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Trade without private property

 Recently, on facebook, someone commented that "You can't have markets without private property."  This was my response: You definitely can have markets without private property. Remember, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx distinguishes between "private property" and "personal property." He doesn't have any quarrel with personal property (individual property, like your toothbrush and your lawnmower). His quarrel is with private property - that is, bourgeois ownership of the means of production. (Notice that this is usually NOT individual property: rarely does 1 person own a factory. Usually a factory is owned by a corporation, a "fictive person," a made-up person that is recognized by the law, which is in turn owned collectively by its stockholders, which may number in the millions, all over the world.)   Private property is an innovation of capitalism. Early examples include the British East India Company and the V.O.C.,...
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 Derrida positions himself as the savior of the text - a messianic figure, to be sure.  Like every good messiah, he saves the text, and, in order for the text to achieve salvation, according to the text, the text must be overturned.  The text overturns itself: he the mere vehicle of the text's glorious self-overcoming.
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Do words need definitions?

The naive philosophical position is that in order to evaluate the truth of any proposition, one must know the definitions of all of the words in that proposition.  This might be called the "reductive" theory of truth. But this is quite wrongheaded. Why is it wrongheaded?  Because it leads to a kind of infinite regress.  Suppose you have a statement p, which is made of words.  What do these words mean?  They have definitions - but those definitions are also made of words.  So in order to evaluate whether p is true, you now have to know the definitions of all the words in p, plus the words in the definitions of the words in p - call that p'.  But all of those words have definitions as well, which means one would have to know the definitions of the words in p, plus the words in p', plus all the words in the definitions of the words in p' - call that p''.  And one can continue expanding this indefinitely, to p''', p'''', and so on. ...
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  The rationality described by Austrian economists is not only radically different from the way that humans actually act - in my opinion, anyway, it's not even all that rational.  The "homo economicus" behaves more like a badly programmed robot than any complex biological animal, humans included.  It certainly behaves nothing like a healthy human, who is capable of the evolutionarily-developed capacity for empathy, and whose actions are profoundly embedded in the context of a culture with a history.  Homo economicus behaves a bit like a sociopath, though even a sociopath is more human and more rational than this strange, cold, alien, artificial intelligence. Perhaps the aspect that is most gallingly inappropriate and bizarre - indeed, unrealistic - about homo economicus as a model for human behavior is this notion of "revealed preference".  The desires of homo economicus are completely on the surface, completely unambiguous.  Unlike real humans, they have ...
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If the hipster is a living contradiction, the hippie is a living tautology: equally meaningless.  I call the hippie "the pleonasm."  The pleonasm looks outward and embraces everything around, but this frantic grasping, despite its colorful, happy outward appearance, cannot disguise the rot inside.
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The Problem of Glory

    There's an ancient theological problem, known as the problem of Glory.   Why does my life have meaning? According to theists, because of God. But how, exactly, does my life have meaning, if God exists? Traditionally the answer is that everything in the universe exists for the Glory of God.   Here's the problem. Imagine what it was like before the universe was created. The only thing that existed was God. God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, perfect in every way. He is the ground of Being, the essence of the universe. And He was all that existed. The universe was God, at that point. So the universe was perfect in every way.   What possible reason could God have for creating anything at this point? What could He possibly create that would *increase* His Glory? What could this "Glory" possibly mean?   Anything that God creates will be less perfect than God - it will not be all-powerful, all-knowing, or all-good. No matter how good it...
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Against Political Heroism

  A hero is an object of admiration.  Admiration is an emotion.  As human beings, we have all kinds of emotions, including, occasionally, admiration.  This is normal and healthy and probably inevitable and I have no problem with people experiencing the full breadth of their emotions.  I'm not trying to get you to feel guilty about any of your emotions - although guilt is an emotion as well, and it's fine if you're feeling guilt.  Feel whatever you feel.  I merely encourage you to be honest with yourself, and acknowledge that admiration is an emotion you feel, and it is nothing other than an emotion.  More importantly, don't base your politics on heroism.  Instead, use cold, scientific analysis of political economy to determine the most effective strategy. You can't really control your emotions - not completely.  If you feel admiration bubbling up within yourself, allow yourself to feel it, fully.  Don't be dishonest with yourself in...
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