 There is to be a 30-minute break between this session and the next bout in which we can go out in the halls and literally fill the air with theoretical insights. Until then though, we can worry about that later, and the important thing for me to do right now is to present to you Dr. Gordon Tullop. I was fascinated to discover that politics bureaucracy required reading in at least one public affairs course. At most public affairs course, you're required not to read it. It is, by the way, changed publishers. We were out of print for about eight months, and now we're back with American University Press, which is one of these presses that exists for the sole purpose of republishing things that are out of print. But get back to what I was saying. Before I arrived at the University of Virginia to begin my postdoctoral fellowship, I had had only the most minor personal contacts with Jim Buchanan. My formal background was not in economics, and indeed I did not favor welfare economics. Buchanan rather quickly converged me on the latter, but it has to be said that I've always been rather unhappy with the Peretti and apparatus. Throughout my career, I've attempted to invent improvements or replacements. I can't say that I have been immensely successful. As a result of this background, I had a somewhat different approach to our joint work than Jim. Specifically, I was thinking of understanding the government and if possible improving its functioning. The use of economic tools for me was a method of reaching this goal rather than an end in itself. My interest in political exchange is only instrumental. All of this provided a genuine but not gigantic difference in approach. I think that the mild amount of tension between our different approaches together with the fact that we had the same basic perspective contributed to the success of the analysis. Unlike Jim, however, I have been disappointed by the subsequent history of the calculus consent. It has sold well, been used in classes, even been influential in the sense that it has affected the thought of a large number of people. There has, however, been almost no further research along the lines of the calculus. I am in particular good position to certify this as editor of public choice. This is not, of course, to say that public choice itself is not flourished and that there has not been a great deal of research. But it seems to me that Duncan Black's median preference theorem and Anthony Down's work on information in politics have led to much more research and elaboration on the calculus of consent's constitutional perspective. I think that my later rediscovery of rent-seeking set off more articles which directly attempted to apply and expand the reasoning that the calculus of consent and the same could have been said at a somewhat earlier period of Jim's theory of clubs. Needless to say, I'm not alleging that there was no research at all based on the calculus consent. Further, what one might call the simple constitutional perspective, which we introduced in the book, has had great influence. But the more elaborate constitutional theory of the book has stimulated almost no research. There has been substantially no work on constitutions per se. The simple constitutional perspective consists of looking at the basic institutions rather than the specific activities of government in an effort to explain its behavior. Thus, for example, recently Shepsley in a series of papers has been explaining the functioning of the House of Representatives in terms of semi-constitutional procedural rules, which the House has adopted. Note that these are only semi-constitutional. They're not actually part of the Constitution. Secondly, Shepsley does not seem to have a reformist perspective. He seems to be that these rules are okay, although he doesn't formally endorsement and does not suggest how they could be improved. Further, he does not compare them with the rules and use in other borough bodies. In terms of output of government, it seems likely that the British legislature from the time of the First Reform Act until about my 1890s was history's best. It used an institutional structure which was totally and completely different from the one that Shepsley presents as out of the House of Representatives. Either he, nor as far as I know, any other of the modern public school scholars have looked into the difference in attempted comparative evaluation. Such comparative evaluation in and of itself be interesting, but its real importance would be as a first step towards developing improved constitutional rules. There are, of course, a good many constitutions and comparative study would seem to be sensible. I must self-do a good deal of reading in this area, but I don't have enough language capacity to make really serious studies. To take one particular example, the Swiss Constitution is the strongest competitor of the American in a success in the present-day world. Further, Switzerland, as it happens, has a concentration of public choice scholars. There has been only a little work by these Swiss scholars on the differences between the Swiss and the American constitutions. Such studies, with efforts to evaluate performance, would be of great value. This would be particularly useful because the Swiss Constitution of 1848 was actually modeled on the American Constitution and has many similarities as well as certain radical differences. It is true that some Swiss students have looked into the Swiss habit of public referenda and inquired whether it makes a difference. It is no criticism of this research that it say that it is not very extensive. Further, it doesn't offer any arguments either for or against reform of either Constitution. To take a less significant gap, the German Constitution provides a method of electing the lower house of the legislature, which is a sort of a compromise between the single-member constituency and proportional representation. So far as I know, no public choice scholar has made any analysis of its working. This is particularly impressive because the system appears to give considerably more political weight to people whose first preference is one of the minor parties, provided, of course, that the minor party has at least 5% of electorate than to those who favor one of the two main parties. The absence of any reformist drive in the constitutional area is particularly impressive. The calculus was consent was, although not too overtly, a reformist book. Probably its strongest single implicit recommendation for reform was a switch from simple majority to a reinforced majority in the legislature. In the early days, we used to be regularly denounced by conventional political scientists for this. There was, in