Juan de Mariana, Public Choice and the fiscal constitution: The effective limits to political power

Abstract

Over seven hundred years before Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan published The Power to Tax, the scholastic priest Juan de Maria­na (1536-1624) advocated the need to institute a fiscal constitution to limit the monarch’s arbitrary and confiscatory power, when collecting taxes or devaluating the currency. Aware of the harm tyrants impose on the citizen­ry, Mariana, and years later, Brennan and Buchanan, proposes setting down limits to political power that enjoy the consent of the governed but do not depend on temporal voter preferences, whereby public spending is contro­132 lled, state monopolies are avoided, and citizen audit is permitted. Mariana’s project is Catholic, and Brennan and Buchanan’s is secular, but they share a vision of human nature and of the origin of government decidedly rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition.