This book has been oriented normatively to questions of political economy in so-called possessive societies, the modern democracies of the West. Through the use political and economic decision-making models, we have attempted to do principally two things: (1) to describe the origins of government as a coercive institution in a society of free, rational, and politically equal citizens, and to provide a practical frame-work for the translation of individual preferences into collective or political choices; and (2) to suggest principles by which free, rational, and politically equal citizens should choose to allocate their scarce community resources.