Buchanan and accounting

I want to argue that our failure to allow for any accounting of the sort of choice behavior involving investment in becoming something different has inhibited our ability to understand as well as our willingness to try to understand some of the problems of our time, both individual and social. By implicitly refusing to consider man as artifactual, we neglect the “constitution of private man, which roughly translates as “character,” as well as the “constitution of public men,” which translates into the necessary underpinning of a free society, the “character” of society, it you will.

Natural and Artificial Man, James Buchanan 1978

Because, as Buchanan concludes in the last line of his lecture, “He wants liberty to become the man he wants to become.“