The Constitution protects the rights of Americans to participate in politics through assembly and membership in private interest groups. Yet the Founders recognized that interest groups and factions posed a particular danger in a democracy. According to James Madison, there was no way to remove...

This article questions why so many public schools do not teach any form of sex education. The answer proposed in this article is that the U.S. Constitution is a part of the problem. This claim is based on the following two premises: (1) the U.S. Constitution almost certainly does not require...

The text of the U.S. Constitution clearly distinguishes religion from non-religion by providing that while Congress may pass laws concerning many subjects and prohibiting many things, it may not make laws respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting religious exercise. As the...

President Barack Obama, former U.S. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, and others propose a new government agency that would evaluate the relative effectiveness of medical treatments. The need for "comparative-effectiveness research" is great. Evidence suggests Americans spend $700 billion...

The federal government is headed toward a financial crisis as a result of chronic overspending, large deficits, and huge future cost increases in Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and Medicare would be big fiscal challenges even if the rest of the government were lean and efficient,...

A wide range of services provided by the public sector are credence goods, i.e., services for which the producer has private information whether a certain treatment is needed or not. This paper studies how ownership affects the incentives for producers to reveal such information to public...

Politicians will go to any lengths to persuade the voting public that the National Health Service is safe in their hands. Alternative policy models cannot be placed before the electorate unless political parties take huge risks. Yet, at the same time, we see even a Labour government drawing...

We construct a dynamic model of political and economic behavior to examine the impact of variations in term lengths and term limits. Term lengths and term limits alter politicians' time horizons and affect voters' use of elections to attain political accountability and select competent...

We test whether generosity is related to political preferences and partisanship in Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States using incentivized dictator games. The total sample consists of more than 5,000 respondents. We document that support for social spending and redistribution...

The paper provides a collection and analysis of modern sports-for-all policies in Europe, North America, Australia and China. Promoting a healthy lifestyle among community members by providing easy access to sport facilities has been a traditional function of sport-for-all policies. Modern...