This paper explains that James Buchanan's theory of public debt entailed more than the shifting of cost forward in time from the current generation of taxpayers to future generations of taxpayers. The possibility of such shifting is dubious, for public debt really entails a shifting of cost...

All but one American state has some constitutional requirement for a balanced budget but few of them operate this way. Moreover, in 1979 the federal government enacted a public law that required a balanced budget by 1982. The law has not been repealed but neither have budgets become balanced....

Political economy is a field of study where theorists typically treat polities and markets as separate orders of activity within society. Moreover, the standard mode of analysis treats those entities as existing in states of equilibrium. To the contrary, this essay treats polities and markets as...

Most theorists of public finance treat budgeting as a technical problem concerned centrally with projecting revenues and expenses. To the contrary, I treat budgeting as a political problem, with technical matters serving to obscure more than illuminate the political economy of budgeting. This...

This paper is an introductory presentation before the first monthly meeting of the Entangled Political Economy Research Network (EPERN) Network organized by Marta Podemska-Mikluch from Gustavus Adolphus College and Mikayla Novak from the Australian National University. This paper is not so much...

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...

This paper presents the preface and first chapter of my book on James M. Buchanan, which should be out in late 2017, published by Lexington. This chapter introduces Buchanan to those who don't know him, or who know him only in terms of individual pieces of work they have encountered. I portray...

The Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice began publication in 1983 under the title Economia delle scelte pubbliche, changing to its present title in 1998. Under either name, the Journal reflected the founding editor's (Domenico da Empoli) desire to amplify and extend the Italian...

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...

This paper is concerned with the way economists conceptualize the relationship between politics and property rights. It is customary for economists to treat polity and economy as comprising separate domains of human action. In contrast, we treat society as a single domain of action comprised of...