Gravy Train to Oligarchy:

Historian Nancy MacLean explains that Virginia’s white elite and the pro-corporate president of the University of Virginia, Colgate #Darden, who had married into the #DuPont family, found James #Buchanan’s ideas to be spot on.

In nurturing a new intelligentsia to commit to his values, Buchanan stated that he needed a “#gravy #train,” and with backers like Charles #Koch and conservative foundations like the #Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, others hopped aboard.

#Money, Buchanan knew, can be a persuasive tool in academia. His circle of influence began to widen.

MacLean observes that the #Virginia #school, as Buchanan’s brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented #Chicago and #Austrian schools — proponents of all three were members of the #Mont #Pelerin #Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton #Friedman and Friedrich #Hayek.

But the Virginia school’s focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:
“Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to choose and so forth.
"Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems.”

The Virginia school also differs from other economic schools in a marked reliance on #abstract #theory rather than #mathematics or empirical #evidence.

That a Nobel Prize was awarded in 1986 to an economist who so determinedly bucked the academic trends of his day was nothing short of stunning, MacLean observes. But, then, it was the peak of the #Reagan era, an administration several Buchanan students joined.

Buchanan’s school focused on *public choice theory*, later adding constitutional economics and the new field of law and economics to its core research and advocacy.

The economist saw that his vision would never come to fruition by focusing on *who rules. It was much better to focus on the rules themselves, and that required a “#constitutional #revolution.”

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533763/democracy-in-chains-by-nancy-maclean/9781101980972/