Gordon Tullock

Rockford, Illinois and the free society (Friedman, Tullock, Coase)

Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1976) received an honorary doctorate from Rockford College and was our commencement speaker in 1969. Gordon Tullock (co-founder of Public Choice economics with James Buchanan, Nobel Prize in Economics, 1986) was a native of Rockford. And I was charmed to find this bookplate in the Rockford University library’s copy […]

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Can We Blame Keynes for Keynesianism? [Good Life series]

In our era of Keynesian economics on steroids, we should ask: How close is current Keyesnian practice to original Keynesian theory? John Maynard Keynes‘s main claim to fame is his advocacy of deficit spending as a tool of economic recovery. In a depressed economy, the argument runs, the government should spend money it doesn’t have.

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Seminar: Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy

One of my talks at Francisco Marroquín University was on making sense of our mixed economy–an unwieldy combination of market and socialist elements. The 28-minute talk integrates themes from my intellectual heroes–Smith, Mill, Mises, Hayek, Rand, Popper, Friedman, Buchanan, and Tullock–and connects market economics, politics, ethics, history, and public choice to explaining our semi-coherent mixed

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APEE talk on the mixed economy

At the APEE conference next month in Las Vegas, I will be presenting “The Evolution of the Mixed Economy – A Schematic Approach.” My talk integrates themes from several major thinkers from whom I have learned a great deal: Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock.

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Pathologies of the mixed economy (or, How we got into this frackin’ mess)

Putting into one flowchart what I have learned from Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock. The flowchart is in spreadsheet format: the short version and the long version in Excel 2007 or in Excel 97-2003. Update: DJ Dates has a cool, scalable Google maps version

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