In a paper delivered at the December 1955 meeting of the Econometric Society, Paul Samuelson noted that though economists had done "work of high quality and great quantity in the field of taxation," the theory of public expenditure had been "relatively neglected" (1958, 332). Anglo-American...

We develop a theory of social planning with a concern for economic coercion, which we define as the difference between consumers' actual utility, and the "counterfactual" utility they expect to obtain if they were able to set policy themselves. Reasons to limit economic coercion include...