James Buchanan was a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a strong proponent of Public Choice theory, the application of economics to political science. Across three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, guests and the host discuss his work, his critics, and his intellectual relationship to the American founding.
Democracy in Chains and the MacLean critique
In a 2017 episode, Michael Munger, a colleague of Nancy MacLean at Duke, discussed her book Democracy in Chains and its treatment of Buchanan. Munger said MacLean had seen Buchanan’s name in footnotes—one in a book about education segregation and one concerning the creation of the Constitution of Chile during the Pinochet regime—and went to George Mason University to examine archives. There she found letters that she decided implied Buchanan had a central role in what she described as a conservative revolution that tried to repress voting rights, prevent majorities from enacting their will, and install a plutocracy. Her claim was that in the ’60s and ’70s the intellectual groundwork was laid for Donald Trump and a Republican takeover of all three branches of government.
Munger said the book received great attention, including being named by Oprah Winfrey as one of the ten most important books of the summer, and that its timing in May 2017, following Trump’s unexpected victory, contributed to its reception. He acknowledged the book is well-written and interesting, written in a breathless, almost detective-novel style. But he said the problem is that it is not true. He said MacLean found a set of salient documents and stitched together a narrative she thought plausible, and that the way she filled in the gaps is mistaken. In his characterization, it is not a history book but a narrative fiction book about a past in the US that never happened. Bob Zadek noted that NPR commissioned a review, chose a novelist to review the purported non-fiction history, and later backed off and apologized for the choice of reviewer, explaining the reviewer had commented only on style and persuasive quality Leviathan in Chains: Michael Munger on Public Choice Economics (2017).
Public Choice and civil asset forfeiture
In a 2019 episode on policing-for-profit, Bob Zadek invoked Buchanan to explain civil asset forfeiture. Zadek said economists who study the subject, specifically James Buchanan, call this the proof of public choice theory, and that Buchanan and many others observed that just because somebody works for government rather than the private sector does not mean they are not motivated by the same human failings and goals as people in the private sector, such as career enhancement and building the amount of dollars you control. Zadek said this does not single out law enforcement as especially bad but singles them out as just plain human: they are given the tool, and they use it lawfully.
Guest Brian D. Kelly, an economist, responded that there can be more than one explanation and that he tested whether fiscal stress was one possible explanation, though he could not exclude what Zadek said. Zadek described a direct correlation between municipalities with financial needs and an increase in civil asset forfeiture events. He also noted that anecdotes prove nothing except the anecdote itself, while pointing to media stories about ticket-writing quotas and aggressive code enforcement as symptoms of the same motivation.
Kelly offered the Florida highway example: northbound traffic in the drug trade typically carried drugs and southbound traffic typically carried cash near the northern Florida border, and police rather notoriously let the drugs go while stopping cars coming back south that contained cash. He said this is a well-supported anecdote but that there are many others along the same theme, with variation by police agency. Kelly also said forfeiture does not refer to contraband, and that destruction of contraband is not forfeiture and can proceed regardless of forfeiture laws. He noted that police do not need to arrest anyone, can let the driver go after taking the cash, and that drivers are often coerced into signing a form saying they will not dispute the seizure, the alternative possibly being arrest. He cited a Sacramento Bee article about the feds seizing 100 homes involved in marijuana grow operations, valued in the hundreds of millions, which noted near the end that no arrests had been made Brian D. Kelly on the False Promise of Policing-for-Profit (2019).
Limiting Leviathan and the Constitution
In a 2022 episode, Munger described Buchanan’s project as “limiting Leviathan.” He said Buchanan started writing in the late ’50s and wrote a number of things during the 1960s with co-authors, and that Buchanan was interested in the role of constitutions in creating limits on what government could do. Munger said Buchanan was not an anarchist; he believed it was important for government to have these powers, but he wanted to limit Leviathan. Munger said the idea that the constitution should limit what government should do remains controversial, citing the filibuster, the Second Amendment, and the First Amendment as examples.
Munger said Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986, and that critics in the same article would say he was wrong and that we need more powerful government while also saying he was right and that we need a constitution. Munger said Buchanan’s contribution was to remind us of what was written in the U.S. Constitution by the framers, and that Buchanan’s book The Calculus of Consent, published in 1962, said all they were doing was writing down some of the scientific principles behind what James Madison was trying to accomplish in the Constitution. Munger said Buchanan was surprised it was controversial because it was already embodied, and that this is the reason the U.S. Constitution was written.
Zadek paraphrased Madison’s remark that if all men were angels we would not need laws, adding that if all public officials were angels we would not need constitutions. Zadek said the purpose of the constitution was recognizing that once you create a government and give it the exclusive power to use force and coercion, you had better have a lot of controls on the use of that force. He said the founders, having created this potential monster, spent the rest of their time building in controls, and that they were probably channeling Buchanan and Public Choice.
Munger said James Buchanan wanted to argue that we cannot rely on good people and that what we need is good rules, and that if you have good rules, even bad people will basically act as if they were good because the structure of the constitution creates a set of incentives and imperatives. He said Madison wrote this in Federalist No. 51, where the advantage of separation of powers is that ambition can be made to counteract ambition. Munger described how the President and the Senate each want more power and check each other, and that divided government means you actually have to have a substantial consensus. He said a small group cannot grab power even if they have the best of motives, and that you need a large consensus in order to use guns to make people do things they do not want to do. He called this the insight of Public Choice, embodied in the Constitution as written by the founders, whose intuition was later proved by the science of Public Choice.
Zadek said the best example of how the founders understood Public Choice theory without the words or the label, but did an inadequate job, is the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments. He said to call them amendments is almost a misnomer because they were almost contemporaneous, drafted a year later, and really a rider to the Constitution rather than amendments. Zadek said Madison in particular believed the Bill of Rights was unnecessary, since nothing in the Constitution gives the government the power in the first instance to abridge freedom of speech, conscience, religion, or assembly. Zadek said the proof that Madison was in that regard naive is that any litigation in support of free speech never cites the Constitution itself as saying the Constitution does not empower government; it always cites the Bill of Rights, which means without the Bill of Rights the Constitution, felt to be a good finished product, did not do it Troubleshooting the Constitution (2022).
Across episodes
Buchanan appears in all three episodes as the central figure of Public Choice, but the treatment shifts. The 2017 episode is concerned with defending Buchanan against MacLean’s Democracy in Chains; the 2019 episode applies his theory to civil asset forfeiture; and the 2022 episode places him in a lineage running back to Madison and the framing of the Constitution. Michael Munger advances the defense and the constitutional lineage; Bob Zadek advances the forfeiture application, with Brian D. Kelly supplying the empirical anecdotes. The excerpts show no direct development or revision of Buchanan’s ideas across the episodes, only different applications.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Buchanan’s birth or death dates, his academic appointments beyond the mention of George Mason University’s archives, or the full title or contents of most of his works beyond The Calculus of Consent. They do not describe the Nobel Prize citation or the specific contributions for which it was awarded. They do not give the outcome of the MacLean controversy beyond Munger’s assessment and the NPR review episode. The excerpts also do not state what became of the Sacramento Bee case or the South Carolina “Rolling Thunder” program beyond the description Kelly provides.