John Tomasi’s 2012 book, Free Market Fairness, has been well received. On the dust jacket, Tyler Cowen proclaims it “one of the very best philosophical treatments of libertarian thought, ever” and Deirdre McCloskey calls it a “long and friendly conversation between Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls — a conversation which, astonishingly, reaches agreement.”
Reframing the Labor Question
April 13, 2017 by
Subtitle: On Marginal Productivity Theory and the Labor Theory of Property
This paper reframes the labor question according to the normal juridical principle of imputation whose application to property appropriation is the modern treatment of the old natural rights or labor theory of property.
Review of Erik O. Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias
January 9, 2017 by
I rarely review books and almost never books by Marxists. However, in order to comment on a presentation at a conference, I decided to write up my extensive comments in the form of a book review of Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias.
Review of Dahl’s Preface to Economic Democracy
January 9, 2017 by
This is my review in Commonweal of Robert A. Dahl’s 1985 book Preface to Economic Democracy shortly after it was published.
Straddler interview and video
December 23, 2016 by
This is the text and edited video of an interview with The Straddler in January 2016 entitled: Against the Renting of Persons.
Classical Liberalism and the Firm
March 24, 2015 by
This is a scan of my chapter in the new book: Commerce and Community: Ecologies of Social Cooperation, edited by Robert F. Garnett, Paul Lewis, and Lenore T. Ealy. London: Routledge, 2015.
The Neo-Abolitionist Case Against Renting People
January 17, 2015 by
The talk presents the arguments from inalienable rights theory in a neo-abolitionist framework as making the case against the renting of people, i.e., against the employment relation–echoing the abolitionist case against the owning of people.
American Revolution Applied to Corporations
January 17, 2015 by
The basic idea of the talk was to take the fundamental principles of the American Revolution and apply them to the economic sphere.
Talk on Alienation versus Delegation at Troy University
November 20, 2014 by
These are the slides for a talk on Alienation versus Delegation at a conference on Philanthropy and the Economic Way of Thinking at Troy University, Troy, Alabama November 7, 2014.