James Buchanan, RIP and ATRA

This past week we lost an intellectual giant, James Buchanan, whose contributions were and are still under appreciated. Among other contributions, Buchanan helped discover and bring to a fuller light facts that should have been obvious: political actors are subject self interest and incentives just like everyone else and government failure is as much if not more a fact of life as is market failure.

See these excellent appreciations of the Mr. Buchanan's life work:
     From Alex Tabarrok
     From Steve Horwitz
     From Arnold Kling
     From Don Boudreaux
     and From the WSJ editorial page

It is a bit fitting unfortunately that Buchanan's death would come so closely to the passage of the American Tax Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA)--the resolution to the so called tax portion of the Fiscal Cliff. This disgusting example of political corruption would have been well understood by Buchanan. The act contains nothing resembling fiscal responsibility or improvement. It is a giveaway to the special interest of the tax lobby (tax preparers, tax advisors, estate lawyers, et al.) and other corporate special interest. It leaves us with a tax code more punishing on work and savings, more complicated, more encouraging of the rich to spend and use rather than save and share, more taxing on all taxpayers as everyone's income tax burden has increased (not just but especially those making more than a couple hundred thousand in a particular year--the $450,000 is a fiction), and more likely to bring us fiscal problems down the road. But it should have all been of no surprise to any of us; I was not surprised. The whole thing reminds me of this exchange:

Muriel Blandings: You remember Bunny Funkhouser, dear, that clever young interior decorator that we met at the Collins' cocktail party.

Jim Blandings: You mean that young man with the open-toed sandals? What about him? 

Muriel Blandings: Well, you know how long we've said we've got to do something about fixing up this apartment. Well, a couple of weeks ago, he called, and I asked him to come over, and he had some simply wonderful ideas, and I didn't want to bother you with sketches and estimates until I knew whether we could afford it. So I sent them over to Bill. 

Jim Blandings: How much? 

Muriel Blandings: What's the point in asking how much until you know what you're going to get?

Jim Blandings: I've seen Bunny Funkhouser. I *know* what I'm going to get. 

RIP, James Buchanan. We still have a lot to learn from you.