Recognition of conflicts of interest between French Canadians in Quebec and English Canadians in the rest of Canada is a necessary first step in the evaluation of proposals from Quebec for the refrom of the Canadian constitution, as well as for the design of institutions for an entirely...

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...

The incentive to advertise is a consequence of monopoly power, for there is nothing to gain from advertising by a firm that can sell its entire output at an invariant market price. Advertising is expenditure by a firm to increase the elasticity of demand for its product or to shift the demand...

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...

Justification of private property may be rights-based or needs-based. One may believe that society with private ownership of a significant part of the means of production is good or just in itself, or one may believe that a society with private ownership of a significant part of the means of...

A distribution of income between rulers and subjects, or among ranks in a ruling hierarchy, cannot be derived from considerations of marginal products of owned factors of production. Such a distribution can be derived as a balance of income and violence. Society is organized in ranks, and the...

Disputes over the marginal cost of public funds may be about its magnitude in any given time and place or about its role in cost-benefit analysis. This paper is about the latter. The Samuelson rule was devised for an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent government. This paper is about how the...