The economics profession not only failed to predict the recent financial crisis, but has been struggling in its aftermath to reach a consensus on the cause(s) of the crisis. While competing narratives are being offered and evaluated, the narrow scope of the debate on strictly technical aspects...

We argue that in order to answer the challenges that James Buchanan put to contemporary political economists, a reconstruction of public choice theory building on the work of Buchanan, F.A. Hayek and Vincent Ostrom must take place. Absent such a reconstruction, and the significant challenges...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze some of the unseen negative effects of the post-Katrina government policies dealing with housing in New Orleans. Design/methodology/approach – Since Hurricane Katrina, the government, along with private for profit and not-for-profit...

This article examines some of the reasons why banks and insurance companies have been accused of discrimination, and shows that this is by and large a false accusation. Economic analysis demonstrates that racial discrimination is not a profit-maximizing strategy. Actually, unwise public policies...

Contemporary monetary institutions are flawed at a foundational level. The reigning paradigm in monetary policy holds up constrained discretion as the preferred operating framework for central banks. But no matter how smart or well-intentioned are central bankers, discretionary policy contains...

Knowledge problems with discretionary monetary policy -- Incentive prolems with discretionary central banking -- When firefighters are arsonists -- On the shoulders of giants: monetary policy insights of the classically liberal nobel laureates -- Money and the rule of law -- Conclusion: money...

Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) represents another breakthrough work in her career, and the second volume in a multi-volume work on the economic and intellectual history of western civilization. In a sense, the subtitle of the book explains well what this volume is all about--why...

James Scott has written a detailed ethnography on the lives of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia who choose to escape oppressive government by living at the edge of their civilization. To the political economist the fascinating story told by Scott provides useful narratives in need of...

The efficiency of “quasimarkets”—decentralized public goods provision subjected to Tiebout competition—is a staple of public choice conventional wisdom. Yet in the 1990s a countermovement in political economy called “neoconsolidationism” began to challenge this wisdom. The...

In the 2011 Franz Cuhel Memorial Lecture, I argue that the study of endogenous rule formation in economic life (what I term the positive political economy of anarchism) should be studied in-depth and that the economic analysis of the Austrian school of economics provides many of the key...