Abstract
The idea that government is the ideal institution for providing certain types of goods and for constraining certain types of actions appears in the work of Adam Smith (1776), Wicksell (1896), Samuelson (1954) and many other economists and can be described as the main normative justification for government in the economics literature. In this “economic” view of the state, collective action is a positive sum game. The purpose of government is to achieve a Pareto optimal allocation of resources, and in the absence of transaction costs this could be achieved through voluntary and unanimous agreements among individuals. Governments are justified insofar as they economize on private contracting costs. Even with government the ideal decision rule is a unanimous agreement among all citizens with the use of some less than unanimity rule justified only to save transaction or decisionmaking costs (Wicksell 1896; Buchanan and Tullock 1962, pp. 63–91).
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Mueller, D.C. (2002). The Importance of Uncertainty in a Two-Stage Theory of Constitutions. In: Brennan, G., Kliemt, H., Tollison, R.D. (eds) Method and Morals in Constitutional Economics. Studies in Economic Ethics and Philosophy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04810-8_12
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