 My name is Jamie Lemke. I'm a senior fellow in the F.A. Hayek program for advanced study and philosophy, politics, and economics. And I'm here today with my colleague, Dick Wagner. So thank you for joining me here today, Dick. Well, I'm glad to be here to talk with you. He's an incredibly prolific economist on public choice issues and constitutional political economy, 15 books or monographs and hundreds of articles. Dick has been collaborating with James Buchanan since his very first days as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, so an over 50 year career so far on public choice. And just one year after Buchanan and Tellich wrote The Calculus of Consent, The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, which you refer to in your book as the urtext of constitutional political economy. In your latest book, which we're here today to talk about, James M Buchanan and liberal political economy, A Rational Reconstruction, you explore the analytic foundations of public choice and constitutional political economy, including The Calculus of Consent, but actually even going further back in that analytical tradition. And I just want to start by asking you today, what motivated you to write the book using Buchanan as a central figure? It's hard to say, I think, from my experience, what actually motivates me. I think several things are probably in play. My whole method of doing things has been suddenly something feels right. And it suddenly felt right to write this book on Buchanan several months ago. Now that didn't just come totally out of the blue. There was lots of preparation. After all, I had known the man for over 50 years. He and I had done a number of things together. But more immediately, about two or three years ago at the public choice meetings, I gave a plenary address on Virginia political economy. And the acquisitions editor from Lex Books asked if I would convert that into a book. And I said, no, I didn't care to at the time. And then about a year or two later at the meetings of the American Economic Association, I gave a paper on Italian style, public finance, and its relation to Buchanan. And the Lexington editor was there again, persistent soul, and asked again if I had the interest. And in the meantime, here in the Hayek program, where the main figures that we talk about here are Vincent Nellner Ostrom, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and James Buchanan. And of those three sets of people, you had Pete Betke and Paul Lugica wrote a book on the Ostroms, plus a former student at Mason. I hear just recently came out with a book on Eleanor Ostrom. And you have Pete Betke is writing a book on Hayek. Don Boudreau wrote another book on Hayek about a year or two ago. And I think those things going on led me to say, oh, shoot, maybe I should do a book on Buchanan, because I've known the chap for 50 years. I've read everything he's ever written. And it would be good for the program because Buchanan is the would then be the one of this triumvirate through which there wasn't a book. And now said, okay, so all those things came together. And then one day, I just, okay, it feels right. So do it. And I did. And now we have the complete trilogy. Yeah, we do. The title starts with James M Buchanan. And it is about Buchanan, but it's also very much focused around the ideas that he worked with more so than his personality. So can you talk a little bit about your decision to create an analytical structure for the flow of the book rather than a biographical structure? Surely. I described this book by the subtitle Irrational Reconstruction. And by contrast, the book by Eleanor Ostrom I mentioned by the former student, Vlad Tarko, was titled Intellectual Biography. And the difference between the Intellectual Biography and Irrational Reconstruction is a matter of what you as the author are trying to accomplish with a intellectual biography. If I wrote an intellectual biography of Buchanan, I would be trying to explain how did Buchanan in 1949 come to be Buchanan in 2013 when he died? That would be a kind of an effort to portray the various steps he took, encounters he had along the way, changes of mind he had, trying to lay out the various steps that led over that 64 year period to him becoming the Buchanan we recognize at the end of his life. That's intellectual biography. That is something I don't believe I have the talent to do, nor do I have the interest to do. It requires much more of an ability to wrestle with detail, which is much more the problems of my wife and our family, where I'm much more of a theoretical kind of guy. And so what I did was a rational reconstruction, which he meant by rational reconstruction is you stand at the end of his life surveying his body of accumulated work. Pieces of that work didn't interest him, weren't part of his core, but much of it was. And so I asked the rational reconstruction case then, is there a coherent logic that undergirds the prime body of his work, that gives it a coherence beyond what he would have recognized at any stage when he was developing that body of work? And that's what I did in that book. It's always a pleasure talking to you, Dick, and today was no exception. So thank you so much. Thank you so very much. I always love talking to you too.