Public Choice and Public Policy: A Tribute to James Buchanan

[Author Affiliation]Eugenia F Toma, * Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, University of Kentucky, 437 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA; E-mail: Eugenia.Toma@uky.edu[Acknowledgment]I am grateful for comments from colleagues and for comments on earlier versions of this article. The final article was greatly improved as a result of the comments.1. IntroductionIt is with great humility that I participate in the Southern Economic Association (SEA) tribute to the life and work of James M. Buchanan. The SEA occupied a special place in the life of Jim Buchanan, and it feels particularly appropriate that the organization should choose to honor him with this session. Jim never forgot nor failed to appreciate his southern roots in middle Tennessee. Indeed, those roots defined him just as his training under Frank Knight defined him. Jim forever carried with him a pro-southern, common-man bias. He thought himself fortunate to have grown up in a small, southern community where you went to elementary school with the future mayor and doctor of the town, but you also went to school with the future farmer, the gas attendant, and the person who would grow up to be the janitor of the school. And in that era, it was more obvious to folks than it is today in our socioeconomically stratified communities and schools that good fortune and luck play a significant role in which of those paths you find yourself walking. With his roots in the South, Jim knew that the farmer who plows has something to teach those of us who choose the easier life of the professoriate (Buchanan 1992). The "common" person was as deserving of our conversations and our respect as the Nobel laureate peers with whom Jim found himself later in life. This respect for all individuals across all walks of life was an admirable part of the character of the man, James M. Buchanan.Today we are the fortunate ones here to celebrate Jim Buchanan's life not just as one steeped in character, but also, of course, in intellect. His intellectual legacy undoubtedly will live for generations in the future. His many contributions to the academic world make this responsibility of honoring him a pleasant one, and I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on the specific ways that Jim has influenced my own life as an economist. I have spent most of my career as an economist in a public policy school. I want to share with you the unique way in which that public policy life has allowed me to build upon my James Buchanan/Virginia Tech roots by linking the domains of public choice and public policy.When I first accepted a position in a policy school, I was often greeted by fellow public choice-trained economists with a questionable expression that bordered on horror. How could a public choice-trained economist find herself in a policy school?1 My retort then and now is that I cannot imagine a better place for such economists, and I shall try to explain why. Although this essay is not intended as an advertisement for policy schools, a little background may be useful to an audience of economists who largely choose to surround themselves by other economists within the confines of an economics department. Policy schools are populated by social scientists broadly defined. You may find sociologists or psychologists or anthropologists, just as you find political scientists and economists. At the occasional policy school, you even encounter people who trained in the "hard" sciences because their expertise is useful when applied to health policy or environmental policy, for example.The fundamental questions addressed by policy scholars are remarkably similar to those addressed by public choice scholars. What does the government do, why does it do it, and what are its effects? It is of interest to note that policy schools began appearing in universities at a time roughly paralleling the emergence of public choice scholarship. …