Podcasts
The Great Antidote: The Limits of Liberty: Buchanan’s Case for Constitutional Rules with Edward Lopez

What happens when people stop trusting rules—and start rewriting them?
In this episode, we are joined by economist Edward Lopez about the life and legacy of James M. Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of public choice economics. We begin by unpacking Buchanan’s biography and intellectual roots: what shaped his worldview, who influenced his thinking, and why his work remains foundational to understanding government, rules, and freedom.
From there, we dive into the rich ideas in The Limits of Liberty—a dense but powerful book in which Buchanan asks: How can free individuals live together without descending into chaos or coercion? Lopez shares with us Buchanan’s key questions, his analytical framework, and the underlying principles that guide his work—especially his emphasis on rules, consent, and the boundaries of state power.
We explore questions like:
- Who was James Buchanan, and why does his work matter today?
- What makes Buchanan a “consummate Smithian” and a classical liberal?
- What are the central ideas in The Limits of Liberty—and why are they still so relevant?
- How does public choice theory reshape how we understand politics, institutions, and individual freedom?
Edward Lopez is a professor of economics and the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism at Western Carolina University. He directs the Center for the Study of Free Enterprise and is the past president of the Public Choice Society. His work focuses on the intersection of law, economics, and political processes, especially in the tradition of public choice and constitutional political economy.
If you’ve ever wondered what holds free societies together—or what happens when the rules start to break—this episode is for you.
Want to explore more?
Want to explore more?
- Intellectual Portrait Series: A Conversation with James Buchanan
- Pierre Lemieux, Lessons and Challenges in The Limits of Liberty, at Econlib.
- Randy Simmons on Public Choice, a Great Antidote podcast.
- Sandra Peart on Ethical Quandaries and Politics Without Romance, a Great Antidote podcast.
- Edward Lopez, Socialism from the Bottom Up: Where Lawson and Powell Meet Hayek and Buchanan, at Econlib.
- Troy Senik on Grover Cleveland, a Great Antidote podcast.
Read the transcript.
Juliette Sellgren
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren, and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote- named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back. Today on May 6th, 2025. I'm really excited to be joined by Edward Lopez. He is a professor of economics and the distinguished professor of capitalism at Western Carolina University, and he's the executive director of the Public Choice Society where we met, luckily for me, and he was the president of the Public Choice Society in years past. He is a leading voice, in my opinion, in public choice economics. And today we're going to be talking about one of, I think, the most foundational books in that tradition, but I don't know, you can tell me whether or not you agree on that. James Buchanan's, The Limits of Liberty. We're going to be talking about who Buchanan was, how he thought, and why this book even now still challenges how we think about politics and society. Welcome to the podcast.
Edward Lopez
Thank you. Thank you. Very nice to be here.
Juliette Sellgren (1:25)
So my first question for you, maybe not a surprise, what is the most important thing that people my age or in my generation should know that we don't?
Edward Lopez (1:37)
Well, let's see. I'm not sure if the don't know part is part of what I'll respond with, but I would say think of the economy or think of economies as organic rather than mechanical. And that will go a long way in a lot of different conversations over a lot of different issues these days. For example, the regime in Washington, the administration is sort of explicitly crafting its economic policy around the metaphor of the engine of the economy and treating the economy as mechanical. And that suggests some things about policy in some ways that might be subtle. So I think it's useful to think about it. It suggests, for example, that the economy's made up of parts that are designed to work with each other in specific ways, predetermined ways. It suggests that when those parts are not working as designed, that can be repaired and it can be even fine-tuned. So there's a long legacy of this type of thinking that's led to a lot of bad economic policy. So I would say treat in you're thinking the economy more as an ecosystem or an organic entity rather than something that's mechanical.
Juliette Sellgren (3:10)
I love that. And then the way you elaborated reminded me of that high quote on the wall of the Mercatus office at GMU and it's so great. It's something along the lines of the Curious Task of Economics or the economist or something like that is to show men how little they know about the things they think they can design.
Edward Lopez (3:33)
That's right. And he is a major spontaneous order thinker, and it's in that same line of thinking that he refers to the idea of planning out the economy. Oh, it can't be done that way because it helps to think of it as organic in order to appreciate high direction there.
