Liberalism correctly understood is little more than the persistent and consistent applications of the principles of economics of the affairs of men be they domestic or international. These include mutually beneficial exchange, the absence of political privilege, and toleration. The institutional...

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 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...

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...

This essay memorializes Giuseppe Eusepi contribution to political economy by refining the theme he and I set forth in 2017 in Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. There, we claimed that it was illusory to describe democratic governments as being indebted. We did not advance...

F. A. Hayek's macroeconomic theory and policy ideas have gained renewed attention since the recent boom-and-bust cycle followed the basic Hayekian narrative of an unsustainable cheap- money boom ending with a crash. Only to a very limited extent, however, do we find Hayek's ideas on the agenda...

Ratios of public debt to GDP are much discussed these days and questions concerning debt relative to taxation have long been explored by fiscal scholars. With respect to monarchical regimes, it seems reasonable to treat public debt as similar to personal debt, recognizing that a monarch is not...

The continuing budget deficits and accumulating public debt that commonly plagues western democracies reflects a clash between two rationalities regarding human governance: one of private property and its conventions and one of common property and its procedural framework. The clashing of these...

The recent financial crisis has provoked a raft of contending claims as to whether the cause of the crisis is better attributed to market failure or political failure. Such claims are predicated on a presumption that markets and polities are meaningfully separate entities. To the contrary, we...

The compelling case offered by Austrians regarding the recent economic downturn has no doubt encouraged many to take a closer look at the broader Austrian perspective. Similarly, the jobless recovery has prompted some soul searching in labor economics. We briefly review the history and...