Today, the debate about public indebtedness has reached a fervor not often seen among professional economists and the general public. This has renewed considerations of requiring Congress to balance its budget, through either a Constitutional amendment or some other legislative or statutory...

Civics students from time immemorial have been taught that there is a strict hierarchy within legislative bodies. In the case of the United States, this view would suggest that Congress is at the center of all legislative decisions and that Congress is responsible for all legislative decisions...

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...

Traditional public choice analysis implicitly views political outcomes as the intention of a single-minded person. This view is seriously misguided. Rather than viewing politics as being done by one person or a group of persons acting in concert, this paper presents an Austrian economist's...

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 volume is intended to serve as a review of the “next generation” of political economy scholars in what can be called the “Wagnerian” tradition, which traces its roots to Buchanan and De Viti De Marco in the 1930s, who argued that any decision that results from a political entity...

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Emergence and Entanglement in a Theory of Political Economy -- Chapter 3: Swimming in a Tuxedo: A Systems Theory Approach to Understanding Politics -- Chapter 4: Complex and Entangled Public Policy: Here Be Dragons -- Chapter 5: Taxonomy of Entrepreneurship:...