Entrepreneurship is the economic source of change in society. While it is ubiquitous, its particular qualities depend on the system of political economy in which it operates. We distinguish between two systems of democratic political economy. One system is the classically liberal system where...

The Keynesian revolution rationalized a divergence between political and economic rationality. Prior to the Keynesian revolution, divergences between political and commercial practice were held in check by moral beliefs to the effect that good conduct for governments was similar to good conduct...

What is the place of political parties within a democratic system of political economy? Parties are often described as intermediaries that lubricate the political process by facilitating the matching of voter preferences with candidate positions. This line of analysis flows from a bi-planar...

This essay sketches the central features of Gordon Tullock's (1922-2014) contributions to law and economics. My reference to Tullock as a “maverick scholar” is to indicate that he stood apart from the mainstream of law and economics scholarship as this is represented by Richard Posner's...

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...

The growing preoccupation with identity within public discourse raises important questions concerning its effects on democratic governance. Building on the work of James M. Buchanan, we hope to show that:1) the logic of identity politics raises costs to political cooperation, 2) the phenomenon...

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 The law has not been repealed but neither have budgets become balanced....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...

This essay memorializes Giuseppe Eusepi contribution to political economy by refining the theme he and I set forth in 2017 in Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. There, we claimed that it was illusory to describe democratic governments as being indebted. We did not advance...

Democratic governments can be either national or federal in form. Whether the form of democracy matters, how it matters if, indeed, it does matter, and for whom it might matter are the types of questions this paper explores. Federalism is generally described as a pro-liberty form of government....