Juliette Sellgren (3:55)
Yeah. Well, it's kind of a weird thought because either you think you can play with the economy and treat it as an engine because you're entering at a certain point, and then from there on out you can design it and fiddle with it. Or maybe worse, you think that we've designed it from the beginning and there's no way caveman didn't sit down and say, well, the first thing we're going to do is figure out how to design a market. No, it just happened. And so I don't know. I think at any point where you kind of enter in to what is going on in markets or a market right now, there are so many examples of how you could not anticipate and do not know what is going on. We're trying to characterize it, we're trying to characterize it in part to show that you really can't create something like this on purpose. It's part of human nature, so that's great.
Edward Lopez (4:58)
Well, much of the justification for the policies that come from the mechanical view of the economy, they take their form kind of a history of thought idea here. The intellectual foundation for government intervention, both at the micro regulation level and at the macro stabilization levels originates with neoclassical economics of the late 19th and or first half of the 20th century. And that came along well after even sophisticated economic exchange and activity came along. And in a way that sets up our discussion of Buchanan because much of his career was spent treating that neoclassical edifice as his foil for carving out his contribution. So I don't know, did I just segue to the interview?
Juliette Sellgren (6:03)
Yes, you did.
Edward Lopez
Okay. Good.
Juliette Sellgren
Tell us a little bit as we get started, I mean, we've talked about Buchanan on the podcast before, but just to kind of catch us up, and also I would say we haven't spent so much time on just him that this has become kind of a necessary piece, but who was he? Who were his influences and what is he doing here,
Edward Lopez (6:29)
Buchanan? Let's see. Well, I think that if you want to look at Buchanan, one way to do it is look at his body of work, which instantly you are sort of impressed with how prolific of a writer he was. Liberty Fund is the publisher of his collected works, which doesn't include everything he wrote, in fact doesn't include anything he wrote from the year 2000 onward, but it's 20 volumes in length and very methodical every day working and writing. And it added up to a lot at the end. Buchanan was a Chicago trained economist who in 1986 was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on constitution and public choice.
He was kind of a larger than life figure for those who worked around him and were his students. He asked important questions. He sort of got to the heart of the matter in a lot of ways and encouraged and hired those who were working around him to do the same, he had a sort of contrarian or at least anti elite streak in his work. He cared very much about the common person, the common man, and he grounded his analysis of the questions that he asked on something called methodological individualism, which basically means we're going to pose some big think types of questions, but we're going to ground the questions that affect all of society, all of humanity, all of history. And so really big questions, but we're always going to ground our analysis of these big questions, the individual level of choice and understanding. And this is called methodological individualism.
And Buchanan stuck to it very closely throughout all of his writings, including in The Limits of Liberty. So I would say for our interest in began, there's quite a bit of material on the Econlib, websites, including a couple of biographies and a couple of symposiums on his work. He really spawned a lot of organizations and people to continue working in the traditions of public choice and constitutional economics. So I think the number of district that he chaired over his career, just dozens of people and each of them, many of them in turn chaired many dissertations. And I'm one of those folks, by the way, my chair was Bob [Tollison]. He was one of Buchanan's primary students. So that's a little bit about him and how he gets interested in questions about constitutions and political economy.
Juliette Sellgren (10:13)
So who was he reading? We read him, but who did he read?
Edward Lopez (10:22)
His biography is pretty clear, [Knut] Wicksell being a major influence on him. Swedish economist who's worked on the tyranny of minorities had a major impact on Buchanan. He's also a classical liberal, Buchanan is. So he centers his intellectual and lineage on Adam Smith, and he's a proselytizer as well. Buchanan is because even from the very first publications of his in the late 1940s, he's trying to convince other economists to look through this other facet at issue debt and taxation and so forth. And he never gave that up. He never gave up trying to convince economists to look at their work and the questions that they're asking and sort of way. And probably the single most concentrated dose of that is in his 1963 presidential address to the Southern Economic Association. It's entitled, What Should Economists Do? And in there he's very much advancing a Smithian orientation of thinking about economics and the economy. And so Adam, he wants to return economists to the types of questions posing and argues that economists had forgotten that generations before. So yeah, his influences are Frank Knight as well from the University of Chicago among some others. He's an economist who, as you get familiar with him and his work, you are at some point just really struck by how deeply and widely began and is read and is able to come up with important questions partly as a result of that.
