What is the most basic unit of our society which our values and norms are built around? For James Buchanan, that unit is the individual. It was his view that individual liberty should be the fundamental building block of a society. Laws and systems should be built around the protection of those individual rights in an effort to preserve liberty. His research and ideas won him a Nobel Prize in 1986, but underwent a transformation over the years. “I didn’t understand- had no understanding at all- of how the economy works or how the market works. I’ve often referred to …
