International organized crime

He has served as a consultant to the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the National Security Council, and related agencies of the U.S. government. He has written, coauthored, or edited over sixteen books on intelligence and national security.     

The measurability of budget related rent-seeking

It has been suggested that the extent of rent-seeking expenditures arising from attempts to influence budget allocations should be estimated by the absolute magnitude of the observed changes in allocation. Instead, we argue that it is the extent of theex ante prospective changes that determine the level of rent-seeking, and that in the presence of countervailing activity these may be quite unrelated to the ex post observed values. We further argue that the traditional rent-seeking model of competition for a pre-specified rent is inappropriate in this context.     

The Pending Revolution in Federal Accounting Standards

Accounting standards constitute the body of guidance needed to provide coherence and direction to accountants on how to keep the books. They inform the accountant about the logic of the way that accounting data should be organized and displayed in order to maximize its value to the prospective user. (The prospective users, in the case of federal accounting, range from the president and Congress through agency managers to the general public.) Federal accounting standards are the equivalent, for accounting, of budget concepts for the federal budget. After a long genesis, federal accounting standards are in the midst of a revolution which, if it succeeds, will transform the way accounting reports on federal fiscal activities and how it relates to the federal budget. This article, written from the perspective of a budget concepts technician who has participated in this effort, reviews these developments and where they seem to be heading.     

A transaction-based approach to policy intervention

A transaction-based approach to policy intervention is presented. The approach overcomes a number of weaknesses in current approaches to policy intervention. The approach involves three main conceptual elements: transactions, transaction governance mechanisms, and governance principles. The transaction is taken to be the basic unit of analysis. Profiles of transactions vary along a number of transaction dimensions. Transaction governance mechanisms - such as, for example, government service, regulation, contracts, vouchers, markets, taxes, and self-service - are each suitable for governing transactions having particular profiles. A mechanism will fail when used to govern transactions not fitting the profile. Governance principles are criteria or expectations - for example, efficiency, justice and liberty - used to judge how well a mechanism fulfills or achieves important societal goals. Specific choices of governance mechanisms (from the set that are technically feasible) therefore should be made according to how well they satisfy these governance principles. Public high school education is used as an example to illustrate the approach. A number of conclusions are offered.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Public Administration Portland, Oregon, April, 1988.     

'To Secure the Blessings of Liberty': Liberty and American Federal Democracy

The founding and subsequent development of the United Stateshave been characterized by a tension between two kinds of liberty,which can be called natural liberty and federal liberty. Naturalliberty refers to the freedom of individuals to do as they pleasewithout being shackled by civil society. Federal liberty refersto the liberty to be a partner in establishing the covenantfounding civil society, and then the liberty to live accordingto the terms of the covenant. Federal liberty has taken twoforms in America: one concerning the relationship between individualsand civil society, and one concerning the relationship betweenthe states and the federal government under the U.S. Constitution.Out of the tension between natural and federal liberty, thereemerged two constitutional traditions: the U.S. constitutionaltradition, which has emphasized individualism and the marketplace,and the state constitutional tradition, which has emphasizedcommunity and commonwealth. Since the end of World War II, however,there has been a shift away from historic syntheses of marketplaceand commonwealth. Increasingly, the states have been deniedtheir constitutional powers to support any particular moralorder other than that of the marketplace, and the federal governmenthas undertaken to establish a new morality of equality for thenation as a whole.     

ECONOMIC CONVERSION: INDUSTRIAL POLICY AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES

While arms control and disarmament represent efforts to respond to the military and political factors in the arms race, there has not been a com- parable effort to reduce the economic incentives. To do so military contrac- tors would have to be able to convert their production facilities to civilian manufacturing without loss of profits or workers.