Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was an economist and journalist. A member of the French Liberal School, he is best known for his free trade ideas and his philosophy of law. Mark Blaug ranks him as one of the 100 greatest economists before Keynes. Schumpeter called him a brilliant economic...

Keynes is back. President Obama's economic stimulus package is based on the premise that we can spend our way out of recession. It is an application of the Keynesian multiplier theory, which was expounded in Keynes' 1936 economic treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money....

The U.S. economy is growing more slowly than it can and should be growing because it does not invest enough in infrastructure, science, and education. There is an important procedural obstacle to funding public investments — a process of scoring the economic effect of legislation. This process...

This article addresses the question of whether sanctions constitute violence in the broad sense of that term, and whether, and under what conditions, sanctions can be justified. The sanctions imposed against Iraq and Cuba are discussed as case studies and several ethical theories are applied to...

This paper examines James Steuart's explanation of the emergence of the exchange economy. An initial hypothesis holds the decisive influence of a plan designed and implemented by merchants. Our proposal evokes the importance, acknowledged by Steuart, of the construction of institutions,...

In studying the development of western freedoms, perhaps no subject is more worthy of discussion than classical liberalism, which the late historian Ralph Raico wrote was “the signature political philosophy of Western Civilization.” Raico defined classical liberalism as “the ideology...

In classical and Marxian political economy economic advancement takes place in stages of development. These stages are characterized by different functional distributions of income. In this paper we show that the Cobb-Douglas Production Function is the only production function which has the...

This paper contributes to the debate over the unity in Smith's corpus by emphasizing Smith's pervasive methodological approach based on an assumption of self-interest. Specifically, Smith consistently relies on equilibrium arguments to explain why a given pattern of economic, political, or...

This is a preliminary draft of the first 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 explores some issues regarding the scholarly location of what is often described as the Virginia...