What keeps corporate managers from underperforming or disregarding shareholders interests? In contrast to most scholars and policymakers who believe legal and regulatory oversight is key, Henry Manne's Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control describes a private or entirely invisible hand...

Must the state handle the adjudication of disputes? Researchers of different perspectives, from heterodox scholars of law who advocate legal pluralism to libertarian economists who advocate privatizing law, have increasingly questioned the idea that the state is, or should be, the only source of...

Do weak governments around the globe merit assistance? The premise of When States Fail: Causes and Consequences is that without strong government, society devolves into chaos. Sponsored by the Harvard University Failed States Project, this edited volume contains fourteen chapters, most of them...

The Center for the Study of Public Choice has been quite successful at generating and spreading ideas. James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and their colleagues challenged many core beliefs of economists and political scientists who viewed government as benign force in the economy, and they ended up...

In the 1920s, Ludwig von Mises argued correctly that the problem of making economics calculations without market-generated prices would be an insuperable difficulty for socialist systems of production. Bryan Caplan is right to argue that there is no theoretical way to infer the magnitude of this...

Economists who adhere to the assumptions of homo economicus typically focus on altering external constraints through laws or regulations as the means of eliminating bad behavior. Reaching the optimal solution is simply a matter of having government adjust the price of unwanted behavior through...

Should law be provided centrally by the state or by some other means? Even relatively staunch advocates of competition such as Friedrich Hayek believe that the state must provide law centrally. This article asks whether Hayek’s theories about competition and the use of knowledge in society...

Does economic freedom lead to more or less conflict? Numerous authors argue that markets create conflict, whereas many advocates of economic freedom from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman argued the opposite. This topic has not yet been investigated empirically. This article examines the various...

Although many economists recognize the existence of stateless orders, economists such as Cowen, Sutter, and Holcombe question how viable stateless orders are in the long run. Research documenting the historical existence of stateless societies is much more developed than our understanding of...