Juliette Sellgren (12:56)
So what's really interesting about that is that on the one hand, there's kind of this account which is kind of evident through, I mean your descriptions of him and what he read and what he thinks economists should do, that it is classically liberal. But then you said, or you started to say that maybe he was kind of also a contrarian and that, I mean, he kind of in a way seemed like a true intellectual. He doesn't fit in certain ways into one box, one standard box. And the things that kind come to mind are the fact that at least once he was like, yeah, an a hundred percent inheritance tax, that would be great. Or his fascination with the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. And I mean, you could argue that that fits into classical liberalism, but it's definitely a different strain in a way, it's his own take. It's a hodgepodge of beliefs in a way that don't fit super neatly together, but do maybe through him through the fact that he's read so much and can synthesize a lot of stuff perhaps and then build on it.
So I don't know how sometimes I feel as though we just claim him as a classical liberal because we like him and because sometimes he really does agree with a lot of the things that we say and a lot of the things that we think about. I mean, hearkening back to what you said at the end there, what the questions he thinks we need to be thinking about are things that classical liberals think about more often and more intentionally, not that other people don't care about it. So in a lot of ways he aligns really well with classical liberalism. But are we just claiming him this? I'd never known.
Edward Lopez (14:46)
That's a good question. I think that it's a really nice take on a question that I've heard more often, which is, does Buchanan fit better in the box of classical liberal or in the box of libertarian? But this question, this is a good one, is how is he even classical liberal in this book in The Limits of Liberty? He's asking a fundamental, which is very classical liberal, he's asking how a society can achieve both order and liberty in its arrangements. And he says it's ultimately got to be because we individuals all agree on the rules of the game first, and then we play the game under those agreed upon rules. So he is preoccupied with this expansive question, this fundamental question. And at the same time, he's trying to, at various points in the book, argue that what he's saying is relevant to 1970s America. So it's 50 years since the book came out because in the early seventies when he is writing this, he just perceives a good bit of what he describes as constitutional disorder. And I think part of that is goes to his credibility, if you will, as a classical liberal because he doesn't want order to be achieved in ways that will infringe unduly on liberties.
And he wants to ground everything that he's doing in the analysis of individuals. So I think another very strong connection is ultimately he's going to land at a point of limited government and limited by the agreed upon rules. So yeah, I think in those ways, very strong connecting points for people who might be interested in Buchanan and finding out how classical liberal he is.
Juliette Sellgren (17:38)
So I mean, we already kind of started, but The Limits of Liberty, how does this fit within everything else he's written and where does it situate itself? So you explained a little bit of what he's thinking about, but what did he have to think about before to even get to that question, and why are those the two things he's chosen to, I guess figure out the tradeoff between if we want to talk about it in terms of economics to weigh these two things that societies do think about, why not liberty and happiness, why not order and cleanliness?
Edward Lopez (18:31)
So one of the things that you can find on the Econlib website is the review of Buchanan's 1962 book, the reviewer's Pierre Lemieux, and let you mentions The Limits of Liberty as being Buchanan's Follow up to that earlier 1962 book called The Calculus of Consent. And it's in this book co-authored with Gordon Tullock that they lay out this sort of two stage conceptual stage way of thinking about constitutions and politics. And that's also where they introduce their analysis of a unanimity rule, and they ultimately use the unanimity rule as a way to assign a higher priority to certain decisions in collective action compared to others. And the rules of the game generally falling in those sort of higher priority categories. And so that on say where that might matter to the 1970s America would be how have the, excuse me, what's the electoral margin required for a constitutional amendment compared to what's the margin of victory required for a piece of legislation?
And so at that time, we were talking about Nixon and the tumultuous times where there was quite a bit of tension between the Congress and the President, and there were sort of open battles for power along Pennsylvania Avenue, which culminated in 1974's Congressional Budget Act, which among other things concentrated more of the budget power on the side of Congress as opposed to with the president. And so this checks and balances featured is one of the ways that, and starting in the calculus of consent that Buchanan explored the needs for limited government, this sort of checks and balances, that is a very liberal, classical liberal idea. And that Buchanan himself will sort of say that he's really working with [James] Madison's dilemma, how to achieve a government that's powerful enough to protect individual's rights but not powerful enough to become an infringer upon those rights. So Buchanan would say he's really tackling that basic fundamental question. It starts with the coauthored book in 62, Calculus of Consent, and then in The Limits of Liberty I think is where he is putting many of the pieces together and giving it, tagging a second lap around the track to get his thoughts together. Right on it.
