This essay explores the legacy of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock as it pertains to the establishment of public choice as a field of scholarly inquiry. The Calculus of Consent is surely the Ur-text for capturing that legacy, yet that legacy can be discerned in two distinct directions. One...

In Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life, Edward Stringham explains that private ordering is sufficient to secure full exploitation of gains from trade within a society. After describing the logic of Stringham's claim on behalf of private ordering, the remainder of this...

The bulk of James Buchanan's contributions to political economy occupy 20 volumes in Liberty Fund's collection of his works. Reading those works shows both that Buchanan injected new strands of thought into that tradition and that his oeuvre contains points of apparent incoherence. To speak of a...

The economic analysis of taxation contains two disparate strands of theorizing. One strand is a scientific strand that seeks to explain the rhyme and reason of the pattern of taxation that governments create. The other strand is a normative or exhortatory strand that seeks to instruct...

This is a review article of The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, edited by Roger Congleton, Bernard Grofman, and Stefan Voigt. This two-volume collection has 90 chapters, with each chapter averaging 20.4 pages (excluding the volumes' indexes). My subtitle conveys my judgment of this work. The...

Public finance entails two distinct research programs with incongruent hard cores. A scholar can work within both programs but not at the same instant because of that incongruity. One program sets public finance inside welfare economics. It received its canonical expression from Francis...

We provide evidence that individuals selected from societies with high human capital are more likely to cooperate when placed in an environment comparable to the state of nature: The world of New York City diplomatic parking. National average IQ, a robust predictor of economic growth, is found...

This essay is written for a Festschrift to commemorate Jürgen Backhaus's contributions to political economy on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Erfurt. Jürgen is a penetrating and wide-ranging scholar from whom I have learned much since we first met in 1974. It would be...

Voluntary and coercive relationships among person play important roles in ethics, political theory, and Western law. This essay attempts to clarify the meaning and limits of coercion using matrix representations of voluntary and coercive proposals.Two settings are focused on in this paper: the...

The articles collected in the three-volume set of Chicago Price Theory illustrate elements of continuity and change in the development of the Chicago School. Its editors stress a continuity in price theory at Chicago that runs from Frank Knight to Gary Becker. Our main contribution in this...