Renewed interest in a guaranteed income is evident from the number of books that have been published on the topic in the 1990s. This paper discusses and compares seven of those books: Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform, edited by Philippe Van Parijs; Real Freedom...

One person's public good is another's public bad and so, perhaps, the public goods problem could be more generally described as the public commodities problem, in which disagreement about the basic goal of a spending program complicates the decision of how much to spend to achieve that goal....

The public choice literature has paid little attention to altruism, and the few works that do deal with it usually focus on the tradeoff between selfish and unselfish preferences, assuming some shared set of unselfish preferences. This focus leaves the question open as to whether unselfish but...

This paper discusses problems with wage subsidy proposals, specifically focusing on the proposal in Rewarding Work by Edmund Phelps. It shows that the book uses one price theory to argue that the whole benefit of a wage subsidy will go to workers (rather than firms or consumers), but it uses an...

This paper uses what could be called a multi-school approach to poverty policy, asking the following question: Given the many proposed causes for poverty, and the conflicting theories about how potential solutions would work, what conclusions can we draw about policy? This paper concludes that...