Reminiscences of James Buchanan and the Virginia School

These are my personal reflections on James Buchanan and the development of the Virginia School.     

Bank reserves: A dispute over words and classification

A prominent philosophical/legal case for requiring 100% bank reserves employs a flawed style of argument. It involves essentialism (criticized by Karl Popper and Joseph Schumpeter), persuasive definitions (identified by Charles L. Stevenson), faulty classification, and the piling up of irrelevant facts and considerations.     

A proposal for a democratic market economy

A type of market socialism is proposed for the United States both as a means of attaining more social equality than private ownership of corporate business makes politically and economically feasible, and of advancing a whole range of liberal purposes by undermining direct and indirect political power of the conservative business community. It is proposed to transfer ownership of corporate business to a system of local-government investment funds under specified national regulation. Such a system could retain all the economic advantages of capitalism, while facilitating better control of inflation, and would have genuine political feasibility in the United States.