James M. Buchanan as a Positive Economist
William F. Shughart II and Robert D. Tollison
2. Academia: If you put the faculty in charge of the university, low-opportunity cost
faculty will come to dominate university decision making, driving out the good scholars and lowering the productivity of the university; as a point of reference, one could examine the scholarly output of members of the faculty senate relative to non-member faculty in her present university (Buchanan and Devletoglou 1970).
3. Deficit Finance: If you lower the cost of taxing future citizens, they will be taxed at a greater rate (Buchanan 1958).
4. Keynesian Economics: Given a choice, politicians will vote for lower taxes and increased spending; the Keynesian Abalance wheel@ is loaded on the side of deficits; one of Keynes=s legacies is modern deficits (Buchanan 1987a).
5. Tax Collection: Governments will collect as much tax revenues as feasible, given the
constraints imposed upon them; Leviathan lives C the era of big government is not over (Brennan and Buchanan 1980).
6. Political Economy: The only test of right or wrong is uncoerced agreement among participating parties; there is no one Aright@ policy independent of individuals= evaluations (Buchanan 1959).
7. Clubs: Many Apublic goods@ are produced efficiently by private, cooperative
arrangements; private supply of public goods is feasible in certain cases (Buchanan 1965a).
8. Voters: The individual=s decision to vote in the ballot box differs from market choices because of the absence of the choice-consequence nexus (Buchanan 1954).
9. Institutional Analysis: The relevant comparison is between realized and not idealized
institutional alternatives; government is not a free lunch (Buchanan 1962a).
10. Fiscal Federalism: Fiscal mobility of individuals and capital embodies certain potential social costs; Acities@ do not function like private clubs because certain property rights are undefined (Buchanan and Goetz 1972).
11. Expressive Voting: Voters may be more virtuous in a 1/N setting by virtue of the first law of demand (Brennan and Buchanan 1984).
12. Ricardian Equivalence: Uncertainty over future tax liabilities leads people to prefer debt to
taxes (Buchanan 1976a).
13. Work Ethic: Individuals have an economic self-interest in the ethics of others; the work ethic (as well as a saving ethic) promotes generalized increasing returns (Buchanan 1994a).
14. Public Choice: Man does not alter his basic behavior as between market and non- market settings; only the constraints are different (Buchanan 1979a).
15. Monetary Policy: Monetary rules and greater predictability of monetary policy are associated with a more prosperous economy (Buchanan 1962b).
16. Government Failure: Government is not a perfect instrument for correcting market
failures (Buchanan 1962a).
17. Rent Seeking: The pursuit of transfers takes place in both public and private settings
(e.g., the rat race); primogeniture will reduce rent seeking in families (Buchanan 1983).
18. Reform: We start from where we are (Buchanan 1962a).
19. Anarchy: The study of a world without government teaches us about the rational basis for steps to civil society and the consequences of a breakdown in social order (Buchanan 1972).
20. Tax Reform: AReform@ begats reform, as the tax code is auctioned off every so many years; rent seeking is a dynamic game (Buchanan 1987b).
21. Ethical Norms: Many ethical norms are the result of a long ago cost-benefit calculus suggesting the gains from trade from ethical behavior; ethics have economic value; ethics are a relatively absolute absolute (Buchanan 1965b).
22. Justice: Justice is fairness (Buchanan 1976b).
23. Secession: The ability to opt out produces fiscal benefits in a federal system; if at first you do not secede, try, try again (Buchanan and Faith 1987).
24. Monopoly: In some cases (crime, for instance) monopoly (e.g., the Mafia) produces social benefits (in a second-best sense) (Buchanan 1973).
25. Literature: The autobiographies of scientists are more truthful than those of novelists (Buchanan and Tollison 1986).
26. Economists: There are examples of Anatural@ economists, for example, Gordon Tullock (Buchanan 1987a).
27. Environmental Regulation: Interest groups prefer command and control regulation to emission fees, tradable pollution permits, and taxes (Buchanan and Tullock 1975).
28. Tax Earmarking: Tax earmarking produces fiscal outcomes superior to general fund
budgeting; why should we buy public goods in fixed bundles (Buchanan 1963)?
29. Indirect Taxation: In a multiple period model of individual choice, there are
conditions under which indirect is preferred to direct taxation (Buchanan 1966).
