This paper explores a possible path toward dissolving an antinomy within political economy: market order is treated as emergent and spontaneous while political order is treated as planned. This paper pursues a path that seeks to locate the entire social order as emergent and spontaneous. Where a...

This paper explains that James Buchanan's theory of public debt entailed more than the shifting of cost forward in time from the current generation of taxpayers to future generations of taxpayers. The possibility of such shifting is dubious, for public debt really entails a shifting of cost...

All but one American state has some constitutional requirement for a balanced budget but few of them operate this way. Moreover, in 1979 the federal government enacted a public law that required a balanced budget by 1982. The law has not been repealed but neither have budgets become balanced....

Political economy is a field of study where theorists typically treat polities and markets as separate orders of activity within society. Moreover, the standard mode of analysis treats those entities as existing in states of equilibrium. To the contrary, this essay treats polities and markets as...

Most theorists of public finance treat budgeting as a technical problem concerned centrally with projecting revenues and expenses. To the contrary, I treat budgeting as a political problem, with technical matters serving to obscure more than illuminate the political economy of budgeting. This...

This paper is an introductory presentation before the first monthly meeting of the Entangled Political Economy Research Network (EPERN) Network organized by Marta Podemska-Mikluch from Gustavus Adolphus College and Mikayla Novak from the Australian National University. This paper is not so much...

This essay uses entangled political economy to explore how concerns over Covid-19 have influenced conduct within the public square. Entangled political economy represents a merging of ideas that Frank Knight (1933) and Harold Lasswell (1936) set forth to indicate that politics and economics...

This essay is a keynote address prepared for a conference on "Entangled Political Economy" sponsored by the Wirth Institute. In keeping with the conventions of such an address, I look both backward and forward while placing more emphasis on looking forward. In looking backward, I compare and...

This is a preliminary draft of the second 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 sets forth the framework to be developed and elaborated in the remaining chapters. The subtitle...

Economists necessarily use models in thinking about their material because there is no alternative given the complexity of the material we face. But through what kinds of models might we use to theorize about the problem of governance? There is a choice between theoretical frameworks in this...