William F. Buckley once defined a conservative as “Someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” With apologies to Buckley, we might define an economist as someone who stands athwart the contemporary public policy conversation, yelling, “This time isn’t different!”

Jack Rakove’s WSJ podcast (“James Madison’s Critique of the Senate Still Holds,” Sept. 16, 2022) is right on the history of the so-called Great Compromise, but wrong in arguing that representation by the states qua states in Congress’s upper chamber is a constitutional flaw. It can be shown, as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock…
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Walter E. Williams, outspoken Black libertarian economist, professor of economics at George Mason University (GMU) for 40 years, syndicated newspaper columnist, author of 13 books, and occasional guest host on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, died December 2, 2020, after teaching a class at GMU. He was 84. The world will be less informed and…
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The power of ideological convictions in shaping political, social, and economic life.

If Democracy in Chains represents the state of art in the research and critical thinking in Nancy MacLean’s field, History as an academic discipline is in serious intellectual trouble.

Leland Yeager, who was a valuable member of the scholarly community, passed away April 23 at the age of 93.

In another post, Randall Holcombe rightly notes the pressing need for tax reform. Holcombe argues that Trump’s proposed tax reform is “an improvement over the current system.” That may be true; time will tell. Yet, today my news feed reports nonchalantly that the Republican Congress passed a budget in excess of $4 trillion. That…
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Public choice analysis shows, among many other things, that organized political interests will tend to dominate the political process at the expense of the unorganized members of society. This is not a claim that “the rich” will necessarily dominate “the poor” in the political process, although the rich obviously have an advantage in influencing…
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People on both the right and the left routinely commit the funding fallacy when they assess research and writing. This fallacy is a variant of the hoary rule, Follow the money. The idea is that if an institution or person funded an analyst’s work directly or indirectly, that analyst was ipso facto a hired…
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James Buchanan, a pioneer in the development of public choice, viewed his approach to the study of government and politics as the analysis of “politics without romance.” But Jim couldn’t really live without the romance, and no sooner had he expelled it out the front door than he let it in the back door,…
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