This paper is written for a Liberty Fund conference on 'Liberty in relation to law and macroeconomics'. The paper works with recognition that the models we use are not neutral devices to see more clearly into reality because they also shade that reality in different ways. For instance, a model...

Traditional Austrian cycle theory starts from general equilibrium and explains how an expansion of bank credit unmatched by an expansion of saving can create a cycle of boom-and-bust, and with the bust followed by restoration of normality. In contrast, this paper offers a non-equilibrium...

James Buchanan's Public Principles of Public Debt is universally associated with the claim that debt allows the cost of public activity to be shifted onto future generations. This claim treats a generation as a unitary and acting entity. While such treatment is standard fare for macro theorists...

The American system of political economy surely faces a fiscal crisis illustrated by but not limited to a trend of growing deficits and debt that cannot continue. What can’t continue won’t continue. In what fashion change occurs will be governed by forthcoming interactions between power and...

This is a preliminary draft of the fifth of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explains that economizing action provides a universal form for pursuing social theorizing in a...

This paper uses the 19th century concern with “the social question” as a vehicle to explore how the theories we use can shape, for better or for worse, our insights into our subjects of interest. Contemporary thinking mostly channels the social question into a focus on inequality in the...

While Antonio De Viti de Marco was a significant figure within the Italian School of Public Finance that flourished between 1880 and 1940, his theory of public finance also has great significance for contemporary theorizing. Where contemporary theory largely treats states as acting to modify...

The term “tax state” originated in a controversy between Rudolf Goldscheid and Joseph Schumpeter over the treatment of Austria's public debt in the aftermath of World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Goldschied asserted that this debt represented a crisis for a state...

This paper uses Alfred Marshall’s treatment of wants and activities and Francis Edgeworth’s treatment of utilitarian redistribution to re-examine what since the 19th century has been described as “the social question.” This comparative examination is prefaced by a distinction between...

Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) was a thinker par excellence. As with most thinkers, the tale of his life is told mostly through his scholarship. Accordingly, this essay reviews Tullock's scholarship in such fields as public choice, law and economics, rent seeking, bureaucracy, social conflict, and...