fact, even some research put in hand which reported to demonstrate that a simple majority was optimal. Today, all of this is vanished. It's not that people criticize, they just don't talk about the matter. As the author of the particular chapter of the book on bicameral legislature, I find it notable that it too has had no effect. In essence, I argued for bicameral legislatures on efficiency grounds and urged that two houses, in so far as possible, be elected by radically different methods. Not only has this vanished into memory hole, the actual progress of history has been in the opposite direction. The Supreme Court, for example, decided some years after the Constitution itself had been drafted that although it was all right for the federal government to have a Senate which was not elected according to population, it was undemocratic for this to be done by anyone else. They thus reduced the efficiency of the state legislature sharply without so far as I know anybody except ourselves realizing that they had done so. It was criticized because of pretty cloth-headed thing to do from the constitutional standpoint, but that it would lower efficiency was never much mentioned. As a particularly extreme example, most of our European public choice members live in societies with proportional representation, instead of the Anglo-Saxon single-member constituency system. As you may know, I prefer this system, but would really like a two-chamber legislature with one elected each way. One would have anticipated a good deal of work comparing the two systems, but it doesn't exist, although I should say Van Wynden and one of his students had just produced a paper which looks into the political business cycle in a multi-party system. But not just research might be anticipated or at least hoped for. I wanted a good deal of reformist activity in both sense both we would think of new and improved ideas for government at the constitutional level and at least make some efforts to popularize them. I, of course, realized the prospect of a few scholars getting a constitutional amendment with Dr. Louis Modest, but I thought we should begin even if we did not anticipate that it would take any real effect for many years. Cain's remarks about the role of ideas may be exaggerated, but they're not fundamentally wrong. New ideas invented in the quiet studies of scholars, sometimes do, after a period, change the world. The reader will be noted by now that while I appear to be criticizing the development of constitutional theory since the calculus of consent, the criticism would apply as well to my work as to that of others. This is unfortunately true. I have devoted a good deal of attention to attempting to approve our knowledge of constitutions and somewhat less, but nevertheless an on-zero amount to attempting to propagandize what we do know. Unfortunately, I have been quite unsuccessful on both fronts. It may be then that the basic reason you have not had progress along the lines I have outlined above is simply that it is very hard. Certainly, I have found it hard. But the reason is that it simply is very difficult. This does not prevent me from being disappointed. Given my age, I am decided disappointed the failure of medicine to do anything upon the subject called life extension. That doesn't mean that I blame the doctors. What I am saying here is that I am disappointed with the development out of the calculus of consent, not that I blame anybody. Certainly, I do not feel that I myself should have devoted more effort to attempting to both develop our knowledge of public choice and press constitutional reforms. As a matter of fact, I have done more research than my publications this area would indicate. It is a question of much work and little result. I am inclined to the view that the calculus of consent was a sport. Occasionally in all fields of science, one particular discovery is ahead of its time due to essentially accidental factors. There is little progress in that field until the rest of the science has in essence caught up with it. Steam engines were first built in Alexandria 2,000 years ago and are an extreme example of this. I sincerely hope the theory of constitutions will have a shorter lag. Having said that I am disappointed at the absence of both the much progress in the constitutional theory and the reformist application of what we now know, I would also say that on the whole I am also unhappy with respect to the particular reforms that are normally pressed. And here we have some difference between myself and Professor Buchanan. The constitution has originally drawn up and Philadelphia has been built into it a short bill of rights. Madison was personally opposed to adding the first ten amendments, which for political reasons he was forced to sponsor. He had preferred a government so structured that it was unlikely to trample on liberty rather than specific restrictions on government. It seems to me that his position is the correct one. The view that the government can be bound by specific provisions is strictly speaking naive. There has to be something to enforce these provisions and whatever it is that enforces them is itself unbound. We have a particularly strong example of this in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States since about 1950. The comparative freedom and comparative efficiency with which Americans were governed in the early 100 to 150 years of our constitution depended on the structural characteristics of the constitution, not on the bill of rights. This raises the basic problem of what I call a self-enforcing constitution. Granted that we have invented a good constitution, how do we make sure that it will work the way we have written it? The history of the United States shows many deviations from the intent of the founders. The one that is most conspicuous today is, of course, the Supreme Court's irrigation to itself of vastly more power than was intended. How could the constitutional designers have prevented this from happening? It used to be said that enforcement of the constitution was simple. We could leave it to the Supreme Court. The amendment process was allied on as a way of changing the constitution and the event that it became out of step with popular opinion or the times. It should be pointed out that in a way the amendment process was the cause of the Civil War. Just as Taney had in Dred Scott, I would say correctly, there are some people who disagree, interpret the constitution as it was originally written. The problem for the southern states was the high probability that a Republican abolitionist president would prevent slavery spread to the west. The Republicans would then admit enough western states without slavery to