The most prominent Italian theorist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Antonio de Viti de Marco, accepted David Ricardo's proposition that an extraordinary tax and a public loan are equivalent. Despite this common point of analytical departure, their theories of public debt diverged...

The European Project aims to avoid repeating Europe's bloody history of the first half of the 20th century by creating a united Europe under the banner of the European Union. This aspiration for peace and security recalls the similar effort that led to formation of the United States in the late...

This paper is the penultimate draft of the fifth of six chapters of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This paper modifies the benchmark condition of a cooperative democracy to incorporate a realistic treatment of democracy where there exist islands of...

This is the third of six chapters of the penultimate draft of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This essay asks the reader to think whether an economy in its entirety is better construed as an engine or as an ecological system. By treating it as an engine,...

This paper is the penultimate draft of the fourth of six chapters of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This essay establishes an analytical benchmark of a democratic system in which political outcomes reflect genuine consensus among the participants. This...

This is the first of six chapters of the penultimate draft of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. The book's theme is an elaboration and refinement of the early 20th century orientation toward public debt that Antonio de Viti de Marco set forth. As the book's...

This is the second of a six chapters of the penultimate draft of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This essay explores just who it is that supplies the macro guidance that is envisioned in the various macro theories. The answer to this question is of great...

Ratios of public debt to GDP are much discussed these days and questions concerning debt relative to taxation have long been explored by fiscal scholars. With respect to monarchical regimes, it seems reasonable to treat public debt as similar to personal debt, recognizing that a monarch is not...

Federalism is commonly described in contradictory fashion as involving both competition and decentralization. These descriptions may appear similar on the surface but they emanate from contradictory analytical orientations. Competition entails a polycentric arrangement of competitors where there...

This paper seeks to overcome an antinomy within the theory of political economy: while market outcomes are treated as resulting from polycentric competition, political outcomes are treated as resulting from hierarchic planning. We seek to overcome this antinomy by treating political outcomes as...