How Buchanan’s concern for the South shaped his first academic works

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show that, at the very beginning of his career, Buchanan was interested in concrete issues related to the economic situation in the South rather than with abstract and philosophical works in public finance. We examine the published and unpublished articles, reviews and replies that Buchanan wrote between 1949 and 1952 on federalism. By putting what Buchanan wrote in the intellectual, academic and political context of the period, we put forward four factors which we believe are important to understand Buchanan’s ideas. First, Buchanan defended the intervention of the federal government to redistribute, in the form of equalizing grants, income from rich to poor regions. Second, as a consequence, for Buchanan, such redistribution was an ethical necessity that should precede any consideration of efficiency. Even more important, fiscal justice was a precondition without which a competitive or free market system could not function properly. Third, at least during that period, Buchanan appears to have been interested primarily in practical, concrete problems, rather than in pure and abstract questions. Finally, a fourth and crucial point is that Buchanan insisted on the need for federal government intervention to industrialize the South, a stance that stands in stark contrast to policies the Nashville Agrarians defended.