Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization i...
But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along.164 The United States might call itself a country of laws, not men, but...
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...
Top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, t...
The universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature. The ground of our existence. To be repaid through ritual: ritual being an act of respect and recognition towards all that beside which w...
The more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actuall...
Sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure. Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something:...
On a political level, where every arbitrary act of power tends to reinforce a feeling that it’s not power, but arbitrariness—that is, freedom itself—that is the problem.
Impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas, in liberto officium (to be the object of anal penetration is a crime in the freeborn, a necessity for a slave, a duty for a freedman).
If you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.
If we’re going to actually come up with robots that will do our laundry or tidy up the kitchen, we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian di...
Here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.
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...
We can observe the process in the very earliest records from ancient Mesopotamia; it finds its first philosophical expression in the Vedas, reappears in endless forms throughout recorded history, and...
True, earlier figures like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were suspicious of credit systems, but already by the mid–nineteenth century, economists who concerned themselves with such matters were largely...
To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist.
This last is important. Even in corporate environments, it is very difficult to remove an underling for incompetence if that underling has seniority and a long history of good performance reviews. As...
This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merc...
There is no consensus amongst philosophers about what the word rationality even means. According to one tradition, for instance, rationality is the application of logic, of pure thought untempered by...
The public does not work—a sentence like most of the American public works in the service industry would never appear in a magazine or paper, and if a journalist were to attempt to write such a senten...