From the point of view of public finance research, this book is a little quaint. A typical court of audit judges only what is put before it. In these essays it is argued that the judge should search for alternative actions that could have been taken and change thereby the records presented. This is different in that traditional public finance talks about some unknown entity whose well being a benign president should implement. We are not particularly impressed with this model. Our way of reasoning is that we want to talk about alternatives.