Browsing by Author "Munger, MC"

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    30 years after the nobel: James Buchanan’s political philosophy
    (The Review of Austrian Economics, 2018-06) Munger, MC
    © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. There are three main foundations of Public Choice theory: methodological individualism, behavioral symmetry, and “politics as exchange.” The first two are represented in nearly all work that identifies as “Public Choice,” but politics as exchange is often forgotten or de-emphasized. This paper—adapted from a lecture given on the occasion of the 30th year after Buchanan’s Nobel Prize—fleshes out Buchanan’s theory of politics as exchange, using four notions that are uniquely central to his thought: philosophical anarchism, ethical neutrality, subjectivism, and the “relatively absolute absolutes.” A central tension in Buchanan’s work is identified, in which he seems simultaneously to argue both that nearly anything agreed to by a group could be enforced within the group as a contract, and that there are certain types of rules and arrangements, generated by decentralized processes, that serve human needs better than state action. It is argued that it is a mistake to try to reconcile this tension, and that both parts of the argument are important.
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    A Theory of Just Market Exchange
    (Journal of Value Inquiry, 2019-01-01) Guzmán, RA; Munger, MC
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    Is ‘Too Big to Fail’ Too Big?
    (Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2013) Munger, MC; Salsman, R
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    On the origins and goals of public choice: Constitutional conspiracy?
    (Independent Review, 2018-12-01) Munger, MC
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    Pathologies of Political Authority: Constructed Racism is 'Public Reason' Gone Wrong (forthcoming)
    (Social Philosophy and Policy, 2016) Munger, MC; Grynaviski, G
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    RECONSTRUCTING RACISM: TRANSFORMING RACIAL HIERARCHY FROM “NECESSARY EVIL” INTO “POSITIVE GOOD”
    (Social Philosophy and Policy, 2017) Grynaviski, JD; Munger, MC
    Copyright © 2017 Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation. Our theoretical claim is that racism was consciously (though perhaps not intentionally) devised, and later evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by southern whites, preserving the value of property rights in labor. Second, racism allowed slave owners to justify, to themselves and to outsiders, how a morally "good" person could own slaves. Racism portrayed African slaves as being less than human (and therefore requiring care, as a positive duty of the slave owner, as a man cares for his children, who cannot care for themselves), or else as being other than human (and therefore being spiritually no different from cattle or horses, and therefore requiring only the same considerations for maintenance and husbandry). The interest of the historical narrative presented here is the emergence of racial chattel slavery as a coherent and fiercely defended ideal, rather than the "necessary evil" that had been the perspective of the Founders. The reason that this is important is that the ideology of racism persisted far beyond the destruction of the institution of slavery, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and in some ways persisting even today. This work is an example of the problems of assuming that there is a "feedback" mechanism by which moral intuitions are updated and perfected; to the contrary, as suggested by Douglass North, even socially inferior ideologies can prove extremely persistent.
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    Tullock and the welfare costs of corruption: there is a “political Coase Theorem”
    (Public Choice, 2018-01-01) Munger, MC
    © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Gordon Tullock developed an approach to understanding dynamic processes of political change and policy outcomes. The key insight is the notion that political insiders have a comparative advantage—because they face lower transaction costs—in manipulating rules. The result is that political actors can collect revenues from threatening to restrict, or offering to loosen, access to valuable permissions, permits, or services. To the extent that the ability to pay for such favorable treatment is a consequence of private activities that produce greater social value, there is a “political Coase theorem”: corruption makes bad systems more efficient. But the dynamic consequences are extremely negative, because of the inability to institute reforms resulting from application of Tullock’s “transitional gains trap”.