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
December 19, 2012 by
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).
Helping People Help Themselves
December 19, 2012 by
The full title to this book is: Helping People Help Themselves: From
the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. The book is an intellectual analysis, giving a full history of the relevant ideas, of the various modes of “helping” in general and development assistance in particular.
Revisiting Hirschman
December 15, 2012 by
This paper revisits the seminal early work of the late Albert Hirschman on development strategy and his critique of the “big push” strategies in order to elucidate the current debates about conditionality-based aid and comprehensive development programs.
Why Shock Therapy was Wrong
December 14, 2012 by
This article in Challenge May-June 2003 tried to pull together thoughts on two questions: the overall institutional change strategy and the alternatives to and arguments against voucher privatization.
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.
Inalienable Rights: A Litmus Test for Liberal Theories of Justice
December 12, 2012 by
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.
Introduction to Property Theory
December 12, 2012 by
This is yet another unpublished paper to introduce property theory to various audiences, particularly economists.