Quotes from James M. Buchanan

The eighteenth century discovery that, in an institutional framework that facilitates voluntary exchanges among individuals, this process generates results that might be evaluated positively, produced 'economics,' as an independent academic discipline or science.

If politicians get money to spend and don't have to be responsible for taxation, then of course that will bias their attitude toward more spending as opposed to cutting back on spending.

Politics is a romantic search for the good and the true and the beautiful.

The elementary and basic approach that I suggest places "the theory of markets" and not the "theory of resource allocation" at center stage. My plea is really for the adoption of a sophisticated "catallactics,"…

Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.

Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe.

In 1987, the United States celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of the constitutional convention that provided the basic rules for the American political order. This convention was one of the very few historical examples in which political rules were deliberately chosen.

One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell's unknown and untranslated dissertation, 'Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen,' buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago's old Harper Library.