Through tax evasion, through the labour-leisure choice or in other ways, taxpayers reduce the tax base in response to an increase in the tax rate. The process is commonly-believed to generate a humped Laffer curve with a revenue-maximizing tax rate well short of 100%. That need not be so. In the...

Important as it is for public policy, there is still no consensus about the size of the revenue-maximizing tax rate at the top of the Laffer curve. The purpose of this essay is not to supply a correct rate, but to identify difficulties in doing so. 1) Estimates of the revenue-maximizing tax rate...

A utilitarian measure of economic growth combines changes in the distribution of income with changes in real income per person to show how much better off people are becoming over time. It is the rate of growth of the dollar value of average utility of income. As such , it is seen differently by...

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem is commonly understood to invoke a dictatorship that is somehow lurking within our voting arrangements. The theorem has been described as proving that “any constitution that respects transitivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives and unanimity is a...

Utilitarianism can be misplaced or ambiguous. As a prescription for individual behaviour, the injunction to seek the greatest good for the greatest number is misplaced because there remains a domain of life where, within the bounds of law and custom, one is free to act as selfishly or as...

It has been observed by many that Jorgenson and Griliches' findings have profound implications about the nature and prospects of economic development. In this paper, the author proposes to show that Jorgenson and Griliches' evidence does not bear these implications, and that the inferences drawn...

Few subjects in economics have been more exhaustively discussed than the relation between productivity and thrift in the determination of the rate of interest, yet leading authors continue to hold markedly divergent views. This issue might be brought into focus in the following paper by...

This paper talks about the empirical demand theory as described in the textbooks as well as the one estimated in econometric work. Thus, the argument of this paper is that the gulf between the theory of demand as described in textbooks and the procedure followed in estimating demand curves is...

The liberal society might be supposed to have emerged directly from anarchy, spontaneously or in a social contract; or the liberal society might be supposed to have emerged indirectly by a roundabout process in which anarchy gave way in the first instance to despotism and then despotism gave way...

Public decision-making by majority rule is open to the danger of exploitation of minorities by majorities. Since any majority can employ the vote to expropriate the corresponding minority, it would seem that there can be no electoral equilibrium allocation of income or transfers in a democratic...