James M. Buchanan - Böcker

"As he usually does, Professor Buchanan has produced an interesting and provocative piece of work. [Cost and Choice] starts off as an essay in the history of cost theory; the central ideas of the book are traced to Davenport and Knight in the United States, and to a series of distinguished writers associated at various times with the London School of Economics. The author emerges from this discussion with what can be described as the ultimate in subjectivist cost doctrines. . . . Economists should learn the lessons offered to us in this little book—and learn them well. It can save them from serious errors."—William J. Baumol, Journal of Economic Literature

"The Limits of Liberty is concerned mainly with two topics. One is an attempt to construct a new contractarian theory of the state, and the other deals with its legitimate limits. The latter is a matter of great practical importance and is of no small significance from the standpoint of political philosophy."—Scott Gordon, Journal of Political EconomyJames Buchanan offers a strikingly innovative approach to a pervasive problem of social philosophy. The problem is one of the classic paradoxes concerning man's freedom in society: in order to protect individual freedom, the state must restrict each person's right to act. Employing the techniques of modern economic analysis, Professor Buchanan reveals the conceptual basis of an individual's social rights by examining the evolution and development of these rights out of presocial conditions.

The Theory of Public Choice is a landmark volume that brings together key essays and articles charting the rapid evolution of public choice theory during its most formative decade. Edited by James M. Buchanan and Robert D. Tollison—leading figures in the “Virginian School” of political economy—this collection synthesizes the major advances of public choice as it applies the tools of economic analysis to the workings of democratic and political institutions. The volume begins with overviews of the field’s development, highlighting public choice’s foundational challenge to “romantic” notions of government and its turn toward a more realistic, empirical understanding of collective decision-making. Renowned contributors—including Buchanan, Dennis Mueller, Gordon Tullock, and many others—explore subjects from voting theory and constitutional economics to rent-seeking, bureaucracy, and the political economy of welfare and regulation. Organized into topical sections covering theoretical advances, applications, empirical studies, and philosophical issues, The Theory of Public Choice illuminates how economics, political science, and policy analysis intersect. Whether addressing topics like political resource allocation, the logic of majority rule, or the emergence of tax and spending limitations, these essays demonstrate how public choice theory has reshaped the way scholars, policymakers, and citizens think about government. Accessible yet rigorous, this collection is essential for anyone seeking insight into the mechanisms of collective action, constitutional design, and the ongoing challenge of ensuring accountability and efficiency in public institutions. It stands as a vital resource for students and scholars in economics, political science, public policy, and related fields.

Should government's power to tax be limited? The events of the late 1970s in the wake of California's Proposition 13 brought this question very sharply into popular focus. Whether the power to tax should be restricted, and if so how, are issues of immediate policy significance. Providing a serious analysis of these issues, the authors of this 1980 book offer an approach to the understanding and evaluation of the fiscal system, one that yields profound implications. The central question becomes: how much 'power to tax' would the citizen voluntarily grant to government as a party to some initial social contract devising a fiscal constitution? Those in office are assumed to exploit the power assigned to them to the maximum possible extent: government is modelled as 'revenue-maximizing Leviathan'. Armed with such a model, the authors proceed to trace out the restrictions on the power to tax that might be expected to emerge from the citizen's constitutional deliberations.

The very logic of majority rule implies unequal treatment or discrimination. If left unconstrained, majority coalitions will promote the interests of their own members at the expense of other persons. This book focuses on the effects of applying a generality constraint on the political process. Under this requirement, majorities would be constitutionally prohibited from treating different persons and groups differently. The generality principle is familiar in that all persons are to be treated equally. In summary, this book extends the generality norm to politics. Several defences of equal treatment or generality are developed and applied. These include the familiar intuition that invokes fairness. But the primary argument here is centred on political efficiency, which is increased when governments are constrained to treat persons or groups generally rather than differentially. The political efficiency defence of the generality constraint is based on a public choice analysis of the implication of majoritarian discrimination.

Societies function on the basis of rules. These rules, rather like the rules of the road, coordinate the activities of individuals who have a variety of goals and purposes. Whether the rules work well or ill, and how they can be made to work better, is a matter of major concern. Appropriately interpreted, the working of social rules is also the central subject matter of modern political economy. This book is about rules - what they are, how they work, and how they can be properly analysed. The authors' objective is to understand the workings of alternative political institutions so that choices among such institutions (rules) can be more fully informed. Thus, broadly defined, the methodology of constitutional political economy is the subject matter of The Reason of Rules. The authors have examined how rules for political order work, how such rules might be chosen, and how normative criteria for such choices might be established.

Should government's power to tax be limited? The events of the late 1970s in the wake of California's Proposition 13 brought this question very sharply into popular focus. Whether the power to tax should be restricted, and if so how, are issues of immediate policy significance. Providing a serious analysis of these issues, the authors of this 1980 book offer an approach to the understanding and evaluation of the fiscal system, one that yields profound implications. The central question becomes: how much 'power to tax' would the citizen voluntarily grant to government as a party to some initial social contract devising a fiscal constitution? Those in office are assumed to exploit the power assigned to them to the maximum possible extent: government is modelled as 'revenue-maximizing Leviathan'. Armed with such a model, the authors proceed to trace out the restrictions on the power to tax that might be expected to emerge from the citizen's constitutional deliberations.

