CONCLUSION

This chapter makes clear the following points:

1. The Nobel Laureate economist James M. Buchanan demonstrates that the Prisoner’s Dilemma model for basic exchange and for the social contract codified in a constitution is generally accepted knowledge.

2. Buchanan’s analysis of political economy in effect normalizes the expec­tation that strategic rationality consistent with noncooperative game theory characterizes rational citizens and consumers.

3. Buchanan’s social contract and market exchange leaves no role for con­sent to terms or self-recruitment to legal compliance predicated on indi­viduals’ endorsement of fundamental principles or distributional outcomes. His “post-constitutional” moment in political practice may be equated with neoliberalism.

4. Buchanan’s analysis of constitutional order differs from that of both John Rawls and Robert Nozick because the latter adhere to the view that a precondition for social order is individuals’ respect of one another’s human dignity and right to exist.

5. Neoliberalism cuts across the grain of the well-known debate between classical and progressive liberals who are divided over whether the state should play any distributional role in ensuring that individuals have access to the resources and opportunities required for subsistence and the pursuit of happiness. Buchanan’s school of public choice adheres to a strict view of private property rights but relies on individuals to defend and exercise their rights. His view of the constitution and rule of law permits powerful actors to leverage asymmetric advantage in negotiating the content of law and terms of transactions, and either breaking or enforcing those terms in their favor, thus likely resulting in a society with vastly disproportionate access to resources. Whereas Buchanan endorses Nozick’s historical evolution of rights, his neglect of the classi­cal liberal no-harm principle necessarily invites deploying coercive threats and enforcement by oppressive punitive measures to sustain a social contract with even more disparate socioeconomic consequences.^[478]