The great free market economist James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) died this week.
His contribution to the resurgence of interest in free market economics and
limited constitutional government in the post-war period cannot be underestimated.
Not only did he make pioneering contributions to an entirely new field of economic
theory, the so-called "Public Choice" school, winning the Nobel Prize
for Economics in 1986 as a consequence, he also taught several generations
of young economists who continue to work in this important area. The key insight
he developed was the apparently obvious one that politicians and bureaucrats
are also human beings and have the same motivations which spur their fellow
creatures to action (or inaction). It is a common place that "consumers" and "producers" attempt
to maximize the "benefits" which are available to them and to minimize
the "losses" or "inconveniences" which they face. So too
do politicians and bureaucrats, only for them the things they attempt to "maximize" are
not profits or monetary gains but power, privilege, re-election, promotion,
expanded departments and budgets, and dare one also say renown and an historical "legacy".
Buchanan spent a lifetime developing these ideas and they have become very
influential. Liberty Fund is very proud to be the publisher of a 20 volume
edition of his Collected Works, 9 volumes of which are online here at the
OLL.
Norman Barry states, at one point in his essay, that the patterns of spontaneous
order “appear to be a product of some omniscient designing mind” (p. 8). Almost
everyone who has tried to explain the central principle of elementary economics
has, at one time or another, made some similar statement. In making such statements,
however, even the proponents-advocates of spontaneous order may have, inadvertently,
“given the game away,” and, at the same time, made their didactic task more
difficult.
I want to argue that the “order” of the market emerges only from the process
of voluntary exchange among the participating individuals. The “order” is,
itself, defined as the outcome of the process that generates it. The “it,”
the allocation-distribution result, does not, and cannot, exist independently
of the trading process. Absent this process, there is and can be no “order.”
What, then, does Barry mean (and others who make similar statements), when
the order generated by market interaction is made comparable to that order
which might emerge from an omniscient, designing single mind? If pushed on
this question, economists would say that if the designer could somehow know
the utility functions of all participants, along with the constraints, such
a mind could, by fiat, duplicate precisely the results that would emerge from
the process of market adjustment. By implication, individuals are presumed
to carry around with them fully-determined utility functions, and, in the market,
they act always to maximize utilities subject to the constraints they confront.
As I have noted elsewhere, however, in this presumed setting, there is no genuine
choice behavior on the part of anyone. In this model of market process, the
relative efficiency of institutional arrangements allowing for spontaneous
adjustment stems solely from the informational aspects.
This emphasis is misleading. Individuals do not act so as to maximize utilities
described in independently-existing functions. They confront genuine choices,
and the sequence of decisions taken may be conceptualized, ex post (after the
choices), in terms of “as if” functions that are maximized. But these “as if”
functions are, themselves, generated in the choosing process, not separately
from such process. If viewed in this perspective, there is no means by which
even the most idealized omniscient designer could duplicate the results of
voluntary interchange. The potential participants do not know until they enter
the process what their own choices will be. From this it follows that it is
logically impossible for an omniscient designer to know, unless, of course,
we are to preclude individual freedom of will.
The point I seek to make in this note is at the same time simple and subtle.
It reduces to the distinction between endstate and process criteria, between
consequentialist and nonconsequentialist, teleological and deontological principles.
Although they may not agree with my argument, philosophers should recognize
and understand the distinction more readily than economists. In economics,
even among many of those who remain strong advocates of market and market-like
organization, the “efficiency” that such market arrangements produce is independently
conceptualized. Market arrangements then become “means,” which may or may not
be relatively best. Until and unless this teleological element is fully exorcised
from basic economic theory, economists are likely to remain confused and their
discourse confusing.
[ORDER DEFINED IN THE PROCESS OF ITS EMERGENCE [A note stimulated by reading
Norman Barry, “The Tradition of Spontaneous Order,” Literature of Liberty,
V (Summer 1982), 7–58.]
Archive 
