There is a secret paradox at the heart of social contract theories. Such theories assume that, because personal security and private property are at risk in a state of nature, subjects will agree to grant Leviathan a monopoly of violence. But what is to prevent Leviathan from turning on his...

Questo articolo indaga sulla reale portata dell'analisi di Marx, basata in maniera fondamentale sulla propria teoria del valore e del plusvalore. L'idea innovativa dell'articolo consiste nel mostrare come sia possibile capire realmente l'analisi della teoria del valore di Marx, partendo da Marx...

This is a paper presented at the international symposium on 'Income Distribution and Economic Inequality' in Bad Homburg, West Germany in 1976. This symposium was organized by Zvi Griliches, Wilhelm Krelle, Hans-Juergen Krupp and Oldrich Kyn. The paper compares the empirical evidence on actual...

An article published in Czechoslovakia just before the Soviet invasion of 1968, which stopped the progress of the economic reform aiming to transform the centrally planned command economy into a kind of market socialism. The article was acknowledging that the Marxian economics have no...

This is a brief but critical survey of the life and accomplishments of the Czech economist Ota Sik. He joint Communist Youth organization already before the WWII. During the war, he was in the Mauthausen concentration camp, together with the future secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party...

In this paper a simple dynastic overlapping-generations model with homogeneous agents is used to analyze the optimal use of capital income tax, labor income tax and estate tax. The results of this analysis add to the conventional wisdom about capital income taxation: while it is true that in the...

Presents a complete and detailed constitutional framework applying the rational self-interest model and market mechanisms to intra and inter- governmental behaviour and collective decisions. In particular, the paper presents an enabling mechanism for the creation, adjustment and dissolution of...

The tax office wins most cases in Japan. We think about why this might be. We find that although judges who rule in favor of the taxpayer do not suffer in their future careers, if the loser-- whether governemnt or taxpayer--appeals and wins, the reversed judge's career does take a turn for the...

Conviction rates in Japan exceed 99 percent -- why? On the one hand, because Japanese prosecutors are badly understaffed they may prosecute only their strongest cases and present judges only with the most obviously guilty defendants. On the other, because Japanese judges can be reassigned by the...