Talk: A Tale of Two Invalid Contracts: Coverture and Employment

These are the slides for a talk that focuses on the parallel inalienable rights arguments against the now-outlawed coverture marriage contract and the yet-to-be-outlawed employment contract.

Review-Essay on Elizabeth Anderson’s “Private Government” book

In her recent book Private Government [2017], Elizabeth Anderson makes a powerful but pragmatic case against the abuses experienced by employees in conventional corporations. The purpose of this review-essay is to contrast Anderson’s pragmatic critique of many abuses in the employment relation with a principled critique of the employment relationship itself.

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).

Inalienable Rights: A Litmus Test for Liberal Theories of Justice

This paper published in the European journal, Law and Philosophy, examines the intellectual history of inalienable rights theory, and critically examines the work of liberal philosophers of justice, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, from that perspective.

On Rawls and Nussbaum

This paper was delivered at a 2008 conference in Leuven on Martha Nussbaum’s book Frontiers of Justice. The paper was to be published in the conference proceedings, but somehow that never happened.

Employment Contract and Liberal Thought

This was the first of several papers that focused on the employment contract and inalienable rights, rather than on the labor theory of property.

Rethinking Common vs. Private Property

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a rethinking of the common-versus-private framing of the property rights issue in the Commons Movement. The underlying normative principle we will use is simply the basic juridical principle that people should be legally responsible for the (positive and negative) results of their actions, i.e., that legal or de jure responsibility should be imputed in accordance with de facto responsibility. In the context of property rights, the responsibility principle is the old idea that property should be founded on people getting the (positive or negative) fruits of their labor, which is variously called the labor or natural rights theory of property.

The Pons Asinorum of Political-Economic Theory

In many debates of a political or economic nature, I find myself again and again arguing with people on both the left and right who take the consent-vs.-coercion framing of political and economic issues as fundamental. Those on the right tend to take consent as the essentially sufficient condition for an institution to be morally acceptable. Somewhat surprisingly, those on the left accept the same framing of the issue, and just take the other side—arguing that certain institutions are “actually” coercive.

New Instant Cities: The Über-Planners of Libertarianism

This posting is in the series with the theme of libertarians (or classical liberals in the European sense) being unable to stick to their own fine principles whenever it is ideologically inconvenient (as if the fine principles were not their primary motivation!). An earlier blog posting as well as published papers made the point about the whole anti-social-engineering theme of so much libertarian thought (e.g., Hayek and Austrian economics). That theme was much applied to criticize the social planning of socialism in the transition from a capitalist or pre-capitalist society to some form of socialism. But when real-existing socialism collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, liberal neoclassical economists (e.g., the Harvard wunderkinder such as Sachs, Summers, and Shleifer) pushed the strategy of “shock therapy” which involved massive social engineering in the transition from socialism to some form of a private property market economy. Instead of sticking by their fine anti-social-engineering principles, the libertarians, Hayekians, and Austrians suddenly fell silent since it would be ideologically inconvenient to appear as opposing the (shock therapy) transition to capitalism.

Listen Libertarians! Concluding Part V

In this fifth and concluding part of the review of John Tomasi’s book Free Market Fairness, we look at the invisible hand mechanism of the property system (in contrast to the usual price system) which seems to be invisible to liberal scholars and social scientists since it does not give a satisfactory “account” of the current economic system based on the renting of human beings.