Richard E. Wagner was born in Jamestown, North Dakota, on April 28, 1941, and was moved by his mother to Los Angeles in 1943. There, he attended a variety of public schools until he graduated from high school in Fullerton, in 1958. He spent the next few years serving in the US army, attending the University of Southern California from which he graduated in 1963, and getting married. He then attended the University of Virginia where he received a PhD in economics in 1966. He has since taught at such universities as the University of California at Irvine, Tulane University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Auburn University, Florida State University, and George Mason University, from which he received emeritus status in 2022.

His most cited professional work is Democracy in Deficit, coauthored with James M. Buchanan, Nobel laureate and honorary doctor of UFM. To date, he has published over twenty books and 200 papers in scholarly journals across such fields as economic theory, public choice, political economy, monetary theory, law and economics, and the history of economic thought. His current research focuses on economics in relation to theories of society, and especially on the increasingly complex relationship between commerce and politics, which has become known as entangled political economy. Currently, he is working on three book-length research projects with former PhD students from George Mason, whose dissertation research he supervised. He has other projects in the pipeline to start when these projects near completion.