Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato l’undici febbraio 2016 con il titolo Inequality is a Zero-Sum Game. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. In un recente commento (“Economic Inequality”, gennaio 2016), l’investitore Paul Graham difende la disuguaglianza dicendo che non è necessariamente il risultato di un gioco a somma zero. Solitamente non lo è, dice. E accusa “gli…

The only function of “intellectual property” is to snatch scarcity from the jaws of abundance — to take goods that, thanks to the advance of human knowledge, should naturally be getting cheaper, and make them artificially expensive. This is nowhere more evident than in the war corporations are fighting against their own customers’ right to…

There’s an old saying that when you see a turtle on top of a fencepost, you know it didn’t get up there on its own. In the official capitalist ideology — especially the version that prevails in neoliberal America — great wealth is seen as the reward for superior entrepreneurship, foresight and personal drive. As…

In a recent commentary (“Economic Inequality,” January 2016), venture capitalist Paul Graham defends inequality on the grounds that it’s not necessarily the result of a zero-sum game. In fact, he says, it’s usually not. He accuses “the most naive” critics of growing levels of economic inequality of starting out from “the pie fallacy: that the…

Playboy’s announcement (“Playboy is Doing What?!?,” Playboy.com, October 13) that it will be ending the nude magazine pictorials that have been its foundation for six decades might seem the result of the instability of free markets.  The Foundation for Economic Education’s Sarah Skwire (“The Creative Destruction of Nudity in Playboy Magazine,” The Freeman, October 14) calls the…