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James Buchanan wrote \"An Economic Theory of Clubs\" and invented clubs to support a form of welfare economics in which there is no social welfare function (SWF) and individual utility functions cannot be \"read\" by external observers. Clubs were a means to allow the implementation of individualized prices for public goods and services and to allow each individual to pay exactly the amount he wants to pay. He developed this project to answer and counter Paul Samuelson's analysis of public goods, in which social welfare functions play a crucial role. Buchanan and Samuelson disagreed over the allocation of the costs of the public good to each individual. To Buchanan, it was by relying on individual's preferences. To Samuelson, by using a SWF. Buchanan's clubs are thus foreign and incompatible with the traditional Samuelson-style public economics in which they are used.

One of the major challenges that result from the digital transformation occurring in our societies bears on its impact on the organization and regulation of the economy. This leads to a dramatic change to the economic institutions of capitalism—into what could be defined as platform capitalism—that rests on a fundamental dilemma between ‘decentralization’ on the one side and ‘concentration’ on the other. This is the main puzzle that the emergence of a big data driven economy is actually offering to law and economics scholars and to policy makers. This paper introduces to some of the major aspects of this dilemma.

Buchanan did not write \"An Economic Theory of Club\" to complement Samuelson's analysis of public goods, but to develop a radically different, form of welfare economics – in which there is no social welfare function and individual utility functions cannot be \"read\" by external observers. It was the perspective Buchanan adopted to analyze the pricing of public goods and services, and from which he also envisaged clubs. The main feature Buchanan attributed to clubs was to implement a condition that made no sense in Samuelson's framework but that was crucial in Buchanan's and clubs made Samuelson's collective condition useless. Buchanan and Samuelson disagreed over the allocation of the costs of the public good on each individual. To Buchanan, it was by relying on individual's preferences. To Samuelson, by using a social welfare function. This has not much to do with the nature of the good, its \"physical properties\" to use Buchanan's words.

The purpose of this paper is to present “What Should Economists Do?”, an article written by James Buchanan and published in 1964, in an historical perspective. We put forward an important point, namely the opposition with Ludwig von Mises, and Buchanan’s attempt at differentiating his approach from Mises. Instead of in addition to Robbins, that he nominally targeted, Buchanan was actually criticizing Mises. Buchanan thus defined economics in a very specific way, as a science that studies exchange but only when it results from a desire (or a propensity) to exchange.

This article examines how James Buchanan came to write Public Principles of Public Debt, his first sole-authored book. We explore the evolution of Buchanan’s views on public debt, particularly his rejection of the three central propositions of what he called the “new orthodoxy.” We show how he initially recognized the significance of Ricardian equivalence (the relationship between taxes and loans), later rejected it, and ultimately criticized the analogy between private and public debt. Our analysis draws on a draft paper titled “Taxes versus Loans. Variations on a Ricardian Theme,” tracing Buchanan’s gradual intellectual development and the factors that influenced his theory of public debt. This study not only clarifies Buchanan’s thinking process but also sheds light on the formation of Public Principles of Public Debt, contributing to a better understanding of its economic content.

The purpose of this article is to show that Prices, Income and Public Policy (1954), an introductory textbook in economics written by William Allen, James Buchanan and Marshall Colberg, was actually a treatise in political economy. The book indeed tapped to the political economy of Henry Simons and Frank Knight, and anticipated Virginia Political Economy. This form of political economy has three dimensions that we discuss in this article. First, teaching principle of economics. Second, defending the virtues of a free-market economy. Thirdly, insisting on the importance of government intervention in such a system. Their point Allen, Buchanan and Colberg made was that a free market is flawed, just as government intervention. By contrast with those who were suggesting to invent a new form of capitalism to deal with the evils of capitalism, they claimed that one should try to make this system work by understanding its nature.

The purpose of this paper is to show that, at the very beginning of his career, Buchanan was interested in concrete issues related to the economic situation in the South rather than with abstract and philosophical works in public finance. We examine the published and unpublished articles, reviews and replies that Buchanan wrote between 1949 and 1952 on federalism. By putting what Buchanan wrote in the intellectual, academic and political context of the period, we put forward four factors which we believe are important to understand Buchanan’s ideas. First, Buchanan defended the intervention of the federal government to redistribute, in the form of equalizing grants, income from rich to poor regions. Second, as a consequence, for Buchanan, such redistribution was an ethical necessity that should precede any consideration of efficiency. Even more important, fiscal justice was a precondition without which a competitive or free market system could not function properly. Third, at least during that period, Buchanan appears to have been interested primarily in practical, concrete problems, rather than in pure and abstract questions. Finally, a fourth and crucial point is that Buchanan insisted on the need for federal government intervention to industrialize the South, a stance that stands in stark contrast to policies the Nashville Agrarians defended.

This article presents and discusses \"The 'Politics' of Economic Policy,\" an essay that remains unpublished and that James Buchanan wrote in 1953. In this essay, Buchanan, for the first time, claimed that politicians and bureaucrats are not benevolent despots—it was not an assumption. This helps to understand that Buchanan had abandoned the \"romantic\" belief that politicians were acting for the interest of the public early in his career, much earlier than usually acknowledged and even earlier than his first works in \"non-market decision-making.\" Beyond this historical insight, we show that Buchanan wrote his article in response or echo to Knight's \"The Rôle of Principles in Economics and Politics\" (1951). Comparing Buchanan's and Knight's texts, we show that Buchanan adopted a Knightian perspective while criticizing Knight and departing from his views. Of particular importance is what Buchanan wrote on how economists should frame their policy recommendations and on how they may need to avoid very sophisticated theories.

Buchanan's first writings about federalism and fiscal justice were “'Federalism’: One Barrier to Labor Mobility” and “A Theory of Financial Balance in a Federal State,” two term papers that he wrote before his dissertation and that have never been discussed before. Studying them allows us to complete the recent literature on the origins of Buchanan's fiscal federalism. We show that most of Buchanan's ideas about fiscal equity were already in these works, and also that Buchanan made other claims and used other arguments – about mobility, for instance – that were absent from the dissertation but remained important to him for a long time. We also analyze these essays in the context in which Buchanan was at that time, namely the economics department of the University of Chicago. We show how Buchanan fed on, not to say was influenced by, the courses for which he wrote these essays. This allows us to shed new light on the role Theodore Schultz, D. Gale Johnson, Henry Simons, and Roy Blough, played at the beginning of Buchanan's career.