Not really. If the goal of development assistance is to foster autonomous development, then most aid and “help” is actually unhelpful in the sense of either overriding or undercutting the autonomy of those being “helped.” The two principal forms of unhelpful “help” are social engineering and charitable relief. The World Bank is the primary example over the last half century of the failures of social engineering to “engineer” development.
The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm
December 2, 2012 by
My second book was the 1989 The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm. The book was revised for the Chinese translation, and that is the version that can be downloaded here. This book develops the labor theory of property and democratic theory arguments for a democratic firm, and analyzes the connection between those principles and the legal structure of the firms.
Economics, Accounting, and Property Theory
December 1, 2012 by
This is my first book. In order to develop a mathematical model of the stocks and flows of property inside a firm, I first had to give a math model of the usual double-entry accounting for the stocks and flows of the scalar value, and then generalize it to vectors of property rights.
Gian-Carlo Rota’s Introduction to Probability and Random Processes
December 1, 2012 by
This is a scanned copy of Gian-Carlo Rota’s and Kenneth Baclawski’s Introduction to Probability and Random Processes manuscript in its 1979 version.
Employment Contract and Liberal Thought
November 17, 2012 by
This was the first of several papers that focused on the employment contract and inalienable rights, rather than on the labor theory of property.
Introduction to Normative Property Theory
November 16, 2012 by
This was my first (1972) publication in property theory. The normative part of the theory is essentially the same as what I would espouse today, but for the descriptive theory, I was still in the grip of the “fundamental myth” that the rights to the product are part and parcel of some existing property rights to some capital asset.
The Objective Indefiniteness Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
October 31, 2012 by
The purpose of this blog entry is to briefly describe a new interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM). A long paper introducing this objective indefiniteness interpretation is available at the Quantum Physics ArXiv and (a more recent version) on my website.
Rethinking Common vs. Private Property
August 14, 2012 by
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.
Austrian capital theory and bourgeois paternalism
July 9, 2012 by
As pointed out by Lenore Ealy in her recent blog, there is an interesting connection between a couple of articles in the July 10, 2012 issue of The Freeman. One article by Peter Lewin was a critique of Keynesian stimulus/job creation programs from the viewpoint of Austrian capital theory. The creation of capital and enterprises is a roundabout time-consuming process, and cannot be a quick response to a government stimulus program. The other article by Sandy Ikeda makes a similar point with respect to the bourgeois paternalism of government programs to remake troubled communities since “no government can create what can only emerge spontaneously. That includes genuine communities, warts and all, instead of unsustainable projects and ‘Disneyland neighborhoods.’”