26 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2017

There are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: December 7, 2017

Abstract

James Buchanan argued that Tullock was a “natural born” economist. In this paper, we explore the notion that Tullock, more appropriately, was a “natural born Misesian.” Characterizing Tullock as such, we ask the following question: was Gordon Tullock also an economic imperialist, relentlessly applying the logic of homo economicus to all walks of life? Tullock, like Mises, understood homo economicus to be homo agens, or acting man, an individual who makes decisions in an open-ended world of uncertainty. For the natural born Misesian, homo economicus already exists outside the realm of markets, but the role of the economist as a social scientist is to understand the institutional constraints within which the infinite variations of homo economicus manifests itself.