This paper critically discusses the standard concept of hierarchical preferences, which presupposes that a stable system of higher- and lower-order preferences exists, wherein the former contains an individual's fundamental purposes and values, while the latter guides everyday choices. It is...

In diverse areas – from retirement savings, to fuel economy, to prescription drugs, to consumer credit, to food and beverage consumption – government makes personal decisions for us or helps us make what it sees as better decisions. In other words, government serves as our agent. Understood...

Using a framework that distinguishes short-term consumer preferences, individual reflective preferences and political preferences, we discuss from a constitutional economics perspective whether individuals find it in their common constitutional interest to endow representatives and bureaucrats...

With the change in legal status, marijuana is not really being legalized or even just decriminalized. It is being made regulatable or, to coin a phrase, regulatabilized. Markets in illegal goods — along with the goods’ creation, cultivation, distribution, taxation, sale, etc. — are...

Using a framework that distinguishes short-term consumer preferences, individual reflective preferences and political preferences, we discuss from a constitutional economics perspective whether individuals find it in their common constitutional interest to endow representatives and bureaucrats...

In the history of economic thought Walter Eucken is mostly known for his impact in establishing the Social Market Economy in post-war Germany. Even though there is a growing interest in his ideas especially from an Austrian and a Constitutional Economics perspective, his influence on the...

This paper provides, after a contextualizing introduction, the first-time translation of Walter Eucken's presentation during the first session of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, April 1-10, 1947. Eucken was the only scholar based in Germany to attend the conference and took an...

This paper depicts the co-evolution of the political economies of the "Old Chicago" and Freiburg Schools. These communities within the "laissez-faire within rules" research program and the long-standing "thinking-in-orders" tradition emerged in the 1930s and culminated in the 1940s into a...

We describe and compare the experiences of academic exclusion of Alexander Del Mar, J.A. Hobson, and Gordon Tullock. While aspects of the circumstances differed, a common element was academic exclusion because of challenges to mainstream views. Alexander Del Mar, J.A. Hobson, and Gordon Tullock...

This paper contextualizes the early political economy of Austrian economist and social philosopher F. A. Hayek in the intellectual milieu of German ordoliberalism. It argues that the particular urgency during the 1930s and 1940s to preserve and stabilize the disintegrating orders of economy and...