The policing of “information” is the stuff of Naziism, Stalinism, Maoism, and similar anti-liberal regimes. To repress criticism of their dicta and diktats, anti-liberals label criticism “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Those labels are instruments to crush dissent. This paper...

Self-governance of common pool resources is presumed to work well in small, homogeneous communities where interaction is repeated, agents have low discount rates, and information about past performance is available. It is presumed to work poorly elsewhere. This paper provides a case study of...

This paper uses economic reasoning to analyze the traditions and institutions of one of the most successful criminal organizations in modern history: La Cosa Nostra (LCN). Drawing on recently declassified FBI reports, the paper's analysis shows that LCN's core institutions are best understood as...

Immigration control-related audits and their resulting sanctions are not solely determined by impartial enforcement of laws and regulations. They are also determined by the incentives faced by vote-maximizing congressmen, agents acting on their behalf, and workers likely to compete with...

This paper considers an economic approach to autistic individuals, as a window for understanding autism, as a new and growing branch of neuroeconomics (how does behavior vary with neurology?), and as a foil for better understanding non-autistics and their cognitive biases. The relevant economic...

This is a review article of The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, edited by Roger Congleton, Bernard Grofman, and Stefan Voigt. This two-volume collection has 90 chapters, with each chapter averaging 20.4 pages (excluding the volumes' indexes). My subtitle conveys my judgment of this work. The...

Ostension is the act or process of showing, as in showing a child a fossil while saying “fossil.” Here collected are 59 quotations about language, discourse, ostension, and semantics. A theme is the “facts are theory-laden” spiral between language and discourse, between explananda and...

We test the hypothesis that strategic interactions foster overconfidence. We experimentally compare an environment where players have an incentive to overstate their own ability to deter competitors, with one where this incentive is removed. We find that overconfidence persists in the former...

Federalism is commonly thought to be a pro-liberty system of government, in contrast to a unitary system. Within a unitary system, people face but a single government that taxes and regulates. Within federal systems, however, people face two or more governments that tax and regulate. In light of...

The appeal of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) has moved with openness to non-foundationalism. This paper is devoted to providing evidence of that bivariate relationship. The paper stems from a 2018 article, “Dissing The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” I have pared down the quotations and...