Probability Theory with Superposition Events

In finite probability theory, events are subsets S⊆U of the outcome set. Subsets can be represented by 1-dimensional column vectors. By extending the representation of events to two dimensional matrices, we can introduce “superposition events.”

COVID-19 Aid to Promote Employee Ownership

The premise of this paper is that state aid to distressed companies should benefit not only the current owners but also the employees, who are the ones taking personal risks to continue or restart companies.

Comments on Universal Basic Income

This is a draft paper called “UBI: A Bad Idea Whose Time has Come?”. The income supplements supplied due to the coronavirus pandemic have put the UBI back on the policy agenda, so it is appropriate to re-examine the idea. Click here to download the paper.

Reclaiming Democratic Classical Liberalism

The argument shows that the classical liberal endorsement of sovereign individuals acting in the marketplace generalizes to the joint action of individuals as the principals in their own organizations and associations.

Worker Ownership and the Current Crisis

There are so many crises these days (coronavirus, global warming) that this paper seems already out of date since we are referring to the crisis caused by the neoliberal post-socialist transition policies in East Europe and elsewhere in the post-socialist world.

Nancy MacLean’s Book and James Buchanan

Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains, raised questions about James M. Buchanan’s commitment to democracy. This paper investigates the relationship of classical liberalism in general and of Buchanan in particular to democratic theory. Contrary to the simplistic classical liberal juxtaposition of “coercion vs. consent,” there have been from Antiquity onwards voluntary contractarian defenses of non-democratic […]

Classical Liberalism and Workplace Democracy

This is a paper coauthored by Tej Gonza for the European Liberal Forum, the foundation associated with the Lib-Dem parties of the EU in the EU Parliament. It explores the support for workplace democracy given by democratic classical liberals such as Tocqueville, Mill, Dewey, and Buchanan.

Fallacies of Corporate Analysis

Our goal is to analyze a miscellany of fallacies concerning the Citizens United case, corporate personhood, the stakeholder theory, the affected interests principle, and finally ending with the deeper fallacies concerning the rights of capital that are embedded in the conventional economic theories of capital and corporate finance.

The Case for Workplace Democracy

“In Chapter 11, David Ellerman offers a theoretical justification for a form of workplace democracy. He argues that a philosophical defence of workers’ control of workplaces and the products of their labour is possible outside of the lineage of Marxist and communist theory.” [Editor’s introduction] Amen

Extending All Boolean Operations to Partitions

The lattice operations of join and meet were defined for set partitions in the nineteenth century, but no new logical operations on partitions were defined and studied during the twentieth century. Yet there is a simple and natural graph-theoretic method presented here to define any n-ary Boolean operation on partitions. An equivalent closure-theoretic method is […]