The governments of American states often attempt to incentivize businesses to locate within their borders by offering targeted benefits to particular industries and companies. These benefits come in many forms, including business tax credits for investments, property tax abatements, and...

This is a preliminary draft of the first of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explores some issues regarding the scholarly location of what is often described as the Virginia...

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...

Scholars distinguish between gratitude, which involves not only appreciation of benefit but a positive feeling directed to the benefactor, from gratefulness, which does not necessarily involve any benefactor, much less a feeling toward one (‘I am grateful for the warm sunshine.’). I suggest...

A group of scholars, including myself, have elaborated a tri-layered understanding of justice in Adam Smith (commutative, distributive, and estimative). Here I go beyond the matter of Smith’s understanding of justice, to ask: How did he discourse about justice? Does he instruct us in the...

This paper explores concepts under a rubric termed “jural,” the meaning of which is differentiated from “legal.” Within the conceptualization of the modern nation-state, there are two categories of jural relationships. In the first, both parties have equal jural standing (equal-equal),...

In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith reasons about how a change in one thing, A, is attended by a change in another thing, B. In expounding on such bivariate relationships, Smith sometimes seems to go out of his way to posit a state of the world in which the relationship would break down....

This document includes the Introduction and table of contents of a project: Think Spiral: Essays on Adam Smith. The Introduction has the following sections: (1) A Social Grammar(2) The Three Justices: Commutative, Distributive, and Estimative(3) The Liberal Program(4) The Theory of Moral...