30. Generality Constraints: In majoritarian democracy, general rules that apply to all citizens inhibit majority cycling and rent seeking (Buchanan and Congleton 1998).
31. In-Kind Redistribution: There is an individualistic rationale for redistributing specific
goods and services rather than general purchasing power (Buchanan 1968b).
32. Public Goods: The demand for public goods has a negative slope (Buchanan 1966).
33. Social Security: Employers do not Apay@ the payroll tax (Buchanan 1990).
34. Fiscal Illusion: Politicians have an incentive to obscure the costs of government programs and to highlight the benefits of the same programs (Buchanan 1966).
35. Fiscal Awareness: Individuals are not very aware of how much they pay in taxes (Buchanan 1966).
36. Ethics and Economics: Ethical behavior is muted by individual incentives in a large numbers setting; ethical behavior is subject to the first law of demand (Buchanan 1965b).
37. Majority Rule: Though widely used, this voting procedure does not have much to recommend it; combined, for example, with geographic representation, it leads to inefficient public policies (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
38. Relative Unanimity: More inclusive voting rules increase collective decision costs but enhance the efficiency of collective decisions (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
39. Unanimity: Unanimous agreement is the only voting rule consistent with discerning underlying increases in economic welfare (Buchanan 1962a).
40. Logrolling: Vote trading is analogous to private exchange in some respects in that it can enhance the productivity and stability of collective decision making under specified circumstances (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
41. Constitutional Economics: The rules for in-period political exchange are a key source of the capital stock of any society; societies with better rules are more productive (Buchanan 1986).
42. Public Goods: In a small numbers setting, public goods will be provided efficiently on a voluntary exchange basis among individuals; in a large numbers setting individuals will pursue the potential gains from trade by selecting rules and institutions for the provision of public goods (Buchanan 1968a).
43. Profit Seeking: Profit seeking in competitive markets is not analogous to rent seeking; profit seeking creates value; rent seeking destroys value (Buchanan 1980).
44. Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs have positive and negative effects depending upon the institutional setting in which entrepreneurship is practiced (profit seeking versus rent seeking) (Buchanan 1980).
45. Socialism: An economic system which separates consumption from production will not survive (Buchanan 1997).
46. Democracy: This word must be preceded by Aconstitutional@ if political equality is to be meaningful; democracy is not majoritorianism or mob rule (Buchanan 1997).
47. Bureaucracy: Bureaucracy is a system of political pricing that makes decisions based on criteria other than economic value (Buchanan 1994b).
48. Exit: The absence of an exit option in political processes blocks an important feedback loop to public decision makers (Buchanan and Faith 1987).
49. Science: Politics, unlike science, is not a search for truth; politics is about agreement (Buchanan 1967).
50. Market Orders: Outcomes emerge in ordinary markets from the process of individual choice; the end-state or allocative result has no meaning independent of individual choices (Buchanan 1982).
51. Valuation of Government Goods: If goods are given away freely, individuals will dissipate their value by over-usage (Buchanan 1968a).
52. Quantity Discounts: Monopolists secure more profit by introducing discounts on large purchases (Buchanan 1952-53).
53. Endogeneous Alternatives for Voting Choices: The alternatives presented for collective voting choices jointly depend on the voting rule (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
54. Heterogeneous Inputs: In the presence of heterogeneous inputs a competitive input purchaser will behave like a perfectly discriminating monopsonist in purchasing bundles of heterogeneous inputs (Buchanan and Tollison 1981).
55. Relatively Absolute Absolutes: Something must be taken as given for purposes of analysis; there is a choice among choices and then choice itself (Buchanan 1989).
56. Economics: Economics is not about allocating scarce resources; it is about choice; it is also better than plowing (Buchanan 1979b).
57. The Welfare State: If the recipients of income transfers are allowed to participate in the collective decision concerning the size of the transfer, self-interested voting will bias transfers upward (Buchanan 1975a).
58. Public Finance: Fiscal policy outcomes can only be understood in the context of the budget as a whole; taxing and spending policies both have distributional consequences (Buchanan 1949).
59. Judges: Good law is the enforcement of agreed upon rules; social justice and law and economics are both about mutual consent (Buchanan 1974).
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