These are the slides and a video of a talk in Zagreb Sept. 8, 2014 on green issues and ESOPs.
Three Themes about the Mondragon cooperatives
This is a preprint of a paper developing three themes, capital structure, active learning, and spinoffs, with special attention to the Mondragon cooperatives.
On Property Theory
This paper is an introduction to property theory including the invisible hand mechanism which handles the initiation and termination of property rights in an on-going private property market economy. The Fundamental Theorem is that when Hume’s conditions of no involuntary transfers and no breached contracts are fulfilled, then the Lockean principle of people getting the fruits of their labor, i.e., imputing legal responsibility in accordance with de facto responsibility is satisfied. The major application is to the current system of a private property market economy based on the renting of persons, i.e., the employment contract.
This is a reprint of the paper in the Journal of Economic Issues in Sept. 2014.
Making Enterprises and Markets Responsible
This is a paper written to further Richard Cornuelle’s abiding vision of a more responsible economy and posted here to invite comment. The basic idea is revisit the whole idea of a market economy dominated by absentee-owned and publicly traded corporations (“Wall Street Capitalism”) that disconnect companies (“the Mother of all disconnects”) from the natural desires of the people working in the companies to improve their communities.
Kantian Personhood Principle
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.
Marxism as a Capitalist Tool
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.
The Market Mechanism of Appropriation
This is a non-mathematical treatment of the fundamental theorem about the laissez faire mechanism for property appropriation.
Hume Implies Locke: Fundamental Theorem of Property Theory
The fundamental theorem for the invisible hand mechanism in the property system is that if Hume’s conditions are satisfied, then the invisible judge imputes in accordance with the Lockean responsibility principle. The paper mathematically formulates and proves the theorem using vector flows on graphs.
The Two Institutional Logics
This paper, published in a Korean English-language journal, argued for the logic of commitment in the design of a firm rather than the logic of exit. The contrasts between these two logics is explored in many fields.