Property and the family are two ideas, for the attack and defense of which legions of writers have taken up arms during the last half century. Recent systems, founded upon old errors, but revived by the popular emotions which they aroused, have in vain disturbed, misrepresented, sometimes even denied, them. These ideas express necessary facts,…

Download a PDF copy of Grant Mincy’s study Power and Property: A Corollary. The concept of property is widely discussed by social theorists and is a hot button issue within political circles. This is mostly because property is somewhat of an abstract concept. Property is a possession — it belongs to someone or something. Seems simple enough,…

Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), the English economics writer I discussed previously, is an enigma — until his philosophy is seen in its entirety. He was an editor at The Economist of London from 1846 to 1855, during the period author Scott Gordon called “the high tide of laissez faire, yet he is considered a Ricardian socialist,…

Mutual Exchange is the Center’s goal in two senses — we favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to the Center’s audience. A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and…

Libertarians tend to see two worlds: one with private property that works reasonably well, and one without that farcically implodes. What they often miss, however, is that this dichotomy is conditional. Private property isn’t morally meritorious or great in itself, but only insofar as it is the best and only way to avoid conflict given…

Reuters reports that this year the United States Supreme Court will hear its highest proportion of intellectual property (IP) cases in history. The justices are set to decide eight cases on IP — six on patent laws and two on copyright. A sign of the times, really. In a world of open source content and the…

An all-private system can be oppressive, just as an all-public one can be.

Less Antman: Anarchy is not a system. It is an attitude of respect for other people, and a rejection of master-slave relationships (with no exception for government officials).

David D’Amato finds a recent court decision makes an excellent opportunity to examine the concept of property.

Thomas L. Knapp puts “intellectual property” on the slippery slope, to see how far down it rolls.

D’Amato: “Intellectual property” is an affront to free markets.

Kevin Carson explains that so-called “intellectual property” adds to GDP only by perversely counting unnecessary costs as productivity.

Kevin Carson explains that the notion that intellectual property somehow protects “the little guy” is a fraud.

Thomas L. Knapp on so-called “intellectual property”: “…big money got to be big money by using government to restrain trade and ban competition.”

Joseph Heath. Filthy Lucre: Economics For People Who Hate Capitalism (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2009). Heath states his goal at the outset: I’m not interested in selling anyone on the virtues of private enterprise. This is primarily because I share the unease that most people feel with the capitalist system. And I would like to see us…

Every once in a while, someone states something so perfectly you just want to share it as widely as possible. A.R. Moxon’s explanation of billionaires and their role in society did that for me: What they do is get themselves in proximity to the natural value generated by our natural human system — value created…

There’s a great deal of commonality in critiques of degrowth by left-wing “ecomodernists” and accelerationists like Leigh Philips (see my critique here), and right-wing libertarians like Steven Greenhut. Both are characterized by a high degree of conceptual laziness; this laziness is manifested particularly in a failure to clearly define what degrowth even is, instead playing…

In a 2019 study for Center for a Stateless Society (We Are All Degrowthers. We Are All Ecomodernists), I argued that the debate for and against degrowth was nearly incoherent because neither side clearly defined “degrowth” at all, let alone stuck to any consistent definition. If Paul Crider’s article “Degrowth: Neither Left Nor Right, But…

At Foundation for Economic Education, Preston Brashers — commenting on a statement by Bernie Sanders that this country can’t afford a billionaire class which is at war with working families — replied (“What the Socialist Left Fails to Grasp about Wealth and Innovation in America,” June 28):  But when you consider the vital economic activities…

At Foundation for Economic Education (“The Ego vs. the Machine,” February 24), self-described “techno-optimist” Dylan Allman dismisses recent controversies over AI as a simple matter of wounded egos. “They feel, on some instinctual level, that if machines can do what they do — only better, faster, and more efficiently — then what value do they…