Customer Reviews

Of Rule and Revenue (California Series on Social Choice and Political Economy)

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A virtuous mix of rational choice, institutionalism and neo-Marxism theories. Levi explains the interaction among State, actors and citizens that has preferences and strategic capacity to maximize objectives. With the historical examples worked by Levi, I notice the possibility to analyze the relationships among the Brazilian State, business associations and unions face the politics of neoliberal reforms recently applied by the brazilian government. Roberto Corrêa

"As specialization and division of labor increase, there is greater demand on the state to provide collective goods where once there were solely private goods or no goods at all."

From the second sentence of this book, it charts its course in oblivious contradiction of reality. In reality, of course, economic activity individuates and privatizes as society develops. The few exceptions, e.g., the Soviet Union, are typically short-lived and embarrassing to their promoters.

Ms. Levi is obviously a clever person, but sadly, as with many clever people in academia, her intelligence in this book is deployed mainly to play games of self-referential abstraction.

This book's obscurity and practical uselessness mean that it is unlikely to be of any consequence. There probably is a good book to be written on a general theory of comparative taxation, but this ain't it.