The economists' stock-in-trade…their tools…lies in their ability and proclivity to think about all questions in terms of alternatives. The truth judgment of the moralist, which says that something is either wholly right or wholly wrong, is foreign to them. The win-lose, yes-no discussion of politics is not within purview. They do not recognize the either-or, the all-or-nothing, situation as their own. Theirs is not the world of the mutually exclusives. Instead, it is the world of adjustment, of coordinated conflict, of mutual gains.

James Buchanan.

James M. Buchanan, "Economics and Its Scientific Neighbors," in The Structure of Economic Science: Essays on Methodology, ed. Sherman Roy Krupp (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 168.