Juliette Sellgren
Is there any significance to the fact that he did it without Tullock?
Edward Lopez (22:43)
There probably is. They reached a point where they maybe drifted in their relationship, their professional relationship, and some of that had to do with the way that each of them respectively looked back at The Calculus Consent and with a critical eye of, well, how could we have done things better or differently? And [Tullock’s] counterpart is to write a book called The Social Dilemma, where he really explores some of the things that he maybe felt were not adequately done in the 62 book. And Buchanan comes to The Limits of Liberty. I think that they did something that is historic and groundbreaking and has created a legacy of scholarship. But there's lots of things that I don't know about that story of their collaborations, but there was definitely a point at which they went effectively, kind of their separate ways.
Juliette Sellgren (24:18)
Yeah, I just thought it was interesting because The Calculus of Consent, it's such a big deal, especially in public choice, and I don't know, I mean obviously they're a pretty powerful duo, but I guess they do diverge, and it's just kind of interesting to think about because usually at least upon introduction to public choice, you think it kind stops there, but it keeps going. I guess they keep thinking you can't stop a thinker from thinking. So what's interesting about this, especially as we've kind of built up this idea of Buchanan as an intellectual, is someone who really has a direction that he thinks economics should go, an end that he thinks economics is kind of made for and what he thinks economists need to be focusing on. And the fact that he's been doing that basically his whole career, but also that he's kind of well placed to actually, even though he thinks liberty is important to say that there are limits in a way that I don't know if other economists would be, it's not to say they can't, but he stands in a unique position to write a book like this. So what are the limits of liberty in his estimation? Are there, what are they?
Edward Lopez (25:44)
Yeah, I mean that is the title of the book, so it should be made clear. So one way to go about it is to sort of look at the early part of the book and how he gets things started and then sort of connect it to the later report of the book where he talks about what reform steps are possible and how can we best anticipate how they would work out given his framework. At the outset of the book, Buchanan lays out his conceptual sequence for how people come out of a state of nature, and he kind of stays close to Hobbes on this where the state of nature would be the famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and shorts. And Buchanan says, how would people come out of that?
He says, property rights have maybe been overestimated in this conceptual process to the neglect of contract. And here's what he says. He says, people in the state of nature are going to be expending resources trying to get the stuff they need and also trying to protect the stuff they have. So because there's no rules against things like theft, fraud, there's no recourse in a state of nature for any of that. So you have to invest in protecting yourself against it yourself. And so each person would have an attraction to this alternative way of doing things, let's everybody agree not to attack each other and steal stuff.
And then some other things, we're going to voluntarily agree to circumscribe our own behavior. We're going to give up some of our liberty, and that's because each of us is going to be made better off for having done so specifically because we don't have to invest all these resources into being good attackers of and protectors of property. So instead, let's all sign a contract, and then underneath the terms of that contract, we'll go about our daily business. So that's his emergence from the state of nature argument. So that might ring some bells where some connection points for you to understand the nature thinkers.
Juliette Sellgren (29:03)
It's kind of interesting because maybe I'm just misunderstanding [Thomas] Hobbes, but Hobbes rubs me as an elitist a little bit. I mean, I guess when he's like, this is how we get out of it, and maybe Buchanan that by saying that it is more contractual and by saying that we do agree to give up these things, what's kind of interesting.
Edward Lopez (29:28)
Yeah, it doesn't want,
Just to briefly fill that in, I think it's a good insight and it's because Buchanan doesn't want there to be monarchy or autocracy or organism. This is where the influence of Knut Wicksell comes in because Buchanan's very preoccupied with the tyranny of the minority and is therefore using the Hobbes and his version of the state of nature as a reference point, but sort of stopping there and saying, we don't want the Hobbesian solution. We would like a constitutional republic solution. So how best could that get worked out?
