This paper provides an explanation for the lack of profit-maximizing governments and for widespread use of more or less representative forms of local governance based on economic, rather than political, considerations. The analytical part of the paper suggests that profit-maximizing governments...

Ratios of public debt to GDP are much discussed these days and questions concerning debt relative to taxation have long been explored by fiscal scholars. With respect to monarchical regimes, it seems reasonable to treat public debt as similar to personal debt, recognizing that a monarch is not...

The continuing budget deficits and accumulating public debt that commonly plagues western democracies reflects a clash between two rationalities regarding human governance: one of private property and its conventions and one of common property and its procedural framework. The clashing of these...

Violent conflict destroy resources. It generates "destruction costs." These costs have an important effect on individual's decisions to cooperate or conflict. We develop two models of conflict: one in which conflict's destruction costs are independent of individuals' investment in "arms" - the...

This study explores the metamorphosis of three major voluntary health agencies — American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and American Lung Association — from charities supported primary by donations into lobbying organizations seeking taxpayers’ funds and grants from...

This paper treats the structure of economic theory as a product of spontaneously ordered relationships among theorists in a setting where different institutional frameworks can govern those relationships. Those differences generate different selection principles among economic theories and,...

Expositions of the theory of public finance mostly presume that taxation will be the primary instrument for generating revenues. While this presumption is historically accurate, it does not so much reflect historical necessity as it reflects a combination of power and ideology. Cities are...

This paper explores a possible path toward dissolving an antinomy within political economy: market order is treated as emergent and spontaneous while political order is treated as planned. This paper pursues a path that seeks to locate the entire social order as emergent and spontaneous. Where a...

Gordon Tullock is one of the world's leading economists. Even more so than Chicago's Gary Becker, Tullock has extended the rational choice model into areas previously judged to lie outside the realm of economics. This essay identifies Tullock's contributions to constitutional political economy,...

We report data from a two-stage prediction game, where the accuracy of predictions (in the first stage) regarding die roll outcomes (in the second stage) is rewarded using a proper scoring rule. Thus, given the opportunity to self-report the die roll outcomes, participants have an incentive to...