This paper presents a reassessment of the policy measures taken to combat the effects of COVID-19. It addresses the following question: does the threat of pandemic justify the sacrifice of legal and political principles for the sake of expediency? We do so by filtering the unintended...

What is the role of the entrepreneur in Carl Menger’s account of the market process? Modern entrepreneurship theory is broadly divided into two types. The Schumpeterian account of entrepreneurship takes an equilibrium state of affairs as an analytic starting point from which the entrepreneur...

Throughout his career, James Buchanan displayed a remarkable consistency regarding the didactic role of the properly trained economist. As he would say, it takes varied iterations to force alien concepts upon reluctant minds. What he regarded as the role of the properly trained economist is just...

In terms of economic methodology, Friedman's most well-known contribution is his 1953 essay, “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” This important contribution has overshadowed his earlier contribution to economic methodology, entitled “Lerner on the Economics of Control” (1947)....

Roger Garrison has played a key role in advancing ideas in Austrian macroeconomics throughout his career. As contributors to this symposium, we discuss a number of “Garrisonian wisdoms” that have provided important lessons for economists in navigating a “middle ground” and seeking...

James Buchanan has argued that not only the study of public choice, but also property-rights economics as well as law and economics can be directly traced to the work of scholars associated with the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy (TJC) at the...

The purpose of this chapter is an attempt to reconstruct the evolution of North's approach to understanding economic history. Underlying this evolution has been an increasing recognition of the role that transaction costs play in explaining the economic performance of different societies through...

Our focus in this chapter will be on the methodological role that Stigler played in validating what he regarded as the science of economics that he had inherited from his own teacher, Frank Knight, and how this affected his understanding not only of economic theory but also public policy....

In recent years the term behavioral economics has arisen in consequence of the growing effort of a significant set of economists to import psychological methods and findings into economics. This body of work issues strong challenges to the use economists have made of rationality in economics....

This book chapter demonstrates that there has been from Adam Smith to Vernon Smith a tradition of economic scholarship that is grounded in the decision calculus of individuals, or what F.A. Hayek referred to as the logic of choice, which requires neither the heroic assumptions of omniscience,...