This paper uses Vincent Ostrom's treatment of government as entailing a Faustian bargain to explore some challenges that confront the research program he pursued in the theory of human association. To enable this exploration, I replace the standard resort to the law of the excluded middle with...

This is a preliminary draft of the last of the eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter ventures modestly into hortatory territory, in contrast to the explanatory focus of the preceding chapters. It...

While going to trial is always an option for settling a legal dispute, settlement prior to trial is the more common response. Settlement allows the parties to avoid the expenses entailed in going to trial, leaving both parties potentially better off than had they gone to trial. Such legal...

In bringing economic analysis to bear on the settlement of legal disputes, it is commonly presumed that the parties to the dispute are governed by the principles of private property and so are residual claimants to their legal expenses. This institutional framework promotes a substantive...

Economists commonly use the Edgeworth box to illustrate the ability of exchange to generate gains from trade. In contrast to this framework of dyadic exchange, we explore triadic forms of exchange where margins of coercion are also present. In the presence of triadic exchange, market...

In bringing economic analysis to bear on whether a dispute is settled without trial, the presumed institutional setting is typically one of private property where the parties are residual claimants to their legal expenses. Many disputes, however, are between private and public parties. In these...

This paper uses Vincent Ostrom’s treatment of democracy as entailing a Faustian bargain to explore some challenges that confront his research program into the theory of human association. To carry this exploration, I concentrate on Ostrom’s 1997 book, The Meaning of Democracy and the...

In 1903 the Italian economist Amilcare Puviani articulated a theory of fiscal illusion to promote better understanding of the course of political action. Puviani created his theory to explain the failure of political pronouncements to reflect the reality to which those pronouncements claimed to...

Public choice theory was initiated by economists and political scientists in the late-1950s and early 1960s and is generally described as the application of economic concepts and formulations to political phenomena. This essay explains that economizing action and public choice are universal...

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....