num_pages: 208
description: This timely book reveals that the budget deficits and accumulating debts that plague modern democracies reflect a clash between two rationalities of one of private property and one of common property. The clashing of these rationalities at various places in society creates forms of societal tectonics that play out through budgeting. The book demonstrates that while this clash is an inherent feature of democratic political economy, it can nonetheless be limited through embracing once again a constitution of liberty. Not all commons settings have tragic outcomes, of course, but tragic outcomes loom large in democratic processes because they entail conflict between two very different forms of substantive rationality; the political and market rationalities. These are both orders that contain interactions among participants, but the institutional frameworks that govern those interactions differ, generating democratic budgetary tragedies. Those tragedies, moreover, are inherent in the conflict between the different rationalities and so cannot be eliminated. They can, as this book argues, be reduced by restoring a constitution of liberty in place of the constitution of control that has taken shape throughout the west over the past century. Economists interested in public finance, public policy and political economy along with scholars of political science, public administration, law and political philosophy will find this book intriguing. Preface1. The Elusive Quest for Fiscal Responsibility2. Budgeting and Political A Theoretical Framework3. Budget Deficits, Ricardian Equivalence, and Macro-Micro Supervenience4. Property Rights, Societal Tectonics, and the Fiscal Commons5. Parliamentary Assemblies as Peculiar Market Bazaars6. Taxation, Fiscal Politics, and Political Pricing7. Regulation as Alternative Taxation8. Public Finance for a Constitution of LibertyBibliographyIndex
language: English
title: Deficits, Debt, and Democracy: Wrestling with Tragedy on the Fiscal Commons
publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing