Democracy in Deficit opened the door for much of the current work on political business cycles and the incorporation of public-choice considerations into macroeconomic theory. Even in the area of monetarism, Buchanan's landmark work has greatly influenced the sway of contemporary theorists away from[...]

"Politics by principle is that which modern politics is not. What we observe is 'politics by interest', whether in the form of explicitly discriminatory treatment (rewarding or punishing) of particular groupings of citizens or of some elitist-dirigiste classification of citizens into the deserving o[...]

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 a[...]

One of Buchanan's most important and influential books. The radical idea he conceived was that: our reliance on public debt has amassed a sort of orthodoxy that is commonly -- and needlessly -- assumed by taxpayers, by politicians, and by economists themselves. Buchanan dismisses the nearly univers[...]

A monumental work that outlines the dynamics of individual choice as it is displayed in the process of public finance. Buchanan is perhaps nowhere more clearly a disciple of the great Swedish economist Knut Wicksell than he is in the underlying principles of this seminal work. Specifically, he elabo[...]

While this volume presents the important writings of James M. Buchanan on taxation and debt, Geoffrey Brennan makes it clear in the foreword that the thrust of Buchanan's work in this area has been to integrate theories of taxation and debt with public-expenditure theory. Therefore, the editors stro[...]