This chapter is motivated by the following questions: what are the implications of an Austrian reassessment of the theory of public goods? What would be left to say that’s right about public goods? The implicit assumption in the theory of public goods being utilized is to frame it in terms of...

To what extent are the outcomes of economic regulation intended and desired by its proponents? To address this question, we combine Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture with the Austrian theory of the dynamics of interventionism. We reframe Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture as an...

What is the relationship, if any, between economic freedom and pandemics? This paper addresses this question from a robust political economy approach. As is the case with recovery from natural disasters or warfare, a society that is relatively free economically offers economic actors greater...

The theory of state capacity predicts that states with powerful abilities - as long as they are constrained - can promote economic growth. Many scholars argue that post offices historically approximate state capacity and that they can be used to evaluate the state’s ability to promote...

Canada is one of the richest countries in the world today. It stands above most countries in the Americas. It is also noticeably poorer than its American neighbour in spite of considerable geographic similarities. These two facts were true as early as the 17th century. Why? An understanding of...

Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2020) offers a powerful critique of ideological justifications for inequality in capitalist societies. Does this mean we should reject capitalist institutions altogether? This paper defends some aspects of capitalism by explaining the epistemic function...

Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? In this paper, we use quarterly demographic and economic data from Moscow to answer this question using a VAR approach. In doing so, we provide the first application of this common methodology in economic history to pre-1913 Russia. We...

Buchanan and Wagner (1977) pointed to an asymmetry in the political rewards of deficits and surpluses with the former being preferable to the latter. We test this claim by relying on the historical reputation surveys of American presidents. Historical reputations have long been something...

The theory of interventionism argues that government interventions are inherently destabilizing which helps explain the growth of government. I argue that the theory of interventionism is also useful process of economic growth. At first, an intervention reduces living as a level change. However,...