Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 154 of my colleague Richard Wagner’s insightful 2017 intellectual biography of Jim Buchanan, James M. Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy:

The robust commercial republic that emerged through this constitution of liberty clearly warranted the designation of American exceptionalism. That exceptionalism has been under assault for around a century now as the consensual principle upon which the American regime was founded has come increasingly to give way to the factional principle, whereby government becomes an instrument that confers advantage on some people by imposing costs on other people, which the original American Constitution sought to resist.