The very logic of majority rule implies unequal treatment or discrimination. If left unconstrained, majority coalitions will promote the interests of their own members at the expense of other persons. This book focuses on the effects of applying a generality constraint on the political process. Under this requirement, majorities would be constitutionally prohibited from treating different persons and groups differently. The generality principle is familiar in that all persons are to be treated equally. In summary, this book extends the generality norm to politics. Several defences of equal treatment or generality are developed and applied. These include the familiar intuition that invokes fairness. But the primary argument here is centred on political efficiency, which is increased when governments are constrained to treat persons or groups generally rather than differentially. The political efficiency defence of the generality constraint is based on a public choice analysis of the implication of majoritarian discrimination.

Studies of public finance, as traditionally developed, have analyzed the effects of fiscal institutions on the market-choice behavior of individuals and firms, but this book takes a different approach. It analyzes the effects of fiscal institutions on the political-choice behavior of individuals as they participate variously in the decision-making processes of democracies. What effect will the form of a new tax have on individuals' attitudes toward more or less public spending? To what extent does the private sector--public sector mix depend on the way in which tax payments are made? How do the various taxes affect the fiscal consciousness of individual citizens? These are questions that have been ignored for the most part. They are, nonetheless, important and worthy of examination. This book is an attempt to provide some provisional answers. By the use of simplified models of existing tax institutions, Buchanan predicts the effects that these exert on individual behavior in the area of political choice. The relative effects of direct and indirect taxes, the ""old tax--new tax"" distinction, the effects of fiscal earmarking, the effects of unbalanced budgets -- these are a few of the topics examined. Before these questions can be fully answered, research must be conducted to find out just how much individuals know about the taxes they pay and the benefits they receive. Comparatively little research of this kind has been completed, but the author devotes a chapter to a careful review of the present state of this sort of research. Individuals' choice among alternative fiscal institutions is examined in the second part of the book. If given the opportunity, how would the individual choose to pay his or her taxes? Progressive income taxes, excise taxes, and public debt are analyzed in terms of this question. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, this imaginative study will be of interest to both economists and political scientists. |Although much has been written about the ways in which Confederate politics affected the course of the Civil War, George Rable is the first historian to investigate Confederate political culture in its own right. Focusing on the assumptions, values, and b

These thirtyone essays form the foundation of 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan's work on the constitutional economics paradigm he founded. Following the earlier collection, Economics: Between Predictive Science and Moral Philosophy, these essays include many that appeared in journals not easily accessible as well as some which have not previously been published.The volume is organized in two parts: theoretical foundations and applications. The latter part includes papers on aspects of voting, monetary and fiscal constitutions, public goods supply, taxation and public debt, and property rights and externalities. This edition provides easier access and gives a wider exposure to a set of arguments and ideas that mark important steps in Buchanan's building of the Constitutional Economics Paradigm.The vision of a new political economy developed and applied in the contributions of this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of economics as well as other disciplines from political science to philosophy, providing a valuable perspective and orientation to anyone who is concerned with the practical issues of policy making.

This volume contains the papers, along with the discussant's re­ marks, presented at a conference on 'Federal Fiscal Responsibility', held at The Homestead, Hot Springs, Virginia, on 26-27 March 1976. Additionally, we, the editors, have included an introductory essay which sets forth some of our background thoughts that in­ formed our organization of the conference and which also de­ scribes some of our reactions to the conference. This conference was sponsored by the Liberty Fund, Inc. of Indianapolis, Indiana, which incorporated this conference into its overall program directed toward the study of the ideals of a free society of responsible individuals. Related to this effort, the Liberty Fund also assisted in supporting research on Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes, by James M. Buchanan and Richard E. Wagner (New York: Academic Press, 1977). Both Democracy in Deficit and the conference were de­ signed to examine one important aspect of the Liberty Fund's general set of concerns, namely the' way in which political con­ siderations influence the macroeconomic aspects of budgetary policy, thereby, in turn, influencing the future of American liberty and prosperity. We are most grateful to the Liberty Fund for their efforts, and we are pleased that Enid Goodrich, William Fletcher, Neil McLeod, and Helen Schultz of the Liberty Fund were able to attend the conference.

This important collection of eight interrelated essays fills a gap in English-language literature in public finance and fiscal theory. The author consistently emphasizes the central role of collective decision making in fiscal theories as well as the methodological setting in which positive proportions in fiscal theory must be developed.

Inspired by F.A. Hayek's Individualism and Economic Order, this book, edited by Yong Yoon, stands in contrast to the themes of that work by emphasizing that collective action operates differently from the way the market works. The chapters comprise papers written by James M. Buchanan, both with and without Yoon's co-authorship, after the publication of his Collected Works.In this book, the authors analyze political disorder that is caused by individualism and self-interest in democracy, focusing specifically on the American political commons. Buchanan and Yoon expertly examine a variety of topics within this theme: the public choice approach to political disorder, rigorous economic models, the dysfunction of American fiscal institutions, the psychological aspects of political rules, and Fukuyama's vetocracy as a case of anti-commons.Readers will gain many new insights from Individualism and Political Disorder, and it will prove invaluable for academics and students in an array of areas, such as economics, politics, public policy and public administration, social psychology, and law and economics.

James Buchanan has been a key figure in the integration of the analysis of political decision-making into the corpus of economic theory, the source for what is now called 'public choice economics'. This notable volume seeks to identify for future generations the landmark contributions to this area made in the twentieth century.