RESEARCH
Papers
Research on power, coercion, and the limits of political authority
SUBMITTED · August 2026
The Criterion of Minimal Tolerance
This paper develops a restrictive criterion for determining when coercive provision may enter institutional consideration. It requires effective non-excludability, relevant non-rivalry, and persistent collapse of voluntary provision to be jointly established
The criterion places the burden of proof on coercion: importance, collective benefit, free riding, or dissatisfaction with voluntary outcomes are not sufficient to establish coercive necessity
WORK IN PROGRESS
State Free Riding
This paper examines how the continued functioning of a productive society after the imposition of new state burdens can conceal the counterfactual costs of those burdens
Once an absorbed burden becomes part of the institutional baseline, the resilience of the productive base can facilitate further extraction without requiring any assumption of deliberate state maximization
FOUNDATIONAL PAPER · December 2025 · SSRN
The Theory of Minimal Tolerance
An early formulation of the Theorem of Minimal Tolerance, introducing a framework for examining when political coercion may be tolerated only under exceptional conditions