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Looking Back on a Disgraceful Academic Performance of Five Years Ago

Posted: 20 Jun 2022 10:32 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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My latest column for AIER is the first of a two-part series looking back on
the publication, five years ago this month, of a notably disgraceful
example of so-called scholarship. A slice:

Five years ago there appeared the most appalling instance of academic
malpractice that I’ve ever personally engaged with. In her book Democracy
in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for
America, published in June 2017, Duke University “historian” Nancy MacLean
purports to reveal that my late Nobel-laureate economist colleague, James
Buchanan, was a white supremacist who throughout his long tenure in the
academy aimed to undermine democracy and to oppress the poor and working
classes, and who eventually became a willing tool of rapacious oligarchs.

No one who knew Jim Buchanan personally, or who even just read relevant
parts of his vast scholarly output, recognizes the fictional “Buchanan” who
appears in MacLean’s book. Thus in the previous paragraph I put the
descriptor “historian” in quotation marks to reveal up front my low
assessment of the quality of MacLean’s historical research and reporting on
Buchanan’s work. Her book is a screed of fiction passed off as a work of
fact.

Long-time readers of my blog, Café Hayek, know that I spent a great deal of
time and energy during the Summer and Fall of 2017 exposing some of the
countless fallacies and grotesque misimpressions that constitute the
substance of MacLean’s book. My efforts are surely less thorough and
effective than are those of more talented scholars, including AIER’s own
Phil Magness, who joined in the effort to set the record straight against
MacLean’s fabrications about Buchanan, and about the school of
public-choice research that Buchanan co-founded with his brilliant
long-time colleague and co-author Gordon Tullock. (Disclosure: I was, for
many years at George Mason University, a colleague also of Gordon Tullock.)

I share here – as I will in my next column – some of my many efforts to
expose the errors that run throughout MacLean’s book, as well as throughout
some of the attempts by others to defend her fictional tale.

First is this (slightly amended) June 28, 2017, letter to New Republic
News Editor Alex Shephard:
Mr. Shephard:
In the introduction to your interview of Democracy in Chains author Nancy
MacLean, you write that my late Nobel laureate colleague James Buchanan
insisted “that democracy and liberty – defined as free market capitalism –
were incompatible and that it was necessary to limit participatory
democracy to protect the property rights of the extremely wealthy. Though
he did no empirical work, he was remarkably influential in the field of
public choice theory, which essentially argued that markets could never
fail and governments always did.”
Your characterization of Buchanan verges on libelous. For starters,
Buchanan did not believe that “markets could never fail.” Here’s just one
of many quotations from Buchanan’s published works that disprove your
accusation: “Markets fail; governments fail.” (This quotation is from page
130 of Jim’s 1976 paper “Methods and Morals in Economics” as this paper is
reprinted in volume 19 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan.) Much
of Buchanan’s work is a careful comparison of what he always insisted are
the imperfect outcomes of markets with the imperfect outcomes of politics.
It’s true that Buchanan’s comparisons of politics with markets led him to
conclude that imperfect markets outperform imperfect politics more often
than most people suppose. But it is emphatically untrue that he believed
that “markets could never fail and governments always did.”
Worse is your assertion that Buchanan believed that democracy and liberty
are incompatible. Although Buchanan – like every other serious person who’s
pondered the matter – opposed unlimited majority rule, throughout his life
he sought ways to ensure that each and every adult has an equal voice in
the political arena. Jim understood that a key benefit of such political
equality is the maximum possible protection of individual liberty.
Finally, even if we ignore Buchanan’s proposal for confiscatory inheritance
taxation, it is grotesque of you to suggest that Buchanan wished to protect
the private property rights only of “the extremely wealthy.” Jim advocated
strong and equal protection of everyone’s private property rights. So I
challenge you (or Prof. MacLean, or anyone else) to put your money where
your mouth is: search for passages in Buchanan’s writings showing that he
wished to protect only the property rights of the rich, and that he was
hostile, or even indifferent, to the property rights of the non-rich. For
each such passage you find I’ll pay you $1,000. But if you’re unable to
find any such passage you pay to me $100. Deal?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

Shephard did not respond to the above letter.




