The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ul...
The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suit...
So what exactly was the point of extracting the gold, stamping one’s picture on it, causing it to circulate among one’s subjects—and then demanding that those same subjects give it back again?
Similar declarations are to be found again and again, in Sumerian and later Babylonian and Assyrian records, and always with the same theme: the restoration of justice and equity, the protection of wi...
Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard...
One day when Nasruddin was left in charge of the local teahouse, the king and some retainers, who had been hunting nearby, stopped in for breakfast. Do you have quail eggs? asked the king. I’m sure I...
Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received permiss...
Max Weber famously pointed out that a sovereign state's institutional representatives maintain a monopoly on the right of violence within the state's territory. Normally, this violence can only be exe...
Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world’s population into full-time indu...
It begins to be clear why there are no societies based on barter. Such a society could only be one in which everybody was an inch away from everybody else’s throat; but nonetheless hovering there, poi...
In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way...
In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. There is always an assumption that anyone who is not an enemy can be expected to act on the principle...
Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it’s just randomness.
For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. — H. L. Mencken (slightly rephrased)
For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization...
Credit Theorists insisted that money is not a commodity but an accounting tool. In other words, it is not a thing at all. For a Credit Theorist can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can...
As the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the...
The value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.
It may be true that, if I could con- vince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the...
Asked. As a result, while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace, or across networks of trust (whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions li...