If the state can wipe out pre-existing rights simply by issuing a later ordinance, and thereby escape the requirements of the Takings Clause, that [Fifth Amendment] guarantee is a dead letter.Basically the doctrine of cancellation -- whatever we think now is right.
Another outlandish falsehood in Democracy in Chains is MacLean's statement on page 79 that "the major deficiency" of the Virginia School (i.e., the Public Choice School), is "the failure to search for empirical tests of the new theories." If MacLean had looked at any one issue of the journal Public Choice she would have learned that this is unequivocally untrue. Public Choice became very mainstream, and Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize for his part in it, precisely because there had been hundreds, or thousands, of published econometric tests of its propositions. Bob Tollison alone, Buchanan's most prolific student, authored and co-authored literally hundreds of academic journal articles that were econometric tests of various hypotheses drawn from public choice theory. I personally attended every weekly Public Choice seminar, and every economics department seminar, at VPI from September 1976 to June 1979 as a graduate student and can attest that at least 90 percent of all the papers presented there contained some kind of empirical test. MacLean's assertion is preposterous.
