Tollison’s research is defined by the persistent and consistent application of the economic approach to human behavior to all walks of life. He did so by clearly stating the testable propositions that follow from basic economic reasoning, and then submitting these propositions to empirical examination. Tollison’s work was grounded in economic theory, but his contributions primarily were located in the empirical examination of the implications of the theory so detailed. As Bob often told us—“They won’t let us be theorists”—while waving a copy of the latest issue of the Journal of Political Economy. So like any seriously competitive player, he understood the rules of the game he was playing, and how to play successfully within those rules. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a challenger to the prevailing orthodoxy. Economic explanation of any public policy reality was for Bob an intellectual horse race between a “public interest” story and a “private interest” story. As a result, he never shied away from asking the impolite, but necessary, question in studying politics: who benefits at whose expense? As Tollison (1982, p. 577) explains in “Rent-Seeking: A Survey”, if “competition is viewed as a dynamic, value-creating, evolutionary process, the role of economic rents in stimulating entrepreneurial decisions and in prompting an efficient allocation of resources is crucial.” From this perspective, “rent seeking” and “profit seeking” are standard features of the competitive market order. The seeking of profits drives the competitive market and creates value in the economic system. But, Tollison argues, we must distinguish between what is meant by profit seeking versus rent seeking.

The most sensible way to do this is to analyze rent seeking as “the expenditure of scarce resources to capture an artificially created transfer” (Tollison 1982, p. 578). Thus, the monopoly rents are created by the King’s granting of the right to be the sole seller of a commodity or service. As a result, an artificial scarcity is created by the state, and this sets in motion activities by various individuals in the hope of gaining the favor of the King. Real resources are expended in an effort to capture these rents through activities such as lobbying. This activity results in wasted resources from a social point of view because the expenditures in the process of competing for the transfer of this artificially contrived rent determine the contest’s winner, but do not create value for anyone else.

Tollison’s brilliance was to see the pervasiveness of this rent-seeking society not only in the contemporary US economy, but also to explain historically the organizational logic of mercantilism as well as the medieval church. In his classic work with Robert Ekelund, Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society (1982), the two scholars show how economic regulation historically contemplated is best understood as a by-product of rent-seeking behavior, rather than as a policy enacted out of public interest or pure intellectual error. It is important to understand the significance of Ekelund and Tollison targeting the mercantilist system because mercantilism is the classic example of erroneous economic doctrine that was overturned by the correct economic reasoning of Adam Smith and other classical political economists. But Ekelund and Tollison demonstrated that no matter how correct Smith and others were in their critique of the doctrines of mercantilism, the practice of mercantilism was characterized by government dictating the creation of artificially scarce rents.

An important idea from Ekelund and Tollison’s work is how fiscal technology at any point in time structures the political organization of the economy. In seventeenth and eighteenth century France, for example, tax revenue was raised by the selling of monopoly privileges, whereas in England at the same time the domestic economy was relatively free, though tariffs were utilized to raise revenues. The operative question is always who benefits at whose expense, and the fiscal technology of any given time will dictate how the fiscal state will be organized to pursue the power to tax as a revenue-maximizing leviathan.