Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:32:18.387Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The origins of Buchanan's views on federalism, Chicago 1946–1947

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 December 2019

Alain Marciano
Alain Marciano*
Affiliation:
Montpelier Recherche en Economie and Faculty of Economics, University of Montpellier
*
*Corresponding author. Email: alain.marciano@umontpellier.fr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Keywords

BuchananSimonspublic financefiscal federalismequalizing grantsequal treatment for equals
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , June 2020 , pp. 319 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adarkar, B. P. (1933), The Principles and Problems of Federal Finance, London: King & Son.Google Scholar
Bish, R. L. (2019), ‘The Calculus of Consent and the Compound Republic’, in Wagner, R. (ed.), James M. Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1131–1154.Google Scholar
Blough, R. (1935), ‘Equalization Methods for the Distribution of Federal Relief Funds’, Social Service Review, 9(3): 423–444.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blough, R. (1944a), ‘Economic Research and Tax Policy’, American Economic Review, 34(2): Supplement: Implemental Aspects of Public Finance: 1–21.Google Scholar
Blough, R. (1944b), ‘Conflict and Harmony in Taxation’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Symposium on Taxation and the Social Structure, 88(1): 22–28.Google Scholar
Boettke, P. J. and Marciano, A.. (2016), ‘The Distance between Buchanan's “An Economic Theory of Clubs” and Tiebout's “A Pure Theory of Local Public Expenditures”: New Insights Based on an Unpublished Manuscript’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 24(2): 205–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breton, A. (1987), ‘Towards a Theory of Competitive Federalism’, European Journal of Political Economy, 3(1–2): 263–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breton, A. (1996), Competitive Governments: An Economic Theory of Politics and Public Finance, New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (1941), ‘Gasoline Tax Sharing among Local Units of Government in Tennessee’, Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, available at hdp://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/2683 (accessed 20 November 2019).Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (1946a), Notes, Economics 301: 25 June 1946 (F. H. Knight), Mimeo.Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (1946b), ‘“Federalism”: One Barrier to Labor Mobility’, Mimeo, BP.Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (1947), ‘A Theory of Financial Balance in a Federal State’, Mimeo, BP.Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (1948), Fiscal Equity in a Federal State, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (1950), ‘Federalism and Fiscal Equity.’ American Economic Review, 40(4): 583–599.Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (1952), ‘Federal Grants and Resource Allocation’, Journal of Political Economy, 60(3): 208–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (1957), ‘The Pure Theory of Local Expenditure: Comment’, Mimeo, BP.Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (1961), ‘Comments’, in Buchanan, J. (ed.), Public Finances: Needs, Sources, and Utilization, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 122–129.Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. (2007), Economics from the Outside, Texas: A&M University Press.Google Scholar
Buchanan, J. M. and Goetz, C. (1972), ‘Efficiency Limits of Fiscal Mobility: An Assessment of the Tiebout Model’, Journal of Public Economics, 1(1): 25–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, C. (1940), The Conditions of Economic Progress, London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Corry, J. A. (1941), ‘The Federal Dilemma’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue Canadienne d'Économique et de Science Politique, 7(2): 215–228.Google Scholar
Corry, J. A. (1981), My Life and Work a Happy Partnership: Memoirs, Kingston: Queen's University Office of Communications and External Liaison.Google Scholar
Davisson, M. M. (1950), ‘Review of Federal Tax Reform by Henry C. Simons’, California Law Review, 38(5): 966–968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Emmett, R. B. (2018), ‘Why James Buchanan Kept Frank Knight's Picture on His Wall Despite Fundamental Disagreements on Economics, Ethics, and Politics’, in Wagner, R. (ed.), James M. Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1155–1170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garzarelli, G. and Keeton, L.. (2018), ‘Laboratory Federalism and Intergovernmental Grants’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 14(5): 949–974CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, D. G. (1945), ‘The Theory of Forward Prices for Agricultural Products’, Retrospective Theses and Dissertations, 13996, Iowa State University, available at http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/13996 (accessed 20 November 2019).Google Scholar
Johnson, D. G. (2008), ‘Notes from Theodore W. Schultz's Course on Resource Administration and Policy, Economics 355, University of Chicago, Fall 1946’, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, 26(3): 217–265.Google Scholar
