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...

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...

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...

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...

Long-run neutrality of money is an artifact of a particular theoretical framework. We advance an alternative though not contradictory theoretical framework where monetary processes exert lasting real effects. Our framework holds without rejecting the classical equilibrium condition that nominal...

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...

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....

I have been asked to compare James Buchanan's body of work with that of George Stigler for a symposium on Stigler's contributions to economics. I run my exposition through Frank Knight, who exerted strong though different forms of influence over both Stigler and Buchanan. Stigler's oeuvre is...

Thinking was Gordon Tullock's primary interest in life. He let his thinking roam widely and creatively over his many fields of interest; moreover, Tullock is widely recognized for the robust and creative quality of this thought. He left a valuable legacy. All the same, I think the value of that...