permit an amendment abolishing slavery. The current situation is different. It is argued by a great many people, including many law professors, and at least one Supreme Court justice, that it is the duty of the Supreme Court to impose on the people not the constitution as it was written, but the constitution as they think it should be. Changes in the constitution are, in this view, to take place not through the amendment process, but through a change in the views of nine old men. There is, of course, an ancient theory of government in which we should be ruled by the best instead of by the voter. I do not wish to argue that it is wrong, only that it is clearly not what the people who met in Philadelphia had in mind. Is there some way if we design a new constitution that we will guarantee that it will function according to design? To take an example which is not widely noted, but nevertheless of importance, during the period of time in which a constitutional amendment to provide that everyone over the age of 18 could vote was being ratified by the states, the Supreme Court suddenly decided that it was already in the constitution. This problem of the self-enforcing constitution so far has evaded solution. The founding fathers set up a constitution which remained more or less unchanged except by amendment for a long time. Indeed, it wasn't until this century that significant changes began to be made in the original design. There doesn't seem to be any obvious explanation of this long period of stability, but I believe it came from the fact that the constitution had built into it a very strong internal conflict. In the 19th century, for example, treaties negotiated by the executive were usually rejected by the Senate. This is not a government which could impose its will strongly on any objecting group. Thus, it was on the whole unable to expand its power particularly, and the states remained the dominant government in the United States. The states themselves, due to the internal free trade, were unable to carry out much in the way of rent-seeking, all they certainly tried. We actually had several who were officially socialist. This is a digression from the written part of the paper, but they set up cooperatives and other arrangements like that, and then they discovered that the Sears-Robot catalog existed and they couldn't undersell the result that the socialist experiment failed. In my opinion, although I have to emphasize this is only my opinion, the basic change was a quasi-constitutional revision in the terms of employment of the federal bureaucracy. The gradual extension of the Civil Service Act throughout the government from the 90s to the time of the First World War politically changed the balance of power within government. This, in my opinion, one of many cases in which the reform movement around the turn of the century went badly astray. In this case, as in most of the other cases of the reform movement going astray, there was a mix of people who were well-attentioned and well-educated, but who didn't actually understand the government and a special interest. The special interest in this case was the existing government employees. The Civil Service provided examinations for new employees, but each time it was extended the existing employees were grandfathered in. The change from a situation in which they were completely subject to their political superiors who, when were at all intents and purposes they could not be fired, obviously was a great step up for the civil servants. The results were different than those the well-intentioned progressives probably intended. Civil servants ceased being dependent upon their political superiors who in turn were dependent upon the voters. Further, the politicians became partially dependent upon the civil servants. They could no longer fire the civil servants, but the civil servants as voters might fire them. In consequence, the politicians became partisans of their normal employees. The civil servants became an extremely powerful of special interest groups. In the early days, this had almost no effect on their substantive performance of their duties. It did have a great effect on their political activities. The spoilsman would have been political appointees of whatever political administration happened to be in office at the time. No doubt they would continue to support the party when they were grandfathered into the civil service. Basically, however, they were no longer dominated by the politicians, even the politicians their own parties because their careers were safe. It is true that at first they found it desirable to make contribution to political parties and otherwise work at least mildly for them in order to protect their promotion prospects. Indeed, it seems likely that the legal restrictions on their engaging in political activity were largely pushed by the civil servants themselves because it refused this otherwise unpleasant duty. In the early days, the number of votes of the civil servants was not gigantic, but small pressure groups are dealt with by the politicians as well as large ones. With time, the number of civil servants increased, and no doubt one, although not the only explanation for this was the political power of the civil servants. The civil service unions devoted themselves to lobbying rather than threatening strikes. Probably this, which has led to the somewhat odd structure of pay of our now largest single organization. In general, the lower ranking civil servants are overpaid and the people at the top underpaid. Indeed, CAPS have periodically put on Congress with the result that the promotion in the upper ranks has not increased salaries. Clearly, the reason for this is that there are a lot of votes in the lower ranks and very few in the upper ranks. Thus, in my opinion, the civil service was perhaps the largest single change in our Constitution before the efflorescence of the Supreme Court in the 1950s. In a way, they are called terminists, since the Supreme Court does not seem to have many differences with the civil service. In both cases, there have been a sharp grandestment of the power of federal government and a sharp reduction in the power of the states. But I have to admit that the above discussion of the civil service is an expression of my personal opinion. I would like further studies of the matter, and one way of making such a study, of course, would be examined cross-nationally the growth of government and the expansion of the civil service. Unfortunately, my knowledge of languages and foreign institutions is not great enough to do so. I should say, however, in this one area where there is now a big efflorescence of new papers on the growth of government, mainly country