He was assigned to Honolulu, Hawaii in March 1942, where he served as an officer on Admiral Chester W. Nimitz's operations planning staff in the United States Navy.

Knight, who also taught leading economic thinkers such as Milton Friedman and George Stigler at the University of Chicago, was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

[22] Wagner said that while Buchanan opposed segregated schools at the time, he also believed in decentralization and parental and student choice within a liberal orientation of people being able to develop their talents and abilities.

In order to counter the argument that a "private system was unfeasible and that any weakening of public education would damage the state's economy overall and discourage new industries from coming to Virginia", supporters asked Buchanan and Nutter to write a shorter summary of their February report.

[20] While Buchanan's personal views on race were beside the point, according to Hershman, the "massive resistance private school initiative" had provided an "opportunity to "create a functioning alternative to the existing public system", to "promote his libertarian education doctrines, as an example to showcase those ideas".

While vouchers would ideally promote market competition while also providing benefits of "exposure to other races, classes and cultures", Buchanan warned that this may not happen in practice.

Tullock and Buchanan applied for and received a National Science Foundation grant to organize a preliminary research meeting in Charlottesville in 1963 with about twenty people from economics, philosophy, and political science including Olson, William H. Riker, Vincent Ostrom, Anthony Downs, Duncan Black, Roland McKean, Jerome Rothenberg, and John Rawls (author of the influential 1971 A Theory of Justice).

In 1983, Buchanan relocated the entire Center for Study of Public Choice unit, which included its seven faculty members to George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, Virginia.

[14] Buchanan complained to then-GMU economics department chair Karen Vaughn that VPI was losing its status as unique center for public choice.

[32] Economist James C. Miller III, who served as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and as Budget Director for then-US president Ronald Reagan consulted with Buchanan, Tullock, and Tollison at the Center.

[39] Buchanan said that his 1949 paper, "The Pure Theory of Government Finance: A Suggested Approach" published in the Journal of Political Economy[Works 7] he was influenced by Wicksell.

"[27] "The Pure Theory of Government Finance: A Suggested Approach" published in the Journal of Political Economy[Works 7] It contained core ideas that Buchanan continued to develop over his career which spanned six decades, according to his biographer Richard E.

During the recession of 1960–1961, Buchanan and Musgrave served on a Brookings Institution's National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) advisory committee on the needs, sources, and utilization of public finances.

[Works 12] In the late 1940s and early 1950s as Buchanan was developing his own thoughts on the concept of the state, Kenneth Arrow published his influential 1951 monograph, Social Choice and Individual Values.

[48] Arrow concluded that it was generally impossible to assess the "common good", for example, the design of a social welfare function through a fair ranked voting electoral system because individual preferences within the aggregate differ.

[27] In public choice theory, Buchanan raises concerns about minorities being exploited under permanent majorities While in Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1956 - 1957 he became aware of how his generation of Americans—those born in the decades after WWI—had a view of politics that was too romanticized.

[Works 13] In it he analyzed how individual behavior affected fiscal institutions in situations related to collective choice, for example, the relationship between income tax and the public use of economic resources.

Buchanan said that there was government overreach in totalitarian regimes but also in the 1960s in Western democratic welfare-state nations, such as President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs designed to eliminate poverty and racial injustice.

[53] Buchanan told his contemporaries in the field of economics that Adam Smith's statement in his 1776 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations that the human "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another" is what political economy is all about.

[15] In their article on Buchanan's politics as exchange, they described him as a classical liberal, who also incorporated rational choice theory, and individual utility maximization in his analyses.

[43] In The Calculus of Consent, Buchanan and Tullock cited Swedish economist Knut Wicksell's standpoint on public choice in their argument for the need for unanimous agreement on constitutional rules.

According to a 1992 journal article by George Mason University economists, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, the precursor to Buchanan and Tullock's public choice theory is found in the work of John C.

Buchanan maintains that a person's first instinct is to make their decisions based upon their own self-interest, which varied from previous models where government officials acted in constituents' best interest.

In the 1960s when Buchanan first began to formulate his public choice theory, he was one of the few, if not the only economist, who was critical of Keynesian economics,[66] which had become widely accepted in the United States in the 1960s and resulted in a shift in towards governance through "macro-economic engineering".

[Works 22] Keynes had written his classic and influential The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1938, but there was a lag between its publication and the widespread adoption of his ideas.

[79] As he witnessed the federal government increasing its power, Buchanan sought ways to protect the wealthy from being forced to support programs that seemed to him to be a move towards socialism.

[5] In a 1986 Chicago Tribune interview Buchanan said, "I want a private sphere in which I am protected, where nobody can invade...I don't feel the need to be a part of a community or a team."

"[5] Even though he had a long career at George Mason University in Fairfax, Buchanan and his wife chose to spend most of their time a four-hour drive away on their 400-acre working farm near Blacksburg.

[11] The New York Times obituary said that the Nobel Prize-winning economist who championed public choice theory influenced a "generation of conservative thinking about deficits, taxes and the size of government".

[11] The Badische Zeitung (Freiburg) called Buchanan, who showed how politicians undermine fair and simple tax systems, the "founder of the new political economy".