Who is James Buchanan?
Where and what is George Mason University? What is public choice? Perhaps I responded too quickly to the last of these questions, and perhaps in my eagerness to be understood I jumped too readily into the application of public choice analysis to the budget deficit. As a result, all sophistication in evaluation was lost, and the secondary journalistic accounts that appeared in the days immediately after 16 October were simplistic, grossly misleading, and could have been taken to be insulting to me, personally. Alone with most of the other Nobel laureates in economics, my selection was ridiculed by the media ignoramuses, in my case on the grounds that any fool knows that public choosers seek to promote their own interests. This type of criticism, stemming from uninformed journalistic arrogance, is unique to economics, and it is a cross that we bear in a science that has never isolated itself sufficiently from the public discourse. Every man his own economist – this has proved to be the s
When James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the US died in 1868, he was reported to say the day before his death that history would one day vindicate him. So far, few historians have stepped up to this challenge because of Buchanan’s failures in office. In fact, he is considered to be one of the worst presidents to serve in office, and few of his decisions are regarded as anything but weak or unintelligent. During his time in office from 1857-1861, state secession began in earnest, and Buchanan did little to try and stop it. James Buchanan is what people of his time called a “doughface,” a northerner, born in Pennsylvania in 1791, with strong Southern leanings. He supported slavery and states rights and refused to act when several Southern states seceded. He claimed that the states had no legal right to do so, but on the other hand, the Federal government had no legal right to stop states leaving the Union. His inaction would require the cleanup job of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil Wa
He has no military pretensions — he is no • Ctaesar, with a Senate at his heels— he never set a squadron in the field, nor wears he a sword to throw it in the scale to make it kick the beam! He is simply that which is ex- pressed by the word most precious to republicanism — a plain, unpretending, but sound, safe, conservative citizen. ‘ Civil in every sense, he is a civilian ; a statesman of train- ing, of age, of experience in public affairs, prudent, cau- tious, honest, patriotic, able, and has rendered the country not some, but much service. He has especially rendered this State and the South the service of that sacred regard ‘ to the Constitution which protects property and persons, and maintains State Sovereignty and State equality— the only policy which can guard the Union. A man of sound morals, he has conserved himself, and kept his faculties so veil by a virtuous life, that he, now at the age of sixty-five, has many year* of service still in him. Though his head he white as sn
