A successful transition involves balancing a decisive break with the previous regime with the simultaneous minimization of the costs associated with the administration of justice. Where the benefits of pursuing transitional justice outweigh the associated costs, the administration of justice is...

Liberal principles of self-government are severely tested when faced with an existential threat like foreign attack, financial crises, and a global pandemic. COVID-19 represented such an existential threat to the liberal order. The policy path followed as a consequence of such an emergency will...

The current public debt crises in Western democratic countries provide an important illustration of what Adam Smith had described as the “juggling trick” – namely deficit increases, accumulation of debt, and debasement of currency – that all governments resort to when confronted with...

During times of economic crises, the public policy response is to abandon basic economic thinking and engage in ‘emergency economic’ policies. We explore how the current financial crisis was in part caused by previous emergency economic measures. We then investigate the theoretical...

What can we learn about applied price theory from the Bourgeois Era? In this paper, we contend there are three important lessons that can be extracted from McCloskey's work on the Great Enrichment. First, transaction costs are not constraints, but objects of choice. Second, property rights are...

In the 2011 Franz Cuhel Memorial Lecture, I argue of endogenous rule formation in economic life (what I term the positive political economy of anarchism) should be studied in-depth and that the economic analysis of the Austrian school of economics provides many of the key analytical insights...

In “The Soul of Classical Liberalism” (2000), James Buchanan argues that modern advocates of the liberal order must move beyond the mid-20th century project of “saving the books” and “saving the ideas” and instead embrace the challenge of “saving the soul” of liberalism. The...

Attempting to find the technically optimal monetary policy is futile if the Fed's independence is undermined by political influences. Nobel Laureates F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan each sought ways to constrain and/or safeguard the Fed from political pressures over their...