John Stuart Mill's harm principle maintains that adult behavior cannot justifiably be subject to social coercion unless the behavior involves harm or a significant risk of harm to non-consenting others. The absence of harms to others, however, is one of the distinguishing features of many...

Adam Smith defeats Karl Marx: this shorthand summary of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was not uncommon during the early years of reform. But would Adam Smith approve of the nature of the economic transition in Russia? This essay, drawing intensively...

Sir Lawrence Olivier prefaces his acclaimed 1948 film version of Hamlet with a description of the prince as “a man who could not make up his mind.” Such a description renders the Danish brooder almost anti-economic: an inability to choose typically is banished axiomatically from choice...

The robustness principle for vice regulation suggests that public policy towards addictive or vicious activities engaged in by adults should be robust with respect to departures from full rationality. That is, policies should work pretty well if everyone is well-informed and completely rational,...

This is an unedited draft version of a paper that appeared in final form in Erich Goode, ed, The Handbook of Deviance, Wiley Handbooks in Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2015. The paper surveys the range of regulatory controls that are arrayed against vices such as excessive drug use and...

The reform era in Russia has been marked by a massive increase in reported crime, including organized crime. The purpose of this paper is to look more closely at the interaction between crime and economic reform measures. Widespread economic crime in the old system paved the way for the removal...