This essay stems from Jim Dorn's invitation to encapsulate my recent book, Politics as a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2016). Where standard political economy treats states as singular entities that intervene into...

While going to trial is always an option for settling a legal dispute, settlement prior to trial is the more common response. Settlement allows the parties to avoid the expenses entailed in going to trial, leaving both parties potentially better off than had they gone to trial. Such legal...

Over 25% of the US population volunteers. Clary et al. (1998) devised a survey that identifies a volunteer’s primary motive for volunteering. We investigate the effect of tailoring the communications that volunteers receive from their organizations (e.g., printed newsletters, update emails) to...

Most public finance theorizing treats its material of public finance as reflecting some ruler's optimizing choices. Within democratic regimes this ruler is typically a median vote. While this approach has tractability on its side, it achieves that tractability by presenting caricatures of...

The provision of public goods is often used to justify the state. Since many highly-valued goods such as education, national defense, roads, etc., possess some public characteristics (i.e. non-rivalry and non-excludability), standard theory predicts such goods will be underprovided by private...

We have been asked to examine the individualism-holism dichotomy within economics. We pursue this examination by probing the contours of several dichotomies that recur throughout the resulting debates over method. The primary dichotomy concerns whether society is properly an analytical object...

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...

Non-violent action entails exerting power to bring about change through means which avoid the use of physical force. Examples include protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and non-cooperation, among others. Although it is possible for a single individual to engage in non-violence, larger-scale...

This paper explores a political economy of liberty, in contrast to the customary pursuit of a political economy of control. Where a political economy of control theorizes in hierarchical fashion by postulating the state as a singular locus of control, a political economy of liberty theorizes in...