 My name is Jamie Lumke. I'm a senior fellow in the F.A. 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. To wrap up, I just want to ask you one last question, not asking you to be Cassandra here, but in the spirit of operating in the extended present and maybe figuring out where this tree is growing, where do you think are some of the most productive research directions for people who want to do research in public choice and constitutional political economy in the spirit of Buchanan? Well I think the, where I think this is leading or should be heading, is in this kind of direction of economics of political economy becoming a genuine social science. If you look at economic theory, if you go back to the time of Adam Smith, economics was a social science. It was concerned with trying to understand the properties of societies, recognizing that people had certain principles of action that were referred to as economizing action, which all that means is that people continually try to seek for states of living that they value more highly than what they have now. And that simple universal principle of economizing action in the classical economists led into a, that was a way of thinking about society in different forms of social organization and their properties. And when you get to the neoclassical period in economics, things got subverted or turned away in that what you had over the course from the late 19th into the 20th century into today is the treatment of economics as a theory of choice or of rational action. This didn't happen all once it happened in stages or in steps. But it started from the idea that an economic system is now to be treated as an entity that conforms to some principles of the theory of equilibrium. What that means, what that enables is you can treat a society, you can reduce a society to a single person, call it a representative individual. And do all of your theorizing in terms of that representative individual, what happens thereby is all of the social processes, interactions and so forth disappear. It's like, and there have been models many call crusonia models, imagining Robinson Crusoe. There's lots of things of rational choice you can illustrate by Robinson Crusoe. However, if you had 100 Robinson Crusoe on their individual islands, you would have 100 tales of Robinson Crusoe. But suppose instead those 100 Robinson's are all washed up on the same island. You're going to have all kinds of new situations, new problems, new phenomena arising that would never arise to any one of those 100 Robinson Crusoe. And it's that interaction amongst all these people where the real material I would say of political philosophy and political economy and social philosophy arise. Because Robinson Crusoe by himself has no questions of mine or yours, has no one to quarrel with, no disputes, no courts, no jails, nothing. And it's only when you have multiple people interacting that you generate not only multiple opportunities for trade, but again also multiple ways in which we can get after on each other's nerves. And I say that where I think this whole scheme of Virginia political economy leads is to recognition that what material dealing with is fundamentally a theory of society, that in this sense I've mentioned earlier that Buchanan really tried to bring forward the Italian theorist into the present in his treatment of public finance. I also think in that book mentioned that really Buchanan is totally misconstrued or misinterpreted as being a standard neoclassical economist with right-wing views. He was nothing of the sort. Sure, he was a classical liberal. He believed in the importance of individual liberty for human development in our capacities and thought by and large we should be able to govern ourselves and not be bossed by someone else. And that was very much part of it. But he was fundamentally resided with, operated within the British or English classical tradition of political economy going back to Adam Smith, David Hume, people like that. The only place he diverged from this classical tradition was he didn't get confused about diamonds and water. You know, Adam Smith repeated this diamond water paradox that it's a paradox that water is necessary for human life, but diamonds are so much more valuable. But the classical economists repeated this confusion for a long time. It took the neoclassical period to resolve it. Buchanan wasn't confused about the diamond water paradox, but that's the only sense in which he was really a standard neoclassical economist at his core than that he was a classical economist. What that meant, there was a wonderful paper published in 1960 by Nathan Rosenberg called institutional aspects of the wealth of nations. And what Rosenberg pointed out, Smith was not at all to be sent was not at all centrally concerned with any notion of an efficient allocation of resources. He was rather concerned with the institutional arrangements by which people live together. And it's that because, see, think about it. Well, you talk about efficient resource allocation, but resources can't allocate themselves. They can't. They're inanimate objects. Only people can allocate resources. But they do so inside of some kind of set of arrangements that governs their relationships with one another. And so that means that the foreground of your theoretical concern, conceptual concern, really has to be on the arrangements that we develop to govern our relationships where the allocations that we create, they just come out of it. They're not of any first order interest. And that, I think, was the in-co-it kind of vision animated Buchanan's program. I think it's the program that was alive when Virginia political economy got started in Charlottesville in the mid 1950s. And I think it's a vision that's alive and well today. It's a vision, I believe, that very much the Hayek program here with its three-fold emphasis on philosophy, politics, and economics is, I think, very much in the position to carry forward. And I hope to be actively doing that for many, many, many long years in the future. Well, I hope so too. And we've been talking today about Richard Wagner's newest book, James M. Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy, A Rational Reconstruction. We didn't get through a fraction of what it covers. So if you're interested in more, please pick up a copy. 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.