A distribution of income between rulers and subjects can be derived as an equilibrium of violence, rather than from considerations of marginal products of owned factors of production. Society is organized in ranks, and the occupants of each rank are provided with incomes just sufficient that...

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Chinese historians speak of dynastic cycles where periods of economic progress and decline coincide with the rise and fall of families of rulers, while economists speak of societies without technical change or involuntary unemployment as evolving into stationary states. This paper alters the...

Public provision of private goods is usually modeled as the displacement of a market where people can buy as much or as little of a good as they please, with tax-financed provision by the government of equal and identical amounts of the good per person. But public provision is not always equal...

Through tax evasion, through the labour-leisure choice or in other ways, taxpayers reduce the tax base in response to an increase in the tax rate. The process is commonly-believed to generate a humped Laffer curve with a revenue-maximizing tax rate well short of 100%. That need not be so. In the...