Sol Price and Sam Walton changed retail in the twentieth century. Price changed retail by combining knowledge he assembled from real estate law and from the firms he observed to find creative ways to innovate in discount retail. Walton too combined and redeployed knowledge—in some cases,...

Corruption supposedly reduces economic development by creating an uncertain contracting environment and by preventing the state from efficiently providing public goods and correcting externalities. However, corruption can be efficiency-enhancing in countries with relatively little economic...

The roaring (twenty-)twenties are a decade of anniversaries and milestones. 2020 was the 100th anniversary of Ludwig von Mises’s seminal article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” and the 75th anniversary of F.A. Hayek’s seminal article “The Use of Knowledge in...

James M. Buchanan’s 1969 book Cost and Choice speaks directly to the socialist calculation debate from the perspective of the “London Tradition” in the theory of cost. More than this, however, it places Buchanan alongside Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman as an exemplar of...

First-user appropriation of private property is defensible on several grounds, and it meets Locke's “enough, and as good” proviso by actually providing “more, and better” and by creating an institutional context in which objects can be defined as goods. This essay considers Locke's...