The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Foreword
• Richard E. Wagner
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: What Happened?
• 1.: What Hath Keynes Wrought?
• 2.: The Old-time Fiscal Religion
• 3.: First, the Academic Scribblers
• 4.: The Spread of the New Gospel
• 5.: Assessing the Damages
• Part Two: What Went Wrong?
• 6.: The Presuppositions of Harvey Road
• 7.: Keynesian Economics In Democratic Politics
• 8.: Money-financed Deficits and Political Democracy
• 9.: Institutional Constraints and Political Choice
• Part Three: What Can Be Done?
• 10.: Alternative Budgetary Rules
• 11.: What About Full Employment?
• 12.: A Return to Fiscal Principle

Richard E. Wagner

The analytical core of the argument in Democracy in Deficit is simple and straightforward. Indeed, the argument is perhaps the single most persuasive application of the elementary theory of public choice, which focuses primary attention on the incentives faced by choosers in varying social roles.

Richard Wagner and I did not sense any purpose of the book beyond that of laying out the elementary propositions along with the implications. Wagner, as colleague and coauthor, was helpful in placing the concept into its history-of-ideas context, and in his continued insistence that even the simplest arguments must be elaborated to be convincing to skeptics.

Neither Dick Wagner nor I suffer fools gladly, but without our mutually enforcing constraints, a book by either of us would have surely lapsed too readily into polemics.

James M. Buchanan

• Fairfax, Virginia

1998