Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life: Essays in Philosophy, Economics, and Mathematics

Dramatic changes or revolutions in a field of science are often made by outsiders or ‘trespassers,’ who are not limited by the established, ‘expert’ approaches. Each essay in this diverse collection shows the fruits of intellectual trespassing and poaching among fields such as economics, Kantian ethics, Platonic philosophy, category theory, double-entry accounting, arbitrage, algebraic logic, series-parallel duality, and financial arithmetic.

The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm

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.

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.

Introduction to Normative Property Theory

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.

Jobs & Fairness

This the late Robert Oakeshott’s magnum opus of case studies of and reflections on employee ownership. There is nothing else like it but it is very little known.

Property Theory and Value Theory 1980

This is an old (1980) paper published in the Yugoslav journal Economic Analysis and Workers’ Management. It shows essentially all the ideas in the modern treatment of the labor theory of property (i.e., using the juridical principle of imputation) coming together by that date.