Friedrich Hayek (1937, 1945) explained that scholars engage in fantasy when they presume that they, or anyone for that matter, presume to possess the knowledge necessary to construct some societal equilibrium. That knowledge is incapable of being possessed by a single mind, which means that the...

The most prominent Italian theorist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Antonio de Viti de Marco, accepted David Ricardo's proposition that an extraordinary tax and a public loan are equivalent. Despite this common point of analytical departure, their theories of public debt diverged...

When directives rather than contracts determine rights to water flows, agents will substitute away from securing water rights by contract toward securing them through political directives. Especially when they are legitimated by court rulings, such directives alter the rules that govern social...

The relation between micro theory and macro theory is necessarily one between the parts of something and the whole of that thing. This simple recognition entails numerous analytical complexities which contemporary macro theories do more to conceal than to reveal, mostly out of a concern with...

This paper explores the institutional determinants of persecution by studying the intensity of the Black Death pogroms in the Holy Roman Empire. Political fragmentation exacerbated rent-seeking in the Holy Roman Empire. We argue that this fragmentation led to Jewish communities facing more...

This paper traces the roots of police militarization in the United States to a variety of foreign military interventions, including WWII and the Vietnam War. We analyze how these earlier conflicts, in conjunction with the subsequent War on Drugs and War on Terror, contributed to the...

We outline the work of James Buchanan and his influence and contributions to political economy, institutional analysis, and self-governance. In addition to pioneering the public choice movement, we argue that Buchanan’s greatest contribution to political economy was initiating the...

One aspect of the present paper is to draw out the Adam Smith in Friedrich Hayek. I suggest that common economic talk of market communication, market error and correction, and policy error and correction invokes a spectatorial being and appeals to our sympathy with such being. Behind such common...

This is the third of six chapters of the penultimate draft of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This essay asks the reader to think whether an economy in its entirety is better construed as an engine or as an ecological system. By treating it as an engine,...