During the 1950s and 1960s, many economists were convinced that externalities were a cause of "market failures" -- because individuals are not capable of internalizing the costs their actions impose to others -- and therefore that the intervention of the state was necessary to allow an efficient...

Though the social choice of social institutions or social results is impossible there is, strictly speaking, no social choice individual evaluations of social institutions or results trivially are possible. Such individual evaluations can be deemed liberal either because they emphasize political...

This chapter argues that the ambiguous bifurcation in Frank Knight's understanding of economics would manifest itself through the divergent paths in the earlier writings of his students Milton Friedman and James Buchanan. It argues that despite Friedman's stature in the scientific elite of the...

Historians of economic thought are paying greater attention to issues of social ontology (that is, to the assumptions that economists make about the nature of social reality). In this paper, we contribute to this burgeoning literature by exploring the hitherto neglected way in which James...

The task of the economist, from an Austrian perspective, is twofold: (1) to render economic phenomena intelligible in terms of purposive human action, and (2) to trace out the unintended consequences, both desirable and undesirable, of human actions. When analyzing political exchange, the...

There has been a division of labor in the “behavioral sciences”. This is perhaps most striking in two of the largest behavioral disciplines, economics and psychology. Since 1990, a number of economists have crossed this boundary. But James Buchanan was one of the first economists to take the...

We test whether generosity is related to political preferences and partisanship in Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States using incentivized dictator games. The total sample consists of more than 5,000 respondents. We document that support for social spending and redistribution...

We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...