For almost all of history, people were extremely poor. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European countries (and their overseas extensions) began to grow extremely wealthy. Since World War II, enrichment has spread around the world with the “Asian Tigers” of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan,...

Government structures are more bureaucratic (and their policies more redistributive) in the European Union than in the United States. The more 'statist' character of Europe is hardly a surprise given the leading role of France in the post-WWII integration of the continent. Economic freedom was...

James M. Buchanan’s 1969 book Cost and Choice speaks directly to the socialist calculation debate from the perspective of the “London Tradition” in the theory of cost. More than this, however, it places Buchanan alongside Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman as an exemplar of...

Apartheid was an array of racist laws governing South Africa from the election of the National Party in 1948 until the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. Apartheid's codified racism required discrimination, violated the rights of individuals as individuals, and shackled the South African...

In 1986, the economist James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) was honored with the Nobel Prize for the remarkable yet straightforward application of economic theory to political decisions. His was a constrained vision of imperfection and political motivation rather than an unconstrained vision of...