Quotes from Economic Inquiry and its Logic

By James Buchanan (2000)

• Many, indeed the overwhelming majority, of the technologically feasible positions cannot be behaviourally realized, under any regime.#
  Politics
• Statistical inquiry may reveal the existence of parallel increases in minimum wages and in employment. But to rely on such empiricism to invalidate the economists’ scientific enterprise is equivalent to making the observation that Peter Pan really does fly because one’s vision does not disclose the existence of the supporting wires from the rafters.#
  EconomicsMethodologyPolicy
• The statement that individual utilities or productivities are interdependent is equivalent to saying that some resource which is commonly used is not centrally owned. But from this it does not follow that a change in ownership alone is always sufficient to produce the necessary conditions for attaining a Paretian utility frontier. . . . In many cases it is impossible to secure the centralization of ownership required to make the external diseconomies of usage internal to a single owner without at the same time providing the single owner with a degree of monopoly control over the total supply of resource services.#
  Economics
• If the extent of the market limits the potential for deriving the advantages of specialization, at least one industry in the totality that describes the production-exchange nexus must exhibit increasing returns.#
  EconomicsIncreasing Returns
• The paucity of billboards in the Moscow of 1990 was not primarily attributable to regulatory prohibition. This result emerged directly from the fact that no seller-supplier of any good or service felt any economic pressure to respond to customer interests or to expand the demands for products.#
  EconomicsDevelopmentNorms