by country, not cross-national comparisons, and mainly, I regret to say, not telling you very much except that it's grown. In spite of the fact that they had this knowledge, it seems likely that the basic structure which we now regard as efficient was accidental. The basic decentralization of the Constitution, i.e., the reservation of most government activity of the states, came from the very simple straightforward fact that states were already in existence, and it was necessary to get them to voluntarily join the new government. They were unlikely to voluntarily dissolve themselves in order to form a centralized state, although it is quite probable that Hamilton would have been happy with that result. The diversity selected by camera legislature was another compromise between the large states who wanted a population-based representative in the legislature, and the small who wanted each state to be equally represented. The fact that a number of state legislatures already had two chambers may have been important here. Thus, there were not only two houses, but they were elected by different methods, which we accept the argument that calculus of consensus was an efficiency characteristic. Division into executive, legislative, and judicial branches came straight out of English government by way of Montesquieu. The concept of electing the president, which meant that the president in many ways is the third house of the legislature, is a particular clear case of accidental constitutional provisions. It never worked the way it was originally intended to, and in fact the Constitution was amended to change it after the 1800 presidential election. It seems likely, this is a guess on my part, that the people who drew up this provision of the Constitution intended the most popular politician of the United States to be president, and the second most popular vice president, if so, their draftsmanship was extremely defective. It's interesting to speculate what would have happened had this intent, which I think has probably been implemented. It's quite possible the two-party system would never have developed, and certainly political partisanship would have been to at least some extent moderated by the existence of vice president who would actually run against the president. As well as I mentioned, copied our Constitution except they specifically ruled out judicial review and provide a board rather than a single person as the executive. Widespread use of direct voting, even more in Switzerland than California, and the general use of proportional representation made their Constitution as of today quite different from ours, but its basic structure is close enough so comparative studies should be valued. But that is by the way, the main theme here is that there hasn't been very much progress along the lines of calculus and consent since it was written. Since I concede that I am one of the people who has not made much progress, this cannot be taken as blaming anyone. The 25th anniversary of the book, and for that matter, the 200th anniversary of the Great Convention in Philadelphia is a good time to both reflect on the past and to resolve to do better in the future. Now Dr. Buchanan will deliver his paper. Well, I've learned one thing. At this conference, you should never switch subjects in midstream. I felt like, as I said last night, the nature of the audience was such that going over this paper would have been somewhat boring to the audience, and I switched my topic and kind of winged it a little bit, and I thought I was through, and lo and behold, I was asked to come up this morning when I didn't expect to at all. So I haven't even had a chance to go over and review or practice for giving this talk. And at least for me, I always have to sort of at least practice a little bit. I think all of us probably do except Richard Epstein. Now, so let me just go through as best I can some of the main points, and I'll try not to take up too much of your time because you can read the paper, and I will skip over some points. But I've argued in a paper that I call the public choice perspective that there are two central elements in public choice. One is the conceptualization of politics as a very complex exchange process. And the second is the extension of the economist's model of utility maximizing behavior to behavior in politics. And characterizing our book, The Calculus of Consent, I think it was the first book to really integrate these two separate elements into what we hope was a coherent logical structure. And I think it's useful to sort of think about that book and how it emerged by comparison with what else was going on in kind of what was beginning to be elements of basic public choice work at that time. Amongst economists, the items to be noted are, of course, Kenneth Arrow's book, Social Choice and Individual Values, Duncan Black's early work on committees in the late 40s, early 50s, which finally developed into his book in 1958, Tony Down's book on Economic Theory of Democracy, and even before that, Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which does contain a surprising number of precursory elements to public choice, although it was almost totally neglected and didn't really influence many of these other developments with the possible exception of Down's. But these were all economists, and what they did was, in one way or another, they extended the economist model of utility maximization over into politics. With Down's, it was more directly modeling political parties as vote maximizes analogous to firms as private maximizers, but underneath it all, there was basically a utility maximizing behavior that was plugged in and extended over into politics. But what was missing in all of those constructions by economists was any justificatory argument for the democratic process that really was based on individualistic norms of evaluation. Both Kenneth Arrow and Duncan Black really were more interested in examining for the stability and consistency in the social choices, and they didn't really consider the desirability of a possible correspondence between individual values and collective outcomes, and Down's was interested in sort of predicting the results of a majoritarian political process, independently of any concern about the overriding of the desires of the minority. And as we know, Arrow proved dramatically that consistent sets of individual orderings need not generate consistent social orderings under any roof, but he neglected totally any normative reference to possible coercion of minority preferences, which was the basis of my initial critique of Arrow in 1954. But all of these works left with the dangling question, why should an individual enter a