James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock are widely credited with creating the Public Choice School. Its main elements include constitutional political economy, an analysis of different voting-rights regimes, and the insight that human beings do not suddenly sprout angel’s wings when they become...

For Professor James Buchanan, government is just one more player in the market, along with all others, such as consumers, landlords, farmers, etc. This view is subjected to sharp criticism by the present author, who makes the case that the government differs from all other participants in...

In his seminal work, "The Problem of Social Cost," Coase held that in cases of private property right disputes involving what have been called externalities, "with costless market transactions, the decision of the courts concerning liability for damage would be without effect on the allocation...

The purpose of the present article is to continue my part in the debate over property rights in which I have become enmeshed with Harold Demsetz. It all began with the publication of my piece (Block 1977a), which was critical of Coase (1960) and of Demsetz (1966, 1967). The second round...

A reductio ad absurdum takes the principles of a doctrine, applies them exactly as their creators did only to an entirely different subject and with horrendous results, and thus shows what absurd conclusions are logically compatible with the original thesis. The entire article applies the tenets...

Professor Harold Demsetz and I have been involved in an intellectual dispute which has taken place over several years. I can hardly have a better debating partner. He is easily amongst the half dozen or so most eminent economists who has not (yet) won the Nobel Prize in this discipline. To say...

Coase (Journal of Low and Economics 17(2):185-213, 1974) failed to appreciate that the construction and maintenance of nineteenth-century lighthouses were in part financed by British taxpayers. Bertrand (Cambridge Journal of Economics 30:389-402, 2006) rightly calls him to account. While...

The market, not the government, is that last best hope for actual and future potential victims of hurricanes. State subsidies have perverted locational settlement decision-making. They have acted in such a manner as to encourage people to build in more dangerous areas than they otherwise would...

In days of yore, oriental despots commonly treated the bearers of bad news in a rather extreme manner: they beheaded them! We have made great strides in modem Canada, at least as far as humaneness of punishment is concerned. We no longer execute messengers. But in the case of at least one type...

Ludvig von Mises and the Austrian School of Praxeological Economics do make a claim that can only be considered extraordinary, considering the type of methodology that now pervades our social science Establishment. And the claim is that there is economic knowledge that can be both known with...