Author: Parrillo Nicholas R.<br />File Type: pdf<br />In America today, a public officials lawful income consists of a salary. But until a century ago, the law frequently authorized officials to make money on a profit-seeking basis. Prosecutors won a fee for each defendant convicted. Tax collectors received a cut of each evasion uncovered. Naval officers took a reward for each ship sunk. The list goes on. This book is the first to document American governments for-profit past, to discover how profit-seeking defined officials relationship to the citizenry, and to explain how lawmakersby banishing the profit motive in favor of the salarytransformed that relationship forever. **Review Economists beware! In this path-breaking book, Nicholas Parrillo revolutionizes our understanding of compensation systems. With gripping historical evidence, he demonstrates the profoundly political and cultural construction of the USs salary system. - Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Economic Lives How Culture Shapes the Economy (Princeton University Press, 2010) (Viviana Zelizer) Against the Profit Motive is more than a prodigiously researched account of public employee compensation in the United States. It offers a foundational perspective on one of the most challenging dilemmas Americans faced over three centuries empowering government officials to act independently on behalf of the public good while ensuring the legitimacy of those actions, even when they met with opposition. - Brian Balogh, author of A Government Out of Sight The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge University Press) (Brian Balogh) Nicholas Parrillos Against the Profit Motive represents the best in a new generation of source-based, reality-based legal history. Forgoing yet another discussion of the usual cases and well-worn theory and historiography, Parrillo takes us somewhere new. Through exemplary and tireless research in previously untapped primary sources, Parrillo takes us deep into the inner workings of early American governance and meticulously reconstructs a previously unknown historical world of public-private bounties, fees, rewards, prizes, gifts, profits, and moieties that made that all-important machinery seem to go of itself. Together with his Yale colleague Jerry Mashaw, Parrillo is doing nothing less than rewriting the history of the early American state.--William Novak, University of Michigan Law School (William Novak) Winner of the 2014 Law and Society Association James Willard Hurst Book Prize. (James Willard Hurst Book Prize Law and Society Association 2014-04-11) Winner of the 2014 Annual Scholarship Award from the American Bar Associations Section on Administrative Law (Award for Scholarship in Administrative Law American Bar Association 2014-10-22) About the Author Nicholas R. Parrillo is associate professor of law at Yale University.