collective? All of those works at least seemed to me presumed without much inquiry that we were, as individuals, locked into membership in a political community that had the range and scope of activities that were beyond our individualistic influence. Now that is how the calculus of consent differed from these precursory works in precisely this fundamental respect, because we did embody just Victoria argument. We tried to outline in very general terms the conditions that must be present in order that the individual somehow find it ultimately advantageous to be a member of a political community, a political entity, with constitutionally delineated ranges of activity or to acquiesce in membership in a community that had already been established. Now I think this, what I would call an intellectual analytical vacuum, was much more apparent with respect to these early extension of economic methodology into politics than it was for political science inquiry at that time. It was precisely because these economists, particularly black and arrow and downs, had incorporated individual utility maximization into their analysis. It was obvious that possible differences among persons in preference orderings over political alternative would emerge as a central issue. In a model in which people had identical preferences, the problems addressed by arrow and black simply don't arise. But once you presume that preferences over political choice options differ, it's a natural extension to then move that to a choice among political regimes. Now normative political science at the middle of this century, the main thrust of it, there were exceptions of course, but the main thrust of normative political science offered a dramatically different environment of ideas. Influenced in part by Hegelian inspired idealism, the interest of the individual was somehow treated as being embodied in politics as process. Even for many political scientists who could scarcely be classified as strictly falling within the Hegelian tradition, they still conceived politics as a search for truth and goodness, a search for some uniquely best result. As I say, there were some exceptions to this, mainly the pluralism work going back to Arthur Bentley, but basically the main thrust was in that direction, that is politics as what I've called a truth judgment approach. Now if we remain within the presuppositions of methodological individualism, the state must ultimately be justified in terms of its potential for satisfying individual's desires, whatever these might be. The state is necessarily an artifact, an instrument that's evolved for the purpose of meeting individual needs that cannot be satisfied as well under alternative arrangements. In that inclusive sense, the great game of politics is positive sum. I have that statement on page four, that's the one statement in this draft that Gordon picked up and criticized and some other people have critiqued up and criticized. What I mean by that is, as I say, the overall inclusive complex exchange must be positive sum. That's not the same thing as saying each and every particular political decision must be positive sum. Obviously there are many, many negative sum aspects, but I suspect all of you would join me in agreeing that even under the oppressive state that we live under now, that it's better than going back to the Hobbesian jungle, and that's all that statement really means. If we recognize that fact, while at the same time the potential for conflict among differing individual interests is acknowledged, then the basic exchange model of the economist comes to the front. And in that elementary model from economics, traders enter the interaction process with interests that do conflict with each other distributionally, but they also enter a setting where there are mutuality of gains possible. Now this second element in the inclusive public choice perspective that which I have labeled politics is as exchange. This is necessary if we're going to amount any justificatory argument. And adding this element to utility maximization for individuals as they work in the political sector. We were directly influenced by the great work of Newt Vicksell, the great Swedish economist who wrote around the turn of the century, and I've always considered Vicksell to be the primary precursor at least of my own efforts in public choice or in political economy generally. And in my Nobel lecture, I really developed and tried to spell out a bit more fully the sort of Vicksellian construction and how it did influence developments in public choice. For those of you who might be interested, that will be published in the American Economic Review with the June issue. Vicksell tried, along with a few of his peers in the continental Europe in the last decades of the last century, he tried to extend the range of economic analysis to the public or governmental sector of resource use. And he tried to establish a criterion for efficiency in collective use of resources that was at least broadly comparable to that which had been specified for efficiency in the use of resources in the market. Now, the only source of evaluation are, of course, the individuals who enjoy both the benefits of the state finance services and pay the cost through taxes. And from that basic individualistic presupposition, there emerged, of course, the Vicksellian unanimity criterion as the ultimate benchmark for efficiency in the public sector. I'm going to skip over an elaboration of that. You can, those of you who aren't familiar with it can get it from reading page five and top of page six of the paper in the paper. Vicksell did not, however, move beyond the development of a criterion for evaluating policy alternatives one at a time and singly. He did shift our attention to a change in the rules for decision, that is from simple majority voting toward the unanimity rule, or at least a more qualified majority rule, in an attempt to ensure against collective approval that simply won't yield benefits in excess, equal to or in excess of cost, on any particular ordinary project. Vicksell explicitly did not extend his analysis to the operation of decision rules over a whole sequence of time periods or over separate categories of outlay, which might have allowed him to introduce less restrictive criteria for single projects. Now, in the calculus of consent, Gordon and I made exactly that extension beyond Vicksell, and I think that was the central important contribution of the calculus of consent, extending this Vicksellian analysis one stage up, so to speak. Now, in that we were directly influenced by a lot of discussion with our colleague at the University of Virginia, Rutledge Vining, who I think is one of the most neglected