Professor Gaffney,

You are joking, of course?

Public Choice theory as a "front" for southern secession and the KKK?

You'll have to partly throw in John-Baptiste Say, Nassau Senior and Vilfredo Pareto, who all formulated elements of Public Choice theory (e.g., the idea of "concentration of benefits and diffusion of burdens" to understand the political biases toward special interest uses of government intervention at the expense of competitors and consumers). 

Don't forget all of Adam Smith's heirs who have emphasized analyzing market and political decision-making on the basis that people act on their defined self-interest. 

Richard Ebeling



Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 16, 2015, at 7:53 PM, Mason Gaffney <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Aha!  That fits with my strong impression that the Tullock/Buchanan axis was a revival of Secessionism and the KKK, sanitized as “Public Choice Theory” and dissociated from lynching and all that.

Most of you probably know that Jim Buchanan’s grandfather John had been Governor of Tennessee in the 1890s.  John opposed voting rights for blacks, and supported the use of convict labor.

 

Mason Gaffney

 

From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Irwin (Bud) Collier
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2015 6:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] 'Liberty' in South Carolina

 

Gordon Tullock worked at the University of South Carolina until 1962.

 

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Robert Leeson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


In 1978, Hayek stated

 

I am rather hoping that these ideas are now spreading. Of course, I think the main thing is that there are economists who are working outside their fields, like Jim Buchanan and [the one] in South Carolina, and some of the people working at UCLA. What I said before--that you cannot be a good economist except by being more than an economist-- I think is being recognized by more and more of the economists. This narrow specialization, particularly of the mathematical economists, is, I believe, going out.

 

Hayek plagiarized material from John C. Calhoun: but what in South Carolina is Hayek referring to?   

 

 




--

Prof. Irwin Collier, Ph.D.
John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies
Freie Universität Berlin