Historian Nancy MacLean recently wrote a hit piece smearing James Buchanan and a number of other public choice theorists.

What’s Buchanan’s basic message? Simple: Government isn’t magic. In representative democracy, small, privileged special interests groups–such as the corporations–make deals with the government. The government then uses its power to distribute favors to the privileged at the expense of the everyone else. And it does so while telling the bald-face lie that “government is just the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” 

Buchanan won a Nobel Prize for fighting for the little person and for speaking truth to power.

Now the government sure wouldn’t want anyone making its dirty secret public, would it?

So, along comes Nancy MacLean. The government paid her over $50,000 to smear Buchanan and people like him. Rather than challenge his ideas, she accuses him of this and that. Yet, all the while, Nancy is quite literally a hired gun for the government seeking to rationalize its oppression and abuses.

Its a bad book, and you, might notice, not peer-reviewed. But keep in mind it is quite literally a piece of government-funded propaganda. There’s no more point in arguing with Nancy than there is arguing with one of Goebbels’s essays. Asking about its intellectual value is a category mistake.

UPDATE: Here, Russ Roberts catches Nancy “I lie for money, status, and power” MacLean straight up lying about Tyler Cowen.