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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 20 Jun 2022 10:30 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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is from page 119 of the late Michael Novak’s 1981 essay In Praise of
Bourgeois Virtues, as this essay is reprinted in the 1999 collection of
some of Novak’s pieces, On Cultivating Liberty: Reflections on Moral
Ecology (Brian C. Anderson, ed.):

Human offspring require some twenty years of nurture. Three thousand years
of civilization must be passed on to children during those years; without
that, progress would halt.




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And So Its Long Been

Posted: 20 Jun 2022 03:42 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Andy Kessler eloquently exposes as nonsense the assertions by many of
today’s intellectuals that reality is whatever our words say it is – that,
for example, bees are fish, puddles are navigable waters, and violent
rioting is “mostly peaceful” (“Bees Are Fish and Other Fake Narratives,”
June 20). Such intellectual chicanery, alas, is not new. In 1776 Adam Smith
observed that “[t]here is nothing so absurd, says Cicero, which has not
sometimes been asserted by some philosophers.”*

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

Professor of Economics

and

Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at
the Mercatus Center

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA 22030

* Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981 [1776], page 876.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 20 Jun 2022 01:00 AM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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is from page 11 of Edwin Cannan’s superb November 13th, 1931, Sidney Ball
Lecture a lecture titled Balance of Trade Delusions:

So firmly rooted was the belief that it was better to give to the foreigner
than to receive from him that even ardent free traders would defend imports
not on the ground that it is a happy thing to receive goods and services
and the less you pay for them the better, but because, as they put it, “if
you don’t import you won’t be able to export! As if to send out goods and
services and get back as little as possible was the ideal.

DBx: Brilliant!

Cannan (1861-1935), who taught at the London School of Economics, was one
of the early 20th centurys greatest expositors of basic economic reasoning.
In the speech from which this quotation is drawn, Cannan intellectually
destroys the notion that a nation that runs a so-called negative balance of
trade that is, a trade deficit is necessarily (as most protectionists
still in ignorance insist today) losing at trade.

I thank my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein for alerting me to this lecture by
Cannan.




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Some Links

Posted: 19 Jun 2022 02:25 PM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Chris Freiman is correct: Socialism doesn’t liberate workers from
domination.

James Harrigan celebrates Juneteenth.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Walter Olson about election fraud.

GMU Econ alum Gabby Beaumont-Smith, writing at Reason, explains that
Congress and Biden probably just made the shipping problem worse. A slice:

As the supply chain fell into disarray, the market adjusted and prices
increased, including shipping prices. These price increases were the result
of simple economics, not price gouging by greedy shipping companies. Ocean
carriers raised prices in response to high demand for goods with a limited
supply of shipping as ships and containers were stuck in congested ports.
Ocean carriers increased prices in an attempt to temper demand for
shipping. As evidence that prices rose because of supply and demand, not
greed, consider that shipping prices have recently fallen as supply chain
woes have started to abate: Spot rates for 20-foot containers from Asia to
the United States dropped almost 33 percent since peaking in September 2021.

Heres wisdom and insight from the always-wise and always-insightful Bruce
Yandle.

Pierre Lemieux isnt surprised by Bidens economic myopia.

Liz Wolfe reports on more absurdity from the CDC.

Brutal lockdown proves final straw for the middle classes fleeing Shanghai
so reports the Telegraph.

Covid is not a leading cause of death in children.

In this long read, Michael Betrus details how the media fueled unwarranted
covid hysteria and the consequent lockdowns.




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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 19 Jun 2022 01:47 PM PDT
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(Don Boudreaux)




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is from page 230 of Robert Higgs’s September 1986 Freeman essay, “To Deal
With A Crisis: Governmental Program or Free Market?” as this essay is
reprinted and slightly revised in the superb 2004 collection of some of
Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan (original emphasis):

Emergency government programs, then, offer exceptional opportunities for
those who would substitute their own values for those ordinarily guiding
the allocation of resources in the market. When the cry of Emergency! goes
up, the public’s resistance to government takeovers comes down. Hence,
aspiring redistributors of income, collectivist planners, and do-gooders at
other people’s expense rush in to exploit the unusual opportunity for
replacing market processes with government controls. Whatever one may think
about the immediate desirability of an emergency government program,
however, one must recognize that the program is almost certainly only a
beginning; and what follows in its train may be far less desirable.




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