economists of our time. Vining hammered home the argument that political choices are always made among alternative rules, institutions, and arrangements, which as they operate, as these rules or arrangements or institutions operate, they generate patterns of results that are at least in part stochastic. Then we should evaluate the working of a rule or any rule, not in terms of its results or outcomes in particularized choice situations, but instead in terms of its results over a whole sequence, separated both intercategorically and intertemporarily. Vining's insistence on the relevance of the analogy with the selection of rules for ordinary gains was part and parcel of what was a genuine intellectual environment in Charlottesville at that time, and the shift of the Vicksellian criterion from single project to rules seems a natural one for us to take. Now, looking back on that period, that was a much more novel view to take at that time than it would be now, because since that time we've had a lot of emphasis, particularly by Nozick and Hayek, on distinguishing between criteria as applied to in-states and applied to process, but it was precisely the same point that we were developing influenced a good deal by Vining in that context. In the confined Vicksellian choice setting, an individual, if he behaves non-strategically, would vote to approve a collective outlay if he anticipates the benefits will exceed the tax cost, and he would oppose all proposals that fail that test. However, if you place the individual in a genuine constitutional choice setting where the alternatives that he faces are differing decision rules under which a whole sequence of particular proposals are to be considered, the individual will evaluate the working properties of that rule over the whole anticipated sequence. If on balance the operation of a rule is expected to yield net benefits over the sequence, he may vote to approve that rule, even if he predicts that personally he will be subjected to losses on some particular plays of that game. By shifting the applicability of this consensus criteria from the level of particular proposals to the level of rules, that is to constitutional rather than post-constitutional choices, we were able to allow for the possibility that preferred decision rules might embody substantial departure from the Uxcellian unanimity limit, which would include simple majority voting in some cases, even less than majority voting in other cases, and of course much qualified majority voting in other cases. The constitutional calculus suggests that both the cost of reaching decisions under differing rules and the importance of the decisions are relevant. And since both of these elements vary, the preferred rule need not be uniform over all ranges of political action. As Gordon has suggested, in one sense our work was simply reducing majority and majority rule from its level of sacrosanct status that it had attained in many people's conceptualization of the way politics worked in democracies. And as I mentioned last night, it's surprising that that view still is present in many situations. This construction seems to us to offer just Victoria argument for something that was like the complex political structure that James Madison had in mind, much of which finds itself embedded in the constitutional framework approved by the American founders. There is a justification for the compound republic that is for constitutional democracy that can be grounded in individual utility maximization, but the general argument does not allow for the elevation of majority rule to dominating status. This rule, whether in the whole electorate or in the legislative assembly, simply takes its place alongside other rules, some of which may be more others less inclusive. And I'll leave off a paragraph there while I elaborate that a little. This construction enables us analytically to bridge, at least in part, the gap between narrowly defined individual self-interest and an individually generated definition of what might be called the general interest. In this construction, our efforts were quite close to those of John Rawls, which culminated in his seminal and familiar book, The Theory of Justice, which he finally published in 1971. But Rawls had published early papers in the late 1950s and he had adumbrated the essential parts of his construction. While our construction was independently developed from Rawls, we were familiar with these parallel efforts that Rawls was developing. We were not familiar with the comparable efforts of John Harsany, who was also developing sort of a comparable construction. Our analysis differed from Rawls, however, with the important respect that we made no attempt to generate specific predictions as to what might emerge from the perspective agreement among the people who choose rules behind the veil of uncertainty. As noted, our construction suggested that no single decision rule was likely to be chosen for general applicability over the whole range of political action. We used the constructions to eliminate some sets of rules rather than to specify those that would be selected. By contrast, Rawls was led, and we think misled in this respect. He was led to attempt to use his veil of ignorance construction to make specific predictions about what would emerge. And of course, he suggested that these two principles of justice would emerge uniquely from his pre-constitutional stage of contractual agreement. Now, when constitutional stage politics is conceptualized as exchange, a complex exchange among utility-maximizing individuals, of course we're obliged to classify ourselves as having worked within the social contract tradition in political philosophy. And of course, precursors of the calculus of consent are found in the works of the classical social contract theorists rather than the works of the political idealist or the political realist. What has been and remains surprising to me even to this day has been the reluctance and or inability of social scientists and philosophers, but especially economists, the failure to understand and appreciate the relationships between the institutions of voluntary exchange, the choice among constitutional rules, and the operations of ordinary politics within such rules. That is to be able to make those distinctions. James Madison clearly had such an understanding, which we tried to articulate in modern analytical language a quarter-century ago. Now, since that time, I think there has been some shift in both public and scholarly attitudes over that two-and-a-half decades. Some shift toward what I would call a recovery of the Madisonian wisdom. I think perhaps the calculus of consent did contribute marginally to this attitude, no change. But you still find around both politics as pure conflict and politics as a quest for truth and light. Those conceptions still seem to me to be dominant models in shaping both public and scientific views on collective action. In that context, I've often said that I view the contribution of the calculus of consent more as providing a kind of an intellectual substructure that allows people to understand what they observe rather than sort of leading or affecting public opinion here what it has done, I think, is to provide a kind of an intellectual foundation for understanding much of what people have observed about government in the process. