Enforcement Dilemma Research Articles

VOLUNTARY COMPLIANCE AND REGULATORY ENFORCEMENT

Enforcement strategies that encourage “voluntary compliance” can improve regulatory efficiency by reducing unnecessary enforcement and compliance costs associated with legal confrontation between firms and agencies. This article analyzes the enforcement dilemma that causes confrontation and describes a “Tit for Tat” strategy capable of increasing socially beneficial cooperation. The strategy requires agencies to be reasonable toward cooperative firms, vengeful toward cheaters, unrelenting in pursuit of chronic evaders, but conciliatory toward repentant firms. Reforms in this neglected and poorly understood part of the regulatory process could yield considerable social benefits.

Freedom in Constitutional Contract: Perspectives of a Political Economist

It is almost trite to call Professor Buchanan one of the original thinkers of our time, but the clarity and gentleness of his reasoning too often lets us take for common sense and common knowledge that which came through deliberate reasoning and was previously known by few. In this augmented collection of some of his existing work on the fundamental problems of social organizations, Buchanan faces the necessity of describing the conditions under which rules and agreements for community life must exist; he takes the alternative arrangements which exist or have been proposed and rotates them and examines each facet for coherence or flaw in their pattern; and he draws conclusions which are clear hypotheses or specific recommendations. It is orderly thinking and good writing, both as a collection and within each essay. But there is also passion in Buchanan's work. Passion and belief an example of that thin-spread ability to take a stand do not mar the analysis: the belief is clearly set forth, and the passion reserved for those who will analyze without recognizable description of the problem or conclude without analysis. As a humanist, believing in the greatest attainable happiness for individual human beings, and as an individualist believing that people can define for themselves alone what happiness entails, Buchanan seeks a plausibly attainable social constitution for a society of person's recognizable as his fellow human beings. That is what this collection, and all Buchanan's work, is about. The book is divided into five parts. In 'Anarchy, Law, and the Invisible Hand' structures are eliminated which seem to offer no hope of a generally desirable constitutional society. The contractarian approach to a constitutional society is set forth in 'The Structure of Social Contract'. The inevitable problem of enforcing chosen rules is faced in 'The Enforcement Dilemma. And the concluding two sections offer some 'Economic Applications of the contractarian-constitutionalist logic, and an examination of the current situation in the United States together with Buchanan's own prescriptions for reform and for escape from 'constitutional anarchy'. What is a constitutionalist-contractarian? One crucial principle underlies and justifies the use of this distended term: a constitutionalist recognizes