George Mason University; James Buchanan; supply-side economics; libertarian bias against government

George Mason's economics department, meanwhile, became a hotbed of controversial theories that began to transform Americans' tax bills, serving as an incubator for the supply-side tax cuts in the Reagan administration that hugely advantaged the rich. Paul Craig Roberts, an adjunct professor at GMU, drafted a precursor to the first supply-side tax cut bill of the Reagan era, which was introduced by his former boss Congressman Jack Kemp. While the tax cuts starved the government, George Mason also belittled its role philosophically. A star on its faculty was Jame Buchanan, the founder of "public choice" theory, who often described his approach as "politics without romance" because he categorized elected officials and public servants as just another greedy, self-aggrandizing private interest group, a view popular with antigovernment libertarians. In 1986, Buchanan was a Nobel Prize in economics. Liberal economists were aghast. (183-184)