THE NATIONAL INTEREST, WESTMINSTER, AND PUBLIC CHOICE*

Relaxing benevolence: public choice, socialist calculation, and planner self-interest

The Austrian calculation argument suggests that inability to engage in economic calculation worsened outcomes in socialist states. We suggest that this is hardly the case. When Austrian assumptions of benevolence are relaxed, inability to engage in economic calculation prevents the non-benevolent planner from fully extracting all available surplus from the citizenry. Consequently, when planners...

National Westminster Bank Mass Storage Archiving

The system stores all account transactions until the customer receives a statement, or printed copy of his ledger. statements are printed at frequencies ranging from daily to every six months, depending on customer requirements, and also are printed on demand. The Bank is legally obliged to retain copies of all statements for at least ten years and receives a significant number of customer quer...

Local Economic Development: In the Pursuit of Public Interest or Public Choice?

Communities face a fundamental choice in how they evaluate any potential benefits accruing from economic development. This paper develops a decision-making framework using two approaches borrowed from the public welfare and public finance literature. The Public Interest approach illustrates how a community may incorporate distributional equity concerns into its evaluation process, while the Pub...

Regulation and the Public Interest

The increase in government regulation during the 1960s and 1970s is examined, as well as showing the importance of understanding the benefit/cost ratio of regulation.

Hospitals and the public interest.