remarks), it was also prior to the election season the results of which, as we will discuss later, formed part of Buchanan’s shift towards renewed optimism over time.

The connection between these two essays does provide some support for the ‘Get Off My Lawn’ interpretation. Yet the rhetorical intensity present here is missing from Afraid to be Free.

Exactly how blameworthy the charitably motivated but socially harmful choices by the Samaritans are in Buchanan’s view is unclear. That university administrators had, by their complete and total failure to resist campus radicals forced this dilemma onto the general public perhaps mitigates their culpability, as might be inferred from the dedication of Academia in Anarchy ‘To the Taxpayer.’

At least on this particular analytical margin: his criticism of public debt as a macroeconomic lever, concerns regarding campus politics, and his work in public finance with policy relevance all continued in parallel to the work at issue here.

For an essay critical of economic reports from 1970, this essay is of remarkable contemporary salience (would this quotation have appeared out of place in a discussion of Brexit?). Buchanan also gestures towards the potentially corrosive effects on political legitimacy resulting from a failure of a change of administration to result in any change in policy outcomes: “must [the voter] conclude that an ‘establishment’ really does run things for us all and that no genuine change can be expected from political party rotation? Must this voter, if he exist, agree then with the new barbarians whose own naïve prejections[sic] of an ‘establishment’ seem to be spun from pure fantasy?” (Buchanan 1970b, p. 489).

The introductory materials Buchanan composed for this project begin with a series of premises and implications which summarize the perspective discussed in the preceding essays.

This kind of interpretative framework can lead to perverse results, such as that an effort to organize a movement of like-minded individuals to counteract a counter-majoritarian tendency in American political and social institutions is attacked as anti-democratic.

The Nobel Prize itself was also a cause of some rustled feathers: again given the intellectual connections, there had been an unspoken expectation that Buchanan would be invited to the White House in recognition of his award, but this took place only quite belatedly. When that point finally arrived, Buchanan declined the invitation due to the ongoing Iran-Contra scandal.

Although, as Buchanan (1971, p. 6) noted among his criticisms of macroeconomists, even this was not always the case (i.e. “Macroeconomists simply do not know what the tradeoffs are, much less what proper social weights are to be placed on the conflicting objectives for national policy”).

As well as presenting a new hypothesis regarding the preferences of the electorate which, as empirical claim is of significant for his prior political economic proposals, the bulk of his analysis is of the underlying causes for the (new, or perhaps newly recognized) state of the world.