 My name is Jamie Lunky. I'm a senior fellow in the FA Hayek Program for Advanced Study and Philosophy, Politics and Economics. I'm here with my colleague Dick Wagner, the author of a book we're going to be discussing today. James M Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy, A Rational Reconstruction. Thank you for joining me here today. Well thank you for inviting me and looking forward to our conversation. So this is a dramatic oversimplification of the structure you just built. But you have all of these superstructures, constitutional politics, self-governance, post-constitutional politics, the moral and social philosophies that come out of this analysis. And at the root of all of them is this idea that public finance should be a way of understanding relations between free democratic peoples rather than simply being a science that exclusively speaks to relationships between rulers and their subjects or a despotic kind of public choice. At the time that Buchanan is doing this early work, how revolutionary is the idea that these public activities can be founded on a democratic basis rather than more of a despotic basis within the science of public finance? Well there were certainly precursors to the work that Buchanan did. In his doctoral dissertation Buchanan cited two precursors to there. One was Knut Wichsel, a Swede who throughout his Buchanan's career, Buchanan regarded as the single most important person for his constitutional work, who thought of the same kind of question of how could you have a parliamentary system suitable for Sweden where in the underlying Swedish parliamentary activities would reasonably strongly reflect a consensus among the Swedish population and how could you go about, Knut Wichsel asked questions, how could you go about imagining a mode of doing Swedish political business that would fit that image? And then the other source that Buchanan mentioned was an Italian fellow Antonio de Vittemarco, who Buchanan later spent a year in Italy studying a variety of Italian authors. De Vittemarco only had one book published in English and Buchanan had read that. It was published and translated in 1936 and it too offered two different ways of ideal types of democratic forms, what he called a cooperative democracy and what he called a monopolistic form. And the difference between the two forms fit with Buchanan's image of self-governing republics versus republics dominated by special interest groups and those were those corresponded to De Vittemarco's two forms. And so in many ways what became known as public choice in the very late 1960s, early 1960s was already in play in Italy in the 19, actually going back to 1888 and into the 1900s because you had a variety of Italian public finance theorists who likewise start to develop a explanation of how governments actually do their business as against someone saying how a government, they think a government should do its business. Like the long tradition of public finance was you might say concern with the practice of statecraft. What would be a good tax system? Adventist myth, you know, and his wealth of nations had these four maxims for a good tax system. At the time that Buchanan was a student, the two main figures in public finance were Brits, Francis Edgeworth and Alfred Pagoo. Now Edgeworth formulated a good tax system as one that would minimize the utility losses the taxes imposed on people, however you would ever determine that. There was an Italian named Emil Carri Pugliani who wrote a theory of public finance about 1903 maybe and his concern wasn't in trying to say, to advance his thoughts on what would be a lovely tax system, but was rather in saying, well the world has a rhyme and a reason to it. And Pugliani said about saying, well there's a rhyme and a reason to all that happens under the sun. Economizing actions are useful principles for understanding that. And he said about trying to explain what he thought would be the logic by which tax systems were established, were revised over time. Pugliani has never been translated into English, but has been translated into German, it was translated in 1960. And the sponsor of that translation was a man named Gunter Schmulders. He was doing work in what was known as fiscal psychology at the time and is kind of a forerunner of behavioral economics today. And Schmulder probably chose to translate Pugliani in not Davidi because Davidi had already been translated into German in 1934. And so he presented Pugliani, but he also wrote a foreword where he said, Italian public finance has long had a political science character to it where you have an integration of economics and politics. And with these ideas often giving a very good fit with reality. Suppose you took a bunch of these Italians, see the public choice got named at a meeting in 1968. It had a couple of prior meetings in Charlottesville when I was a student there. And it got established in 1968. I posed a hypothetical question. Suppose like, you know, the story of Rip Van Winkle, I guess, and he fell asleep for 20 years and woke up. And suppose you took these Italian dudes like Davidi and Pugliani and so forth. And they had fallen asleep. Then they woke up and here they were or in Chicago in 1968. And they were jumping into discussions that were going on about what was then called non-market decision making. I think those characters who had been right at home, the Italians and the Americans would be speaking the same language, sure they'd have somewhat different emphases and so forth, but they're all speaking the same language. And I think what, in my estimation, what Buchanan foremost did was really serve to connect what was a short-lived Italian orientation towards collective activity and brought it forward under the rubric now of public choice. It's always a pleasure talking to you, Dick. And today was no exception. So thank you so much. Well, thank you so very much. I always love talking to you too.