This short essay is written for inclusion in a set of essays all written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of publication of The Calculus of Consent. These essays are purposefully short, and are meant to be personal statements of the significance of The Calculus to the author and not...

One of the most frequently debated issues in Congress over the past few years has been the value of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) relative to the dollar. It is no secret that congressmen in the U.S. frequently accuse China of being a “currency manipulator.” This paper has two objectives. First,...

The term “tax state” originated in a controversy between Rudolf Goldscheid and Joseph Schumpeter over the treatment of Austria's public debt in the aftermath of World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Goldschied asserted that this debt represented a crisis for a state...

The idea of an identifiable school of thought denoted as Virginia political economy was in play at least as early as 1963, and it is reasonable to conclude that this identifier began to take shape some years earlier. It is common though not universal to identify a school of thought...

This paper identifies two broad strands of fiscal theorizing which date back to the late 19th century in the persons of Knut Wicksell (1896) and Francis Edgeworth (1897). From Edgeworth descends the treatment of public finance as a branch of applied statecraft, as conveyed these days largely...

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....

James Buchanan's Public Principles of Public Debt is universally associated with the claim that debt allows the cost of public activity to be shifted onto future generations. This claim treats a generation as a unitary and acting entity. While such treatment is standard fare for macro theorists...

Bankruptcy has long been the standard approach to reorganizing failing corporate entities. In recent years, bailout has appeared as an alternative option, whereby a governmental entity takes charge of the reorganization. At the macro or systemic level, there is a Coase-like invariance...

The Keynesian revolution rationalized a divergence between political and economic rationality. Prior to the Keynesian revolution, divergences between political and commercial practice were held in check by moral beliefs to the effect that good conduct for governments was similar to good conduct...

This paper explains that James Buchanan's theory of public debt entailed more than the shifting of cost forward in time from the current generation of taxpayers to future generations of taxpayers. The possibility of such shifting is dubious, for public debt really entails a shifting of cost...