Introduction -- Section One – First Forays into Tax Incidence and Public Policy.-1) The Early Life of David Ricardo -- 2) The Times -- 3) The Theory -- 4) The Later Life of David Ricardo -- 5) The Early Life of Henry George -- 6) The Times -- 7) The Theory – Progress and Poverty -- 8) Legacy and Later Life -- 9) John Bates Clark in Defense of the Status Quo -- 10) John Bates Clark and his Times -- 11) Later Life and Legacy of Henry George -- 12) Later Life and Legacy of John Bates Clark -- Section Two – From Burden of Taxation to Optimal Taxation -- 13) The early years of Frank Plumpton Ramsey -- 14) The paper that spawned the study of optimal taxation -- 15) A short lifetime of contributions -- 16) The premature loss of a great mind -- 17) A Modern Extension – Vickrey and Mirrlees -- 18) The Early Life of William Spencer Vickrey -- 19) The Early Life of James Mirrlees -- 20) The Great Idea -- 21) Legacy and Applications -- 22) The Nobel Prize -- 23) The Later Years of James Alexander Mirrlees -- 24) The Later Years of William Spencer Vickrey -- Section Three – Divergent Arguments for the Public Sector -- 25) The Early Life of Knut Wicksell -- 26) The Early Life of Richard Musgrave -- 27) The Early Life of James Buchanan -- 28) The Great Idea of Knut Wicksell -- 29) The Times and a New Role for Government -- 30) The Great Debate Between Musgrave and Buchanan -- 31) The Nobel Prize for James Buchanan -- 32) The Legacy of Knut Wicksell 33) The Later Years of Richard Musgrave -- 34) The Legacy and later Years of James Buchanan -- Section Four - Bringing it all Together –Voting with the Feet and the Henry George Theorem -- 35) The Early Life of Charles Tiebout -- 36) The Early Life of Joseph Stiglitz -- 37) The Times of Charles Mills Tiebout -- 38) The Great Idea of Charles Mills Tiebout -- 39) Applications and Extensions -- 40) The Early Death of Charles Tiebout -- 41) The Henry George Theorem -- 42) The Prize and Legacy of Joseph Stiglitz -- Section Five – What we have learned -- 43) Conclusions.

The Public Financiers is the sixth book in a series of discussions about the great minds in the history and theory of finance. While the series addresses the contributions of scholars in our understanding of modern finance, this volume addresses the development of public finance as a field of thought through the twentieth century. Public finance received little attention from English language scholars until the latter half of the 20th Century. From that time the discipline blossomed, and new thinkers added substantially to existing study and research. New perspectives on rents and profits, the burden of public finance and the mathematics of optimal taxation introduced a new field of thought within public finance. This book explores the great public financiers who brought the discipline back into popularity and described how tax systems can interact with economies with minimal distortion. It introduces the work of David Ricardo, Henry George, John Bates Clark, Frank Ramsey, William Vickrey, and James Mirrlees, who each added new insight to public finance. The book also examines the work of Knut Wicksell, Richard Musgrave, James Buchanan, Charles Tiebout and Joseph Stiglitz, who established how government can be designed to provide the public goods a modern economy demands. The author explains how the contributions of these great minds combined to equip modern thinkers with the intuition and knowledge necessary to account for and even drive the growing federal states of the 20th Century.