This chapter seeks to explain the broad dissatisfaction among the general population of observed political outcomes. To illustrate this, this chapter discusses the growth of the federal tax code over the last century. Despite there being near universal public support for a tax code that is...

Economists have addressed the effect of taxes on a polity, with several economists then using their findings to justify the implementation of various tax schemes. These theories are loosely based on the ideas of fiscal philosophers from the end of the 19th century, with recent work demonstrating...

This paper identifies two broad strands of fiscal theorizing which date back to the late 19th century in the persons of Knut Wicksell (1896) and Francis Edgeworth (1897). From Edgeworth descends the treatment of public finance as a branch of applied statecraft, as conveyed these days largely...

This paper provides a model of employee immolation and provides a case study of the effect that public influences on corporate policy has on the welfare of employees. Conventional wisdom would suggest that efforts to improve the lives of workers within oppressive labor conditions would be viewed...

What is the place of political parties within a democratic system of political economy? Parties are often described as intermediaries that lubricate the political process by facilitating the matching of voter preferences with candidate positions. This line of analysis flows from a bi-planar...

This paper seeks to provide a sketch of a micro-level explanation of public finance. De Viti De Marco (1936) and Buchanan (1949) provide initial starting points for understanding this view of public finance, which was subsequently extended by Wagner (1992, 2007a) and Yoon (2000), among others....