Why were the rating agencies trusted? When they became required for Federal deposit insurance their incentives for upward bias was common knowledge. The requirement was attacked by a Chicago economist, Melchior Palyi, on philosophical grounds (the expertise is excessively secret) and technical...

This essay commemorates James M. Buchanan's life and work by reflecting on my 50 years of association with him, starting in 1963 when I entered graduate school at the University of Virginia and ending with his death in 2013. This essay does not try to add to the substantial secondary literature...

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...

Henry Hazlitt was a public intellectual who had unusual strength in both economic reasoning and articulation and played a central role in communicating the ideas of classical or ‘orthodox’ economics to the general public. He occupied a unique position in the mid-20th century intellectual...

Adam Smith infused the expression “impartial spectator” with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which normally would aptly take the definite article the, and which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator of an...

The American system of political economy surely faces a fiscal crisis illustrated by but not limited to a trend of growing deficits and debt that cannot continue. What can’t continue won’t continue. In what fashion change occurs will be governed by forthcoming interactions between power and...

Ronald Coase wrote the 1949 memo that guided the discussion of the Fabian Research Group on broadcasting. In the evidence presented to the Beveridge Committee on broadcasting, the Fabians endorsed his recommendations by and large. These two facts have previously escaped notice and, as a result,...

This paper uses the 19th century concern with “the social question” as a vehicle to explore how the theories we use can shape, for better or for worse, our insights into our subjects of interest. Contemporary thinking mostly channels the social question into a focus on inequality in the...

What is the role of the entrepreneur in Carl Menger’s account of the market process? Modern entrepreneurship theory is broadly divided into two types. The Schumpeterian account of entrepreneurship takes an equilibrium state of affairs as an analytic starting point from which the entrepreneur...

While Antonio De Viti de Marco was a significant figure within the Italian School of Public Finance that flourished between 1880 and 1940, his theory of public finance also has great significance for contemporary theorizing. Where contemporary theory largely treats states as acting to modify...