The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan. Volume 1, The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty.

• Author: YEAGER, LELAND B.
• Position: Review

* The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan. Volume 1, The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty

Edited by Geoffrey Brennan, Hartmut Kliemt, and Robert D. Tollison

Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999. Pp. xxiv, 522. $20.00 cloth, $12.00 paper.

This handsome volume, attractive in paper, typeface, and binding, is the first of twenty volumes of the not-quite-complete writings of James Buchanan (relatively ephemeral pieces will be left out). Apart from this volume and a final one containing an index to the series and a curriculum vitae, the collection gathers Buchanan's work by topics. This introductory volume contains a wide-ranging sample of thirty-one articles on the job and responsibilities of economists, public choice, public finance, constitutionalism, and ethics. The editors have added a fourteen-page foreword and reprinted the 1986 press release of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announcing the award of the Nobel prize to Buchanan.

One of Buchanan's notable technical contributions finds an echo in this volume: his demonstration, contrary to economists' conventional wisdom but in accord with the layman's view, that debt finance, as opposed to current-tax finance, can indeed shift the burden of government spending partly from the present to the future. The issue cannot be settled by purely physical considerations, by the truism that resources are consumed when they are consumed and not later. The issue hinges, rather, on the subjective nature of "burden." Persons who voluntarily buy government bonds do not suffer a burden merely because they thereby relinquish to the government the current use of the corresponding resources; after all, they judge the bond purchase at least as advantageous to themselves as any alternative use of their funds. The burden comes later and then falls on whatever people must pay taxes to service the bonds (or find parts of their wealth expropriated through inflation).

Even now, forty-two years after Buchanan published his Public Principles of Public Debt (1958), a full consensus from the academic discussion remains elusive--or such is my impression. Just how, for example, does government debt finance impinge on the formation of capital goods and human capital and thereby on future well-being? Room remains for a further expository job to clinch the outcome in everyone's mind. Meanwhile, the whole discussion nicely illustrates John Harsanyi's point that economists have more to do than empirical research and logical and mathematical exercises: their job also includes tackling conceptual-philosophical problems. It shows that framing and clarifying concepts need not be less important or intellectually challenging than, say, econometric work. Buchanan's discussion also illustrates his own concern less with technical minutiae than with the big picture and fundamental questions.

Without scarcity and the attendant need to choose how resources are allocated, economics would not exist as a field of study. As Buchanan knows, however, this obvious fact does not make economics the science of allocating resources so as to maximize the utility (or whatever) obtained from them. Except, perhaps, in a socialist system of extreme and unworkable centralization, no question of overall resource allocation arises. Instead, each individual pursues his own purposes according to his own inclinations, abilities, knowledge, and resources. An economist is unlikely to be the individual's or the business firm's most plausible source of advice.

Parenthetically, Buchanan challenges the notion of definite utility functions and production functions existing even apart from persons' and firms' exploratory activities on...