According to the contractarian perspective, a public good can be thought of as not so much a good that meets the technical neoclassical criteria of non-rivalness and non-excludability, but as one that is produced on a purely contractual basis, thus necessarily increasing the utility of all the involved parties. In this paper, by critically examining Nozick’s “emergent” contractarianism and Buchanan’s teleological contractarianism, I shall argue that no such contractual origin can be plausibly attributed to territorial monopolies of force, and that therefore legal monocentrism — the view that the public goods of law and defense can be provided exclusively by territorial monopolies of force — fails the relevant efficiency test as conceived on a contractarian basis. This, in turn, implies that legal polycentrism, one of whose constitutive features is precisely its unambiguously voluntary and contractual character, should be considered as a superior system in this context.
This article is an attempt to synthetically present and test the main conclusions of the State-as-Leviathan model. In the first part, the main assumptions of the model are described. In the second, the model is developed further in order to present main research hypotheses. In the third part, the critique and remarks on the model are reviewed. The fourth part is devoted to developing an empirical model and presenting the main findings of the analysis. The summary concludes the text with some suggestions for future research. The conducted analysis allows us to draw conclusions pointing to the less-than-perfect ability of the Leviathan model to describe real events in the areas of fiscal policy and taxation and, in some instances, seems to corroborate the conclusions ascribed to the "orthodox" theory of public finance criticized by Buchanan and Brennan. A regression model built upon a database on selected EU countries derived from the Eurostat, European Commission and European Social Survey points to the fact that indeed the broadness of the taxable base can positively influence public revenue. And it also negatively affects the way people perceive the national government (in linę with model assumptions). But when we turn to the influence of the broadness of the base on its perceived quality of life, we can find out that, in the countries with a relatively broad base, people's perceived life satisfaction is significantly higher (in line with "orthodox" theories). At the same time, the analysis corroborates to some extent Leviathan-model suggestions that progressive taxation is beneficial for the citizens in comparison to proportional, as some recent research shows.
A liberal state becomes an unliberal one whenever it ceases to provide for an effective framework of fulfillment of individual aspirations and, instead, commences a program of community-building in a setting, where the community is to fully include only somehow specified members of politically privileged group(s). In such a non-liberal model of state, the state is meant to be a perfect implementer and an ultimate model within which the very being of the community is to be realised. As a consequence, it is meant to give priority to communitarian needs, which are to prevail over individual ones. In such a setting, the state must seem, or if possible, be omnipotent, which implies that the state would have to be empowered to define each and every individual’s position in the community – conveyed to them through various rituals of symbolic provision for the power elite, including participation in the sado-masochistic theatre of submission and control. The non-liberal state defies public choice as a model for unconstrained and axiom-free selection of public provision which is meant to expose individual, yet aggregated, preferences. Instead, it gives the ruling elite the power to identify the interest of the community as a whole. This interest is defined as transcendent and not suitable for any public choice. This model, however, cannot be effective in the long run, because of diminishing returns and because of inability to adjust the state-provision mechanism to changing public preferences.
PL
Państwo liberalne staje się nieliberalne wtedy, gdy przestaje tworzyć ramy zaspokajania indywidualnych aspiracji, a zastępuje je programem budowania jakiejś określonej przez siebie wspólnoty, która niekoniecznie ma już obejmować wszystkich, a jedynie członków grup politycznie dowartościowywanych. W takim ujęciu to państwo ma być najdoskonalszym nośnikiem i społecznym modelem realizacji bytu wspólnoty. Zatem to jego interesy muszą przeważyć nad interesami jednostek. Musi ono być więc omnipotentne, albo choćby jedynie sprawiać wrażenie omnipotentnego – poprzez wytworzenie mechanizmów, w którym obywatele mieliby swoje miejsce w definiowanym przez państwo porządku – poprzez ponawiane rytuały symbolicznego świadczenia na rzecz władzy, udział w stale ponawianym sadystyczno-masochistycznym teatrze podległości państwu nawet w relacjach dnia powszedniego. Państwo nieliberalne rezygnuje z modelu wyboru publicznego, którego warunkiem jest swobodny i wolny od aksjomatów narzucanych przez władzę dyskurs publiczny ujawniający zagregowane interesy jednostek. Zamiast tego stara się raczej zidentyfikować interes wspólnoty rozumianej jako byt transcendentny, który ma również transcendentne i niepodlegające wyborowi publicznemu właściwości, wymagające przyjęcia takiego modelu realizacji, jaki nie może być już przedmiotem wyboru politycznego. Z uwagi na zjawisko malejących przychodów krańcowych taki model świadczenia staje się szybko nieefektywny, gdyż przestaje odzwierciedlać zmieniające się potrzeby i nie jest w stanie dostosować do nich samego mechanizmu świadczenia.
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