Coase's publication of “The Lighthouse in Economics” (1974) sparked a polarizing debate over his claim that government intervention is not necessary for the existence of a private lighthouse market. The purpose of this paper is to reframe this debate by asking the following question: why was...

Was the lighthouse ever a public good? The lighthouse is presented as the quintessential public good as it was inherently non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Since the work of Ronald Coase (1974) on the lighthouse, economists have used debated the extent to which the private provision of public...

Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans? To answer this question, we utilize the case of French colonists of Atlantic Canada (the Acadians) and a Native American tribe (the Mi’kmaq) between the 17th and 18th...

What role does government play in the provision of public goods? Economists have used the lighthouse as an empirical example to illustrate the extent to which the private provision of public goods is possible. This inquiry, however, has neglected the private provision of lightships. We...

Upon opening history books about the electrical industry in the Canadian province of Quebec prior to nationalization (which was realized in two steps between 1944 and 1962), one is often confronted with the claim that the industry was monopolistic and was gouging consumers especially when...

The theory of interventionism argues that government interventions are inherently destabilizing, which in turn helps explain the growth of government. I argue that the theory of interventionism is also useful for explaining the process of economic growth. At first, an intervention reduces living...

Carl Menger’s objective in his seminal book, Principles of Economics, was to elucidate a unified account of price formation. This raises a question, which motivates our paper: to what extent, if any, can Menger account for production not directly organized by the price mechanism, and therefore...

This paper reconceptualizes and unbundles the relationship between public predation, state capacity, and economic development from a constitutional perspective. By reframing our understanding of state capacity theory from a constitutional perspective, we argue that to the extent there is a...

This paper evaluates the contribution of Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit to the development ofeconomic theory in the 20th century. Our argument in this paper is twofold. First, we contend thatthis book embodied what had been the common knowledge of early neoclassical economics priorto WWII....