Juliette Sellgren (30;25)
So this is kind of interesting. I don't know if I misunderstand the way that a lot of political theorists, especially the actual people that academics end up reading and studying and all this [John] Locke and them, how they kind of tell this story. I know with Locke, you're mixing your labor with the land and that makes property and whatever, but it seems as though even if you can kind think that property is an inherent thing, that we have the right to that actually in this narrative, when you're emerging from this kind of Hobbesian state of nature, we're agreeing to it, true. But it seems like at least in the other state, there was nothing necessarily raw. I don't even want to go so far as to say that because I don't know, but it almost seems as though it is more, and I guess this is really what's the crux of the whole thing. And what's complicated is that you're giving up liberty for liberty. There are certain freedoms you have to forego in order to actually have not only prosperity, not only order, but actually to have more options. And that's kind of a weird thing, and I don't know if that's the right interpretation of what's going on, but it seems to differ a bit from the typical account.
Edward Lopez (32:01)
And this is where the sort of two stage framework helps, I think the giving up of liberty that should not be under Buchanan's rules, rules, something that can be an exchange in the sort of post constitutional stage of things. That should be something that is done at the constitutional stage or reform stage. So what that does is it rules out something like in the War on Terror context, for example, the liberty versus security trade off. That's its own conversation of course, but it does kind of show where Buchanan might draw the line and he might object and counter argue against the liberty and security trade off regardless of the merits of it. So do we actually gain more security when we give up liberty regardless of that, he would argue that it doesn't belong in the post constitutional stage and that I think he is a little bit distinctly in the way he treats it.
Juliette Sellgren (33:39)
So this idea of kind of saying, okay, once there's a constitution we're done, it kind of brings us closer to where we are today. We do have a constitution in America and in lots of places, but what do you do? And I always struggle with this when we are born into the post-constitutional stage, especially if we're the big really important decisions, you kind of, I mean, go back to The Calculus of Consent and think about the ways that we decide on things as a society. I was not born when we were in the pre constitutional stage. Neither were you. Neither in a way. Luckily none of us today were because our lives are better, but also because I don't really want to have had to make that decision.
Edward Lopez (34:33)
I think that there's a couple of ways that we, I don't want to say get out of that so much as both recognize it and deal with it. And the first is that well look at these constitutional stage rules as something that a person would approve of. And against the unanimity requirement, you say that most people, all people would look at these rules and say, yes, those are probably good ones for us to get along under. And the other thing that is very, very important for Buchanan and for understanding where he's coming from on this question is that the importance of the status quo. And he always says, we start from where we are, we start from here. And so what that means is that the specific context of time and place where a constitutional reform might be considered and undertaken that by definition will be that decision by definition will be the product of people who were born at the time when it was happening, the ones doing it. So that status quo element is very important for, it's one of those things that sticks with his work almost throughout his career.
Juliette Sellgren (36:14)
I'm trying to think of what we can learn from this. So something that's really inspiring to me about Buchanan that's just super striking, and you mentioned it in a way that's not so clearly at the forefront of other thinker's minds so consistently is, I mean, you can see it through his commitment to methodological individualism, but it is this true fundamental belief in the fundamental equality of human beings. Obviously there are other people who think of that sort of stuff, but there's no economist, I think I could say pretty confidently that exhibits this sort of intentionality towards this principle, even if they believe it. It has been throughout everything that he has produced, it seems to be always there. And so how do we…
Edward Lopez
Yeah he wears it on sleeve. It does. He wears it on sleeve.
Juliette Sellgren (37:14)
Yeah. So how do we learn from that and from what he wrote in Limits of Liberty as we kind of people in a society, as economists, as classical liberals, what do we make of not just this work, but this work is representative of everything he stood for, but also this work in itself?
Edward Lopez (37:46)
I'm drawn to a passage now with your question that I've shared a couple of times recently. After talking with people at a conference or whatnot, I'll come back to his passage and I'll say, you should read this. And both it harnesses everything you just said about his constant priority on the individual, but it does so here in a way that reinforces the responsibility side of the coin, not just the liberty side. And it also is in the context of rip forming, right? So if you look around at the United States in 2025, and there's an argument whether there is a constitutional crisis happening in our current, and there's a president responds in an interview that he's not sure if it's his responsibility to uphold the constitution.
