http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-obituaries/9791656/Professor-James-Buchanan.html

He was a classical liberal who admired the Swedish welfare state because it was based on the principle of generality. Buchanan has said that all successful welfare states (such as Sweden) apply a generality norm in some form.

under Buchanan’s generality norm, governments impose uniform regulation and use flat taxes on uniform tax bases to fund an equal-per-head demogrant to replace all existing government cash transfers and would be a very large government as a share of GDP. That did not bother him.

See http://www.ifn.se/eng/publications/books_in_english/1970%E2%80%931999/988_the_political_economy_of_the_welfare_state_james_buchanan

Buchanan liked to quote his old teacher Frank Knight:

I can’t figure out if people are bitching about the market because it works or because it doesn’t work.

HT: thinkingonthemargin blog

When he spoke at length about the free market being the best allocator of resources, she protested loudly in the way one does when presented with information that conflicts with a worldview.

He periodically returned throughout the semester to ask the same person questions, to see if they had started to grasp the concepts. This was usually met with bristling and refusal to accept that free markets weren’t perfect, but were far better than any other mechanism.

By the end of the semester, she actually said this in class ‘I agree with you…..but only in here, not outside’.

A stunning level of ability to simultaneously drop yet hold onto the promise of socialism.

Hi Token – I think a person like Riha, who introduced me to public choice theory (and German ordo-liberalism, for that matter!), would be in fact a rare species of teacher these days. That is to say, somebody who is prepared to reveal all subtleties of argument and discourse, allowing the students themselves to decide on the veracity of claims made.

I suspect nowadays you often get “push-teaching” of a necessarily limited view of the world, more often than not of the socialistic persuasion.

Incidentally, an excellent essay on the ‘daddy model of wealth’ can be found here : Mind the gap

Principally it deals with the incorrect model young people get by growing up in a regime where a central figures doles out the wealth, and changes in individual wealth arise from whining and begging rather than creating it yourself.