National Review marveled at the “sea change” Buchanan’s work had produced in economists’ thinking about government, making reliance on it “seem not nearly so credible as in the Fifties or Sixties.” The Virginia school’s was “a more fundamental critique than the usual free-market economist’s,” it informed novice readers. “By casting doubt on whether [government] can” do what citizens look to it for, “Buchanan challenges the idea that it ought to try.”70
