Monday, September 01, 2008

Recently read: James Buchanan, Nobel Laureate in Economic Science (1986)


Worth reading: James Buchanan's essay "Socialism Is Dead but Leviathan Lives On" from Volume 1, The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty.

Notable and quotable:
"The death throes of socialism should not be allowed to distract attention from the continuting necessity to prevent the over-reaching of the state-as-Leviathan, which becomes all the more dangerous because it does not depend on an ideology to give it focus. Ideas, and the institutions that emerge as these ideas are put into practice, can be killed off and replaced by other ideas and other institutions."
Think Putin, I suppose.

Leland Yeager's review of the volume is here.

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