It’s not uncommon to hear “free market” libertarians defend their position with a kind of humility: we don’t know what’s good for anyone, so why not let everyone make choices for themself? This is part of a defining strategy in right-wing economic thought: claiming the authority of science to make political judgments while rejecting the possibility of actually using evidence to arrive at political or ethical conclusions. In the mind of the right, legitimate judgments can only come from ignoring reality— whether that means pretending to take view from nowhere, like libertarians, or embracing supposedly eternal false categories like race and nation as the only valid truths.

(This is June’s premium article! If you haven’t already, subscribe to read it and support my work!)

Economist James McGill Buchanan’s 1962 Calculus of Consent, co-written with fellow economist Gordon Tullock, offered thoughts on “what we think a state ought to be.” Buchanan was another product of the postwar right-wing economic nexus; he was a student of Frank Knight’s and a convert to early Chicago economics. Buchanan and Tullock answered their question– what ought the state be– in a manner quite similar to one of this newsletter’s familiar villains: Herbert Spencer.