The “anonymous societies”—the corporations—can never deliver what they promise; they can never bring us limited government, free markets, or private property. But most especially, they cannot overcome the division between capital and labor; that can come only by sharing in ownership, and by identifying property with responsibility. The directors of such [joint stock] companies, however, [...]
The bedrock principle of all Liberalism, whether of the Right or the Left, is Locke’s assertion that “every man has a Property in his own Person.” It is from this principle that Murray Rothbard can assert, “The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a [...]
Somewhere, the Sage hath said, Philosophy is easy; plumbing is hard. The Sage is correct; we should be suspicious of systems that exist only in the mind, but are never seen on the ground. It is only on the ground that they can be tested, and on those grounds alone we should take our stand. [...]
Property and the Just Wage In the last installment, we maintained that the only means to economic equilibrium was the just wage: unless each person gets a fair proportion of the wealth he produces, there will not be enough purchasing power in the mass of men to clear the markets. We noted that in the [...]
What Does an Economy Do? If what we said in the last installment is correct, then the first task of any humane science is to determine what its purpose is. The indispensable requirement for any economic system is that it must provide the material basis for life for a sufficient number of its citizens so [...]
Some wag somewhere has remarked that economists suffer from “physics envy.” One could certainly make that charge against W.S. Jevons (1835-1882), one of the founders of marginal economics, when he wrote that a “perfect system of statistics … is the only … obstacle in the way of making economics an exact science”; once the statistics [...]
Property in the hands of labor is freedom. Labor in the hands of property is slavery.—Dmitri Kleiner From the earliest days of Distributism, distributists have exhibited a certain lack of interest in economics. This is a rather odd stance for the adherents of an economic theory. Distributism was defended generally on moral and social grounds, [...]