David, you’re right that Boettke sets up a straw man with his smarmy statement about Rothbard’s allegedly nonchalant attitude toward “the poor.” He then bloviates on in his usually confusing and pointless diatribe, a hallmark of his writings, ending with another whining smear of Rothbard and Rothbardians.
The source of Boettke’s befuddlement is found in his last sentence where he says he has been reading the work of James M. Buchanan for years, and that is what informs his rambling speculations. Well I, too, have read Buchanan, who was a grad school professor of mine in 1977 at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. What Boettke has been reading of Buchanan’s is not his early work in public finance, but his enterprise of “constitutional economics,” which one of Buchanan’s protégé’s once defined as his project to construct “a voluntary theory of government.” This involves ignoring actual history and reality and theorizing about such things as “conceptual unanimity.” Not real unanimity as in a voluntary, free market, but “conceptual” unanimity invented by James Buchanan and his followers like Boettke. This theory is then used to argue that government is not coercive after all because, in theory, possibly, maybe, with the right assumptions, every last person in society could conceivably, conceptually, theoretically, agree on an activist government. Armed with this tool of statist propaganda, Buchanan advocated harsher antitrust regulation, the taxing away of inheritance, and other interventions. Leland Yeager smashed this silly argument by pointing out that whenever you read the word “conceptual” before “unanimity,” just substitute the word “no” and you will understand what they are talking about.
I’m ashamed to say that when I was young and not very well educated I actually thought there was something to this theory of Buchanan’s, but a little study and paying attention to reality quickly changed my mind. Boettke seems to have gone in the opposite direction: the older he gets the more he believes in such statist superstitions. On the other hand, a cynic might speculate that, like Buchanan, he knows what he is doing and is simply trying to “fit in” with the statist/interventionist mainstream of the economics profession.
8:37 am on July 19, 2016
