Here is the Wikipedia entry for James McGill Buchanan.
George Monbiot of The Guardian reports today about what, accidentally found after Buchanan’s death, has shown the darker side of this George Mason University economist and exposed the dark side of his “public choice” theory.
George Monbiot, The Guardian: A despot in disguise: one man’s mission to rip up democracy
In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982.
There’s your very public demonstration of public choice theory right there.
MacLean says that Charles Koch poured millions into Buchanan’s work at George Mason University, whose law and economics departments look as much like corporate-funded thinktanks as they do academic faculties. He employed the economist to select the revolutionary “cadre” that would implement his programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenin’s techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause). Between them, they began to develop a programme for changing the rules.
The papers Nancy MacLean discovered show that Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential”. Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical “reforms”. (The same argument is used by those attacking the NHS). Gradually they would build a “counter-intelligentsia”, allied to a “vast network of political power” that would become the new establishment.
So here we are with our “new intelligentsia” installed in power. No doubt they saw 2016 as the fight to the death between liberalism (what Clinton actually was despite the hedging) and public choice conservatism in which the billionaire class said a radical “No” to the US Constitution.
What has fascinated me about conservatism for fifty years is how much it modeled its strategies and tactics on what it learned about Leninism-Stalinism and its institutions, strategies, and tactics during the propagandizing of the post-World War II Red Scare. The conservative tracts would get almost histrionic about how we are doomed because the cap-C Communists are conducting a campaign of stealth that does this and this and this. And then in the 1970s, the followers of that conservatism were setting up to do the very same things—for capitalism. And coincidentally for power and for wealth.
Well, the game has been exposed. In the 1960s there was a Fifth Column in America. It was “conservatism” through which wealth sought absolute power. And over 48 years struck down one check or balance after another until now the GOP has absolute power in the national government and many state governments.
And in Kansas and other states Buchanan’s public choice theory, crafted to sabotage school desegregation, has created one disaster and era of misery after another. And it still runs on in Europe, having brought Greece to its knees, fractured the European Union, and now taking a second pass at France.
Putin in his grandest days in the Soviet KGB could not have imagined a more clever strategy of destruction than the call for “Pure Capitalism” and “Freedom for Property”. The Bundys, those “sovereign citizens” are just high on Buchananism without realizing it is intended only for the wealthy.
Buchanan and his department did do very well, including getting the books of his African-American colleague Thomas Sowell placed in almost every library in America , often as the only general books on economics.
And Buchanan’s ideas, propagated by the business media, and the conservative mediasphere, permeate most of American conversation about economics and economic policy. The create invisible blinders and fetters that intend to keep the New Deal from ever happening again.