American Revolution Applied to Corporations

The basic idea of the talk was to take the fundamental principles of the American Revolution and apply them to the economic sphere.

Double-entry Bookkeeping: The Mathematical Treatment

This publication represents success in a long struggle, stretching over three decades, to get the mathematical treatment of double-entry bookkeeping published in an accounting journal.

Talk on property theory at UMKC, Nov. 2014

These are the slides, with some minor additions and editing, for a talk On Property Theory given at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Economic Department November 17, 2014.

Property and Production

This is the 30th anniversary of the publication of this paper, Property and Production, which laid out the whole property-theoretic analysis of production. I would not change a word today.

Zagreb Talk Sept 2014

These are the slides and a video of a talk in Zagreb Sept. 8, 2014 on green issues and ESOPs.

On a fallacy in the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency-equity analysis

This paper shows that implicit assumptions about the numeraire good in the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency-equity analysis involve a “same-yardstick” fallacy.

On Property Theory

This paper is an introduction to property theory including the invisible hand mechanism which handles the initiation and termination of property rights in an on-going private property market economy. The Fundamental Theorem is that when Hume’s conditions of no involuntary transfers and no breached contracts are fulfilled, then the Lockean principle of people getting the fruits of their labor, i.e., imputing legal responsibility in accordance with de facto responsibility is satisfied. The major application is to the current system of a private property market economy based on the renting of persons, i.e., the employment contract.
This is a reprint of the paper in the Journal of Economic Issues in Sept. 2014.

Kantian Personhood Principle

This paper formulates the labor theory of property and democratic theory in the context of the Kantian personhood principle to treat other persons always as ends in themselves and never simply as means.

Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy

This book presents a modern version of the old Labor (or Natural Rights) Theory of Property and of an Inalienable Rights Theory that descends from the Reformation and Enlightenment. Together these theories re-solve the basic problem of distribution in the sense of giving a basis for the just appropriation of property and a basis for answering the question of who is to be the firm, e.g., the suppliers of share capital as in conventional capital, the government as in socialism, or the people who work in the firm as in the system of economic democracy (or labor-managed market economies).

Numeraire Illusion: The Final Demise of the Kaldor-Hicks Principle

The result in this paper undercuts the major applications of the Kaldor-Hicks reasoning in the standard Chicago school (wealth maximization) of law and economics, cost–benefit analysis, policy analysis, and related parts of applied welfare economics.