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Can we model politics as exclusively based on self-interest, leaving virtue aside? How much romance is there in the study of politics? We show that James Buchanan, a founder of public choice and constitutional political economy, reintroduces a modicum of romance into politics, despite claiming that his work is the study of “politics without romance”: Buchanan’s model needs an ethical attitude to defend rules against rent-seeking.

We claim that Adam Smith, more than David Hume, should be considered one of the primary intellectual influences on Buchanan’s public choice and constitutional political economy. It is commonly believed that Hume assumes in politics every man ought to be considered a knave, making him an influence on Buchanan’s idea of politics without romance. Yet, it is Smith who, like Buchanan, describes rent-seeking and suggests that public virtues may be the remedy through which good rules maintaining liberty and prosperity can be generated and enforced. Smith, like Buchanan, rejects sole reliance on economic incentives: the study of politics needs some romance.

Packaging, food packaging in particular, has attracted a considerable amount of adverse comment in the popular and technical press in recent years. Accusations have been made that many products are over packaged and that this adds unnecessarily to their cost. Difficulties encountered in opening, reseating and dispensing from packages have been reported. The contribution made by packaging to the problem of litter and the disposal of waste materials has been highlighted. It is right that such matters should be considered and research is currently in progress to minimise these detrimental influences of packaging. On the other hand, one must not lose sight of the fact that packaging plays an important role in maintaining the quality of food during processing, storage and distribution and that in many of the modern processes for food preservation packaging is an essential and integral stage.

One important discussion comes under Knight’s heading of “Social Control.” To appreciate his argument, one has to understand that Knight’s social theory is developed within a tension between: (1) his knowledge that social control is both inevitable and necessary; and (2) his correlative desire for individual autonomy. One could add to that a hatred of social control, some of which is relevant. But what Knight dislikes is, first, selective elements of existing social control and, second, change of social control, e.g. change of the law by law, except for those changes of the law that remove the selective elements he dislikes; Knight is not opposed to all change of social control. In any event, the problem of social control is also for Knight (as it was for Vilfredo Pareto) the problems of social change and of the status of the status quo as well as of hierarchy.

Given the significant amount of public infrastructure spending and the widely expressed concern about the declining quality of the American public infrastructure system, research about the effectiveness of public infrastructure investment is especially timely and crucial. The study extends public service production theory and public choice theory to the public infrastructure field, and develops a realistic and full theoretical model of public highway production by taking state highway efficiency differences into account. The panel fixed-effects method is used to examine the effects of state highway finance on state highway infrastructure quality. This study finds that state highway maintenance spending plays a crucial role in improving state road and bridge quality. Moreover, highway efficiency elements matter for state highway infrastructure quality.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.