The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan. Apart from this volume and a final one containing an index to the series and a curriculum vitae, the collection gathers Buchanan's work by topics. The editors have added a fourteen-page foreword and reprinted the 1986 press release of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announcing the award of the Nobel prize to Buchanan. The issue cannot be settled by purely physical considerations, by the truism that resources are consumed when they are consumed and not later.
Room remains for a further expository job to clinch the outcome in everyone's mind.
It shows that framing and clarifying concepts need not be less important or intellectually challenging than, say, econometric work. Buchanan's discussion also illustrates his own concern less with technical minutiae than with the big picture and fundamental questions. Without scarcity and the attendant need to choose how resources are allocated, economics would not exist as a field of study. Except, perhaps, in a socialist system of extreme and unworkable centralization, no question of overall resource allocation arises. Instead, each individual pursues his own purposes according to his own inclinations, abilities, knowledge, and resources.