There's a lot of clamoring and outcry whenever a utterances like these come out of Donald Trump. But ultimately, and this is where it Buchanan would sort of sit up in his chair and remind people of, we're a society of self-governed, at least in the fundamental characteristics of our political institutions. We are a self-governed people. And in fact, you often will hear the Trump administration invoking what the people voted him in to do as part of the justification for the steps that they're taking. So what do we make of this? Certainly as people we're concerned with what's happening in our federal government. And that's true if you agree wholeheartedly with the Trump administration or disagree wholeheartedly, certainly for classical liberals, this is not how we would draw up a president or a presidency starting with tariffs and you name it,
Juliette Sellgren (40:32)
Hashtag Grover Cleveland is my president.
Edward Lopez (40:35)
Yeah, I've got some favorites myself, and probably Cleveland is among them, but that this is not a liberal order from how classical liberals understand things. So what do we make of it? I want to suggest that Buchanan gets us to think about Donald Trump as a symptom more so than as a disease. You can clear about us having constitutional disorder. And he also gives us the tools to think about how that really is a reflection of what's happening at the individual level. And so the passage, let me just take a minute, not a minute, a second to read it. This is from late in the book. He says, when we speak of controlling leviathan, we should be referring to controlling self-government, not some instrument manipulated by the decisions of others in ourselves. Widespread acknowledgement of this simple truth might work wonders if men should cease and desist from their talk about and their search for evil men and commence, instead to look at the institutions manned by ordinary people, wide avenues for genuine social reform might appear. And so ultimately he, and this is a constant news work too. He wants to desperately avoid being a council of despair and this is his reaction or this is his response to it. If we can change the mindset, it's just changing our mindset about the economy from mechanical to organic.
If we can change our mindset about what's happening and say, first of all, there's some self accountability here, and secondly, our leader is more symptom and disease. And thirdly, looking at it this way actually opens up some avenue for meaningful. I think he means constitutional stage types of reforms
Juliette Sellgren (43:00)
Because then there's stuff you can do about it.
Edward Lopez
You can do about it. Yeah.
Juliette Sellgren
Ah, that's so optimistic for once. That's great, isn't it?
Edward Lopez
Yeah.
Juliette Sellgren (43:13)
I am thoroughly impressed with his consistency. I mean, again, just at all levels, this commitment is just so present. And I don't know. It's inspiring, but also it really, I mean, he embodies in a lot of ways what we say we want to be as classical liberals, that we are optimistic, and he's sitting here offering ways to think that are actively solving even the problem before we know what the problem is. It is. Great. Well, thank you so much for, I don't know, introducing us to this and kind of…
Edward Lopez (43:55)
I hope it was helpful. Yeah.
Juliette Sellgren (43:57)
I have one last question for you, because we ended on such a nice note here that I'm feeling pretty good. I'm ready to take on the world. But what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on? Why?
Edward Lopez (44:16)
Well, there's so many ways. I would love to answer this. I would love to answer it 10 times, but I'd give you 10 different interesting answers. Maybe I'm a Bayesian in that sense because I keep updating, but I'll give you one that Buchanan actually, and I spent a good bit of time talking about, I was a grad student in the mid-nineties before he retired, and he got interested in my dissertation topic, which was on congressional term limits. And for lots of the reasons we talked about it already, you can see why he might be interested in that. It's a constitutional stage reform.
He also was really interested in the efficacy of it. So term limits supporters were out there touting it as a solution for all kinds of political elements, including fiscal policy. If we turn 'em over more, they won't spend as much. There'll be more like a citizen legislature. All kinds of benefits would come from it. There'd be more diversity and representation and stuff like that. Now, I think I came to the topic, kind of that mindset, wow, this is a pretty cool way of structuring the incentives of elected officials. But the more and more I dug into it, and actually the more I talked to again about it on a few occasions when we did, the more I began to realize, well, none of that stuff looks like it would actually happen or it would work out that way in practice. And in fact, when you look at the state legislatures, when you have about half of them enacting or tightening term limits of their respective legislatures back in the nineties, interestingly, it was those states that did enact state legislative term limits that had a larger increases of spending of state level spending. So put term limits in the actually spending goes up. And my read on that is that you change the time horizon for being an elector office in such a way that it gives elected officials the incentive to spend now as opposed to sort of hang out and wait until they develop some political capital and then influence spending later. So yeah, I would say term limits. That's the one thing my mind on.
Juliette Sellgren (47:04)
Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote Podcast. It means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at greatantidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.
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