 My name is Jamie Lunke. 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. I'm looking forward to our conversation. It seems though that Buchanan was very critical of some particular types of interaction with practical politics, specifically engaging in actually making specific policy recommendations. One of my favorite stories I think in the appendix where you engage in some personal reflection is when you tell about being in his class for the first day and attempting to ask, answer the question about what was wrong with the American tax code and being an enthusiastic young student. You had all these ideas, things you've been learning and reading over the summer and he told you Mr. Wagner, we're Democrats here, not Autocrats and paraphrasing. You bring me down a long, long way, far back. Yeah, I had spent this summer before going to Virginia reading, I read Buchanan, a textbook on political finance. I read things by his academic advisor who he didn't like. I didn't know that at the time on tax reform, all this stuff and he asked this question, what was wrong in the very first question in class? What was wrong with the American tax system? And I piped up and answered the question I thought beautifully about closing loopholes, lowering rates and all this and he shot right back Mr. Wagner. He had no business answering a question like that. Yeah, we're Democrats here. I didn't know what he meant. That came later. But what he meant was part of his wanting to get away from what I think he regarded as feudal modes of thinking where public finance, collective business was the province of a few public officials who had to be regarded as doing the right thing because public business was too complicated for ordinary people. And so he thought it wasn't any particular economist business to say what a good tax system should be. He thought what a good tax system would be would be what a set of people would generate out of a deliberation among themselves. And that's the kind of the image he had. Everything he did was centered around that kind of orientation that he probably said to himself, I want to really plumb deeply how you think about problems of self-governance, where the typical way that economists to this day think about government is government is some entity that you can instruct to do the right thing that can bypass people and their interests or their beliefs. And that was something that Buchanan disagreed with thoroughly. And so that notion that, hey, we're Democrats here. He later, I remember as you remind me, he later in that same semester, he had a lot of these free-ranging discussions with students over different papers. And there was a one instance where I remember Buchanan piping up and say, it seems though today only Mr. Wagner and I are Democrats. It was something that was really deeply in his foundational beliefs. It sounds like you made a lot of progress over the course of just that one semester then. You got upgraded to Democrat status. Well, you know, that it didn't happen at one instant because I still remember, you know, we'd have roughly every week or every second week we would have paper assignments to turn in. He signed up the end of this first class period after I'd embarrassed myself. He has signed this topic said, I've heard it said that if a fly, I think it was a fly, it might have been a flea, but a grasshopper, but it was some insect. He said if this insect were like nine times as big as it is, it wouldn't be able to fly and it might even crush under its own weight. Then he said, well, you know, government has grown. It used to be less than 10 percent. Now it's up around 40 percent. So I think there's an interesting problem with fiscal dimension here. And so for next week, you all go out and write a small essay on the problem of fiscal dimension. I put aside my embarrassment for a minute and shot up my hand. I said, Mr. Buchanan, could you give us a clue of what you're looking for? And he instantly shot back. I said, Mr. Wagner, if I knew what I was looking for, I wouldn't care to hear what you think. So surely thereafter, I came to understand his mode of instruction. And I think in internalized a lot of that myself. 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.