Johnson, M. (2014), ‘James M. Buchanan, Chicago, and Post War Public Finance’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 36(4): 479–498.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, M. (2018a), ‘Rules versus Authorities’, Public Choice, 175(3–4): 219–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, M. (2018b), ‘Rules versus Authorities: Buchanan and Simons and Fiscal Policy’, in Wagner, R. (ed.), James M. Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 941–963.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, M. (2018c), ‘Institutionalism and Fiscal Policy at Midcentury’, Journal of Economic Issues, 52(1): 103–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leland, S. E. (1935a), ‘A Unified Fisc’, Survey Graphic: A Magazine of Social Interpretation, 24: 444–446.Google Scholar
Leland, S. E. (1935b), ‘The Co-ordination of State and Local Finance’, American Economic Review, 25(1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association: 174–175.Google Scholar
Marciano, A. (2019), ‘Buchanan and Public Finance: The Tennessee Years’, Review of Austrian Economics, 32(1): 21–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maxwell, J. A. (1946), The Fiscal Impact of Federalism in the United States, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitch, D. (2016), ‘A Year of Transition: Faculty Recruiting at Chicago in 1946’, Journal of Political Economy, 124(6): 1714–1734.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ostrom, V. (1987), The Political Theory of a Compound Republic: Designing the American Experiment (2nd edition, revised and enlarged), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Riker, W. H. (1964), Federalism: Origins, Operation, Significance, Boston, Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Ross, G. W. (1943), ‘The Constitutional Law of Federalism in the United States and Australia’, Virginia Law Review, 29(7): 881–947.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaviro, D. (2013), ‘The Forgotten Henry Simons’, Florida State University Law Review, 41(1): 1–38.Google Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1934), ‘A Positive Program for Laissez Faire: Some Proposals for a Liberal Economic Policy’, Public Policy Pamphlet No. 15, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1935), ‘Review of The Principles and Problems of Federal Finance by Bhalchandra P. Adarkar’, Journal of Political Economy, 43(2): 267–269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1936a), 'Rules versus Authorities in Monetary Policy’, Journal of Political Economy, 44(1): 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1936b), ‘The Requisites of Free Competition’, American Economic Review, 26 (1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association: 68–76.Google Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1937), ‘Review of The First Principles of Public Finance, by Antonio de Viti de Marco’, American Economic Review, 45: 712–717.Google Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1938), Personal Income Taxation: The Definition of Income as a Problem of Fiscal Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1941), ‘For a Free-Market Liberalism’, University of Chicago Law Review, 8(2): 202–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1942a), ‘Hansen on Fiscal Policy’, Journal of Political Economy, 50(2): 161–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1942b), ‘Review of The Unfinished Task: Economic Reconstruction for Democracy by Lewis Corey’, American Economic Review, 32(3): 616–621.Google Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1944a), ‘Some Reflections on Syndicalism’, Journal of Political Economy, 52(1): 1–25.Google Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1944b), ‘Economic Stability and Antitrust Policy’, University of Chicago Law Review, 11(4): 338–348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1948), Economic Policy for a Free Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sims, C. C. (1932), ‘County Government in Tennessee’, PhD dissertation, Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Staudt, N. C. (1996), ‘The Political Economy of Taxation: A Critical Review of a Classic – Review of Personal Income Taxation: The Definition of Income as a Problem in Fiscal Policy by Henry C. Simons’, Law & Society Review, 30(3): 651–666CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sufrin, S. C. (1950), ‘Review of Federal Tax Reform by Henry C. Simons’, Review, Ethics, 61(1): 82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tiebout, C. M. (1956), ‘A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures’, Journal of Political Economy, 64(5): 416–424.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Horn, R. and Mirowski, P. (2009), ‘The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism’, in Mirowski, P. and Plehwe, D. (eds), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 139–178.Google Scholar
Warner, K. O. (1933), ‘Some Aspects of Australian State-Federal Relations’, Social Forces, 12(1): 116–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, C. P. (1931), ‘Problems of Taxation in Tennessee’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 153(1): 238–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wueller, P. H. (1938), ‘Review of Personal Income Taxation by Henry C. Simons’, Political Science Quarterly, 53(3): 428–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar