Abstract
Political-economic life is rife with bullshit: false, often nonsensical, beliefs. Some of those beliefs are socially productive. James M. Buchanan identifies popular false beliefs in the constitutional realm as foundational supports of political-economic order. I consider how popular false beliefs in the judicial realm support criminal law and order. The beneficence of bullshit in such arenas may help explain the prevalence of bullshit in political-economic life.
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Or at least it has been historically—up through the mid-twentieth century, after which Buchanan (1970) sees such beliefs as deteriorating.
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And the logical structure of American government is that described in The Calculus of Consent (1962). As Buchanan puts it, that book simply “provide[s] a tight logical structure to what must have been the essential vision of James Madison and the Founding Fathers in their conceptualization of the workings of a political order” (Buchanan 1988, p. 16).
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Leeson, P.T. (2018). Beneficent Bullshit. In: Wagner, R. (eds) James M. Buchanan. Remaking Economics: Eminent Post-War Economists. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03080-3_20
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