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Buchanan. Now, Dr. Richard Wagner will react to the two papers. I'm not going to react to both of these papers. I don't feel like doing what I'm assigned to do, either. Actually, I was assigned to react to one paper that was Tullick's paper. I'm going to do that. I just saw Buchanan's paper a few minutes ago and I've heard it. And in the process of talking about Tullick's paper, however, I will cover a number of points that Buchanan mentions in various ways and in many cases with a great amount of similarity. As far as Tullick's paper in the calculus of consent goes, I think in one hand it shows one of his strongest qualities of never being content to rest on laurels. Here is a paper talking about the disappointment of developments out of the calculus of consent by a book that any of us would be very proud to have written if it was the only thing we have written. Here, after 25 years, it gets in the order of 40, 50, or 60 citations per year in the Citation Index, distributed among faculty in economics, political science, law, and philosophy. But neither Tullick nor Buchanan for that matter have ever been content to rest on their laurels. The past is simply a bygone, a prologue to the future yet to be written. And they're always going forward and this paper exhibits that same restlessness of mind, one that I wish were more common in academic life. There is, for instance, that famous article published in either the American Economic Review or the Journal of Economic Literature about 10 years ago, I guess it was, that if you put on the horizontal axis years on the vertical axis articles published, you find the curve starts to rise sharply upwards. It goes way up. And then all of a sudden, it drops way down and plummets in the next few years to Earth. What happened, well, of course, tenure, is what happened. But here we have a paper by someone who has long had tenure, but is not about to plummet to Earth. I agree with much of what Tullick says about scholarship coming out of the calculus of consent, although I disagree with some of his evaluations as I shall explain. What I want to do is to mention a couple of types of disagreements I might have with Tullick on a relatively minor level and then to mention my own really big disappointment with developments out of the calculus of consent, disappointments that relate to what Jim was talking about in his paper, at least as I understand it from what I heard. First, as far as a couple of points, let me first get out of the way just a civil service point. But I think it seems to me that Tullick is right in terms of the sort of drawing position of the civil service, but yet there are some puzzles in terms of the effect upon their ability to effect compensation and the peculiar types of compensation patterns that we observe because while over the last 20 years if you look at the book published by Bennett and Johnson and the growth of government, what you have is a massive what they call civil service grade inflation that in 1959, 40% of federal civil servants were in grades one through four, 20 years later, a little bit less than 20% were. Where they all go, they all went to grades 13 through 18. Pushing paper, giving orders rather than doing work went up from 6% to about 16%. So I think there's some troublesome spots there that I think could be ironed out a little bit, at least I'm not fully clear on. Another sort of disagreement building up is, and maybe a little bit of disagreement with Buchanan as well, is I don't look upon the United States as the arch-typical federal system of government. I think that's a common view that we are the arch-typical federal system. I think my own position is much that was articulated by Martin Diamond in both a book and several articles on the view of federalism in the Federalist Papers in which before the Federalist Papers there were basically two systems of government, a federal or con federal system or identical or there was a national system of government. And what the authors of the Federalist Papers were trying to do was to as a work capture the high ground by arguing that what the Constitution they were trying to develop was a federal constitution because no one wanted a national government and the anti-Federalists were really the true Federalists in all of this, including George Mason, which they should be happy with. But the Tocqueville in his Democracy in America described the United States as an incomplete national government and I think he's basically correct and what that has to do with Switzerland and in fact Diamond also talks about in one place about some of the mistranslations of Montesquieu out of the French into the English on this type of point but perhaps all the Swiss Constitution was to a great extent pattern after the American I think they had perhaps a bit of a more confederaler understanding of what they were doing, that you find for instance principles of nullification in the Swiss Constitution, cantons can nullify federal rules, even find provisions for secession. In 1969 the Cantona Jura was formed out of burn. The process began a few years before, it accumulated in the 1969 secession, 79 secession. So I think the Swiss Constitution, which both Gordon and I admire greatly, I think perhaps reflects more of a true federal understanding of federalism which is what I think the anti-federalists were really about. In regard to the difficulty of self-enforcing constitutions, it is a difficult problem. It's what I'm not sure it's even possible to make a sharp distinction between attitudes or ideas and interests. I'm always reminded that for instance, George Washington chose the blood to death. Was he acting out of interest or ideas? I raise the dichotomy between interest and ideas because it's one that occurs so often in the economic discussion about what is the effect of ideas, do ideas rule the world of new interests, and yet what is one's interest is itself an idea and so I never want to downplay the importance of ideas. At the same time, in terms of