These are the slides for a talk given in Munich in November 2017 at a conference on the Russian Revolution. The basic argument is that much of what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century still sounds radical today. The reason is that Marx, Lenin, and the Russian Revolution set back the Left for a century and a half.
Knowledge and Institutional Change
January 5, 2017 by
This paper attempts set forth systematically some of the knowledge questions that determine certain strategies for institutional change.
Labor theory of property and Marginal productivity theory
April 17, 2016 by
This is a reprint from the journal Economic Thought of a paper on the labor theory of property and the neoclassial theory of marginal productivity.
On Property Theory
November 25, 2013 by
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.
Numeraire Illusion: The Final Demise of the Kaldor-Hicks Principle
December 13, 2012 by
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.
Wall Street Capitalism as “The Model” for Market Economies
December 13, 2012 by
This paper addresses the way the American “Wall Street Capitalism” embodies the irresponsible disconnect between action and the results that markets (unlike governments) are supposed to prevent. This paper is in the Slovene journal Theory and Practice that dates back to 1964.
Marxism as a Capitalist Tool
December 13, 2012 by
The Great Debate between capitalism and socialism is now in the dustbin of intellectual history, but Marxism still plays an important role in sustaining the misframing of the questions so that the defenders of the present employment system do not have to face the real questions that separate that system from a system of economic democracy. In that sense, Marxism has become the ultimate capitalist tool.
Introduction to Property Theory
December 12, 2012 by
This is yet another unpublished paper to introduce property theory to various audiences, particularly economists.
The Libertarian Case for Slavery: A Note on Nozick
December 12, 2012 by
This is a historically important paper, by one “J. Philmore,” arguing along with Robert Nozick from a free-market libertarian viewpoint that the self-sale contract and the current employment or self-rental contract are on the same moral footing.
The Market Mechanism of Appropriation
December 12, 2012 by
This is a non-mathematical treatment of the fundamental theorem about the laissez faire mechanism for property appropriation.