Why do good people almost always turn into scoundrels after they become part of the government? As Buchanan (b. 1919) explained, it's simply because they're pursuing their own interests. Along with Gordon Tullock, Buchanan helped pioneer "public choice" economics which involves analyzing how government officials make their choices and pursue their self-interest, generating pressure for bigger budgets, higher taxes, more regulations and overall more power. Buchanan has explained how various constitutional arrangements affect the incentives officials face and the decisions they make. His work suggests that the best hope for liberty is to enact more constitutional limitations on what officials can do: spending limits, taxing limits and term limits.

Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize (1986) as well as the George Washington Honor Medal, the Legion de la Libertad (Mexico) and other commendations. He has received honorary doctorates from 13 universities in the United States, England, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Switzerland. He is a distinguished senior fellow of the Cato Institute.

Buchanan has been extraordinarily productive. He wrote over 300 articles and 75 reviews which were published in American Economic Review, Economica, Economic Journal, Economic Inquiry, Ethics, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Political Economy, National Tax Journal, Public Choice, Public Finance, Quarterly Journal of Economics, University of Chicago Law Review and other publications. He contributed chapters to more than 350 books published in English, Italian, German, Japanese and Spanish.

He is the author or co-author of 37 books with translations into Chinese and Hungarian in addition to these languages. The best-known work on public choice economics is The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1965) which Buchanan wrote with Tullock when both were at the University of Virginia. If this wasn't really the first book with public choice type of analysis, it did inspire large numbers of economists to pursue public choice and produce perhaps thousands of books and articles over the years.

Buchanan's other major books include Public Finances in Democratic Process (1967), Democracy in Deficit, (1977, written with Richard E. Wagner), The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution (1980, written with Geoffrey Brennan), The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy (1985, also written with Brennan).

Buchanan says he entered the University of Chicago as a socialist, seeking his Ph.D., but economics professor Frank Knight was among those who helped set him straight. Buchanan became a professor of public finance which traditionally has been about how governments can extract the most money from a population. He could see that government officials only exploit people because that's what comes naturally, pursuing their self-interest.

Buchanan (as well as future Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase) were purged from the politically correct University of Virginia, and he and Tullock made their way to George Mason University. Public choice work is the focus of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy there.

For those curious to discover more, the Buchanan/Hayek video offers a glimpse of two of the greatest modern constitutional thinkers, exploring ways to cut government power.

(Reprinted with permission from Laissez Faire Books)

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