constitutional interpretation, I wrote a paper coming out in Tollex Fescheriff called Guns, Parchment, and Constitutional Maintenance or something like that was the title. If we look at what we call, for instance, British constitutional history, a great part was written in various ways, with guns or their threat. We talk about Magna Carter as a constitutional document written at the point of a gun at Runnymede in 1215. Henry II, generation before, Constitution of Claredon, the same thing. Next generation, Henry III, at his parliament of Oxford, the same thing again. A great deal of pushing, as it were, as a part of what we call constitutional processes. If we look at the analogy that comes out of constitutional political economy as a constitution, we have, on the one hand, we have a selection of the rules of the game, and then we have the playing of the game. It doesn't mean that once the game is in place, you won't try, in fact, to change the rules of the game's advantage, that it doesn't change human nature in that regard. Always conceptual distinction is an important one, but how do you put it into practice? In terms of actual games, we find that the referees are, in fact, chosen by the teams, the players, consensually, and through a process that calls for a continual consensual reaffirmation. If the referees, the umpires, do not get the consent of both teams, they're dismissed, which is a process that is really quite different from the type of process by which the rules of the game, as it were, are chosen these days, that the enforcer of the rules in constitutional political economy, as well as in what we call various types of games, is not the maker of the rules. Those capacities are very sharply distinct. That government is not a maker of rules, but simply an enforcer of rules. Once, of course, it becomes a maker of rules, the ability to get favorable rules is a very valuable thing, and people will engage in trying to do that as the whole literature on rent seeking tries to explain. Well, how do we, in terms of the thesis of the discontent with sort of developments, not that it's not been a phenomenal book, but that perhaps could even have been better? How do we go about trying to evaluate a word? In some cases, it's relatively easy to separate out, you can trace citations and things like this, lines of research, like Gordon does some of that, we talk about rent seeking, you really can't trace that, but perhaps remotely in any direct fashion to the calculus and consent, nor the theory of clubs. Things like bicameral legislature, there hasn't been a little done on that. There's been more done on log rolling, been some done on indirect vote markets. There certainly has been some, but not by any means, all topics have not been explored. But I sometimes wonder if it's, to what extent it's possible to, or how easy it is to make this type of separation where you trace out particular lines of research and say, well, here's a sum total of the influence of this book because here's a number of citations to rent seeking, and by tracing back, we can separate out these independent influences and assess relative importance. Are the production functions really that separable that you can do this? I think in some cases perhaps so, particularly perhaps in terms of, well, new ideas on well-established paradigms. For instance, when T. W. Schultz developed the idea of human capital and education as investment, that it's, I think it's possible there to fairly readily to count and to say what the influence of that idea was in terms of particular lines of research that were developed. Perhaps in other cases, were new areas being opened up for consideration, there's a massive amount of uncertainties what the territory is going to look like in which the first efforts are cutting through this vast wilderness. It's hard to predict the direction where people are going to trample down once they get involved, and I think it may become much more difficult to try and give a numerical accounting as it were of influence as against trying to develop some type of impressionistic portrait, such things as Gordon talks about is the importance of the constitutional attitude or approach that has been given a great impetus by the calculus. Further, the calculus is written from basically as Buchanan talks about an exchange paradigm which gets not in a choice equilibrium paradigm and that gets in closing in terms of my own major disappointment about developments leading out of the calculus of consent which relates to some things I said last night. Bruno Frey in a paper in public choice a year or two ago talked about, had an article dealing with the influence of public choice in economics and political science and over a 20 year period I think 1962, 72 and 82 and what he did was go through various major journals in the two fields and ask how much public choice work can you find in these two areas and economics found I think 1%, 2%, 3% was finding and political science maybe went like 1%, 5%, 20% at that period of time that political science has clearly been much more successful public choice has been clearly much more successful I think in political science and it has been in economics to my great discomfort and I am thinking about that that I wonder that if economics is approached within a maximization paradigm and to the extent it is approached within a maximization paradigm is it not almost inevitable that the calculus consent is going to be a disappointment in economics does not the maximization paradigm that is on the one hand you have this model of people maximizing utility firms profits well how simple it is to have a people maximize utility governments maximize social utility so we have social welfare functions we have a growing literature on social choice in economics which all comes out of a maximization paradigm makes sense within that paradigm whereas in an exchange paradigm which I would add conflict to the natural focus is upon processes natural rights even going back to grouches and poofendorf and all that the people and the rights of persons property or prior government itself is a reflection of the use of those rights of person and property paradigm becomes contractarian and a general sort of contractarian market process exchange neolostry and whatever you want to call it call them all paradigm in economics is one that I think would in which the calculus of consent would be a major part of creating a new classical political economy in a modern smithian as you want point of view and so I left myself pondering the irony that is political science the natural home of public choice and if so did I so goof 20 years ago when I chose economics at the University of Virginia thank you