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...

In 2014, the State Council of the Chinese Communist Party announced the institution of a social credit system by 2020, a follow-up to a similar statement on the creation of a social credit system issued by the State Council in 2007. Social credit ratings of the type being developed by the State...

This paper analyzes the “revolving door” phenomena in the military sector in the United States. The revolving door refers to the back-and-forth movement of personnel between the government and private sector. We examine the structure of the revolving door and explain how its very nature...

Economists commonly use the Edgeworth box to illustrate the ability of exchange to generate gains from trade. In contrast to this framework of dyadic exchange, we explore triadic forms of exchange where margins of coercion are also present. In the presence of triadic exchange, market...

This paper is for presentation at a program on the dismemberment of the economics program at the University of Virginia in the mid-1960s. It is a literary flying buttress to “Virginia Political Economy, Rationally Reconstructed.” Where the earlier paper mostly looks forward from 1963, this...

In “The Soul of Classical Liberalism” (2000), James Buchanan argues that modern advocates of the liberal order must move beyond the mid-20th century project of “saving the books” and “saving the ideas” and instead embrace the challenge of “saving the soul” of liberalism. The...

This is a review essay on Vito Tanzi's "Government versus Markets: The Changing Economic Role of the State." The bulk of this book looks backward on the relative growth of government from late in the 19th century until recent times when that growth seems to have stopped in many places. Tanzi...

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....

This essay is written for a symposium on Luigino Bruni's The Genesis and Ethos of the Market. That book identifies a tradition of Neapolitan civil economy that arose in the 18th century, and which the author opposes to the more familiar tradition of Smithian political economy. The difference in...

Attempting to find the technically optimal monetary policy is futile if the Fed's independence is undermined by political influences. Nobel Laureates F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan each sought ways to constrain and/or safeguard the Fed from political pressures over their...