Published in Public choice
In a modern democracy, a public health system includes mechanisms for the provision of expert scientific advice to elected officials. The decisions of elected officials generally will be degraded by expert failure, that is, the provision of bad advice. The theory of expert failure suggests that competition among experts generally is the best safegu...
Published in Public choice
This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Friedrich Hayek to understand threats to personal and enterprise freedom, arising from public health governance. Whereas public choice theory examines the incentives these institutions provide to agents, the analysis here understands those incentives as framed by discursive social constructions th...
Published in Public choice
In the ordinary course of life, choices vary with age and other factors because one's opportunities vary with one's circumstances. Thus, investments in and expenditures on healthcare (and most other things) vary with age and a variety of other factors, including whether one lives in a rural area, suburb, or central city, health risks, risk aversion...
Published in Public choice
In The Pox of Liberty, Werner Troesken details the tradeoff between liberal institutions and communicable disease. According to Troesken, individual freedom presents a danger to the public health in the face of infectious disease, while constitutional constraints restrict the government's ability to implement effective policy. Contra Troesken, I ar...
Published in Public choice
This paper examines the political economy of epidemic disease. First, it outlines the incentive and information problems facing policymakers in responding to a new epidemic. Second, it considers the existence of a tradeoff between public health and freedom. Informed by a survey of the history of public health and an analysis of the response to Covi...
Published in Public choice
Public health programs began as an attempt to fight infectious diseases that are difficult to address without collective action. But the concept and practice of public health has ballooned to encompass an expanding list of controversial public policy goals ranging from reducing obesity to raising self-esteem. As the list of controversial goals expa...
Published in Public choice
Public choice scholars have attended only modestly to issues in public health. We expect that to change rapidly given the Covid-19 pandemic. The time therefore is ripe for taking stock of public-choice relevant scholarship that addresses issues in public health. That is what we do. Our stock-taking highlights three themes: (1) Public health regulat...
Published in Public Choice
COVID-19 vaccine mandates are in place or being debated across the world. Standard neoclassical economics argues that the marginal social benefit from vaccination exceeds the marginal private benefit; everyone vaccinated against a given infectious disease protects others by not transmitting the disease. Consequently, private levels of vaccination w...
Published in Public Choice
We argue that criminal justice institutions must be accessible to citizens, legitimate and have capacity to enforce law. Such was the case with the military societies of the Plains Indians: a system of criminal justice that predated the time of European contact and which remained a significant source of law and order in Indian country until the Ind...
Published in Public Choice
In the midst of a health crisis, a drug in development and candidate for COVID-19 contagious disease was granted orphan-drug designation (ODD). This decision by the US Food and Drug Administration was immediately denounced as an abuse of the Orphan Drug Act (ODA). This paper outlines how this decision may be considered as the result of a complex ca...
