Democratic governments can be either national or federal in form. Whether the form of democracy matters, how it matters if, indeed, it does matter, and for whom it might matter are the types of questions this paper explores. Federalism is generally described as a pro-liberty form of government....

It is common to think of federalism as a governmental arrangement that entails competition among governments. Thinking this way, however, is problematic. A competitive system is generally associated with the notion of polycentricity, as illustrated by a market system of free and open...

Political economy is a field of study where theorists typically treat polities and markets as separate orders of activity within society. Moreover, the standard mode of analysis treats those entities as existing in states of equilibrium. To the contrary, this essay treats polities and markets as...

With respect to ordering different fields of scholarly inquiry, ethics is commonly thought to be independent of economics, and, moreover, with ethical principles standing in judgment of economizing actions. In contrast, we explore a line of thought where ethics, politics, and commerce all emerge...

Drawing inspiration from Ross Emmett's (2006) imaginative construction of what Frank Knight might have thought about the Stigler-Becker formulation of Die Gustibus, I ask what Arthur Lovejoy (1936) might have thought about the origin of public choice. He would surely have denied that public...

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...

When directives rather than contracts determine rights to water flows, agents will substitute away from securing water rights by contract toward securing them through political directives. When those directives are legitimated by court rulings, they alter the rules that govern social...

This paper analyzes the concept of municipal bankruptcy in a comparative framework with commercial bankruptcy. Cities are corporate bodies that continue to exist despite the ever changing identities of the residents. The common designation of cities as municipal corporations suggests an affinity...

When considered as a unified project, the Ostroms' themes of polycentricity, self-governance, and the art and science of association have strong intellectual roots and connections with Austrian economics. In this paper, we show the close relationship between the Ostroms and the Austrians. We...

This article introduces Buchanan's comment on Tiebout's "A Pure Theory of Local Public Expenditures". It helps us to understand the nature of the relationship between Buchanan and Tiebout. Usually, it is claimed that Buchanan modeled Tiebout's insights, that there exists a Buchanan-Tiebout...