Listen Libertarians!: A Review of John Tomasi’s “Free Market Fairness”

John Tomasi’s 2012 book, Free Market Fairness, has been well received. On the dust jacket, Tyler Cowen proclaims it “one of the very best philosophical treatments of libertarian thought, ever” and Deirdre McCloskey calls it a “long and friendly conversation between Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls — a conversation which, astonishingly, reaches agreement.” The book does present an authoritative state of the debate across the spectrum from right libertarianism, on one end, to high liberalism (that shares some ideas with democratic socialism), on the other end. My point is not to question Tomasi’s own version of “market democracy” as a remix of Hayek and Rawls, but to use his sympathetic restatements of views across the liberal spectrum in order to show the basic misframings and common misunderstandings that cut across the liberal-libertarian viewpoints surveyed in the book. The heart of the debate is not in the answers to carefully framed questions, but in the framing itself.     

Is capitalism necessary?: A critique of the neoclassical economics of organization

In recent years, neoclassical economists have offered a theory of the capitalist firm which implies that the corporation is uniquely adapted to the complexities of the modern industrial economy. Hence, it is argued, capitalism is necessary to efficiency. This paper designs a non-capitalist firm that satisfies all the criteria for efficiency unumerated by the neoclassical institutional economists. The design suggests that by separating capitalism from the capital market, advocates of non-capitalist market systems need not discard the capital market as an instrument of economic control.     

Region? Why Region? Security,Hermeneutics, and the Making of the Black Sea Region

In the context of post–Cold War European integration, ‘making’ regions has become commonplace. Far from reducing the significance of regional initiatives, inflationary regional labelling draws attention to the significant role played by ‘regions’ as legitimating political vectors. Why are political projects formulated in regional terms? Critically examining the Black Sea region project, this article suggests that region-making transcends the boundary between theoretical and political praxis. Regional entrepreneurs frequently use different conceptual categories in the formulation and justification of their initiatives. In order to understand why regional forms are preferred politically, it is necessary to scrutinise closely this contextual interaction between political praxis and conceptual logic. The article maps the various concepts of region which coexist in the Black Sea region project, and discusses their relationship with four political and hermeneutical strategies that link the regional project with its context, profoundly marked by the logic of European security integration. The ‘double hermeneutics’ of the Black Sea region highlights the contradictory security logics that structure European security in general and this regional project in particular. In the conclusion, the article draws attention to the significant epistemological and normative consequences of the double hermeneutics of the Black Sea region.     

Awash in a Sea of Confusion: Benefit Corporations,Social Enterprise,and the Fear of “Greenwashing”

In the last five years, the majority of U.S. states enacted benefit corporation legislation, creating a new legal form of business that embraces the “triple-bottom line” of people, planet, and profit. Benefit corporation status provides legal protections for directors and officers, who may now balance social and environmental impact with shareholder returns. It also creates rich opportunities for social entrepreneurs, gives investors more socially responsible options, and offers a helpful designation for consumers. I describe the history and purpose of benefit corporations, evaluate their pros and cons, and argue that safeguards against “greenwashing” make benefit corporations a valuable business form of social enterprise.     

A Political Economy Application of the “Tragedy of the Anticommons”: The Greek Government Debt Crisis

The tragedy of the anticommons unfolds when separate social agents—be they private owners of a property who intend to use the property for their own economic benefit or political actors who pursue their political objectives—do not hold effective rights to use their economic or political power for their own purposes without consent of the other players of the economic or political game. I shall discuss the Greek government debt crisis and the Eurozone countries’ policies toward Greece within the analytical framework of the tragedy of the anticommons in this paper. I do not intend to dig deep into the structure and long-term trends of public and private finances in Greece. I shall only show that the successive bail-out programs of the Eurozone countries were doomed to fail because of these countries’ competitive and non-cooperative approach to the Greek financial problems. I shall also show that a coordinating agency, say the IMF, can foster the coordinated outcome only under strict informational conditions.     

Why do People Care about Sea Lions? A Fishing Game to Study the Value of Endangered Species

Previous research proposes that human beings are motivated to protect endangered species for various reasons: consumptive use value, non-consumptive use value, non-use value, and intrinsic value. However, it has been difficult to tease apart these values at the behavioral level. Using an innovative fishing game, we study an important tradeoff between one kind of use value (monetary value) and one kind of non-use value (existence value) of the endangered Steller sea lion. In the fishing game, players make repeated decisions on how much pollock to harvest for profit in each period in a dynamic ecosystem. The population of the endangered sea lion depends on the population of pollock, which in turn depends on the harvesting behavior of humans. The data show that in general, people responded to the financial value (as a tourist resource), but not the existence value, of the sea lion by cutting down commercial fish harvesting to keep more sea lions in the ecosystem. However, not all people behaved the same regarding the existence value. Females displayed a higher existence value than males, as did people who reported stronger pro-environmental attitudes than those with weaker pro-environmental attitudes. Our findings have multiple implications on public opinion elicitation and public policy design.     

A Rawlsian Defense of the Individual Mandate: The “Collective Asset” Approach

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires individuals to get coverage or pay a fine (or “shared responsibility payment”) starting in 2014. This mandate had been at the center of a contentious political and legal debate. Although the Mandate is key to ending discriminations based on pre-existing conditions in the individual insurance market, its constitutionality had been challenged. We argue that the Obama administration's legal argument for the constitutionality of the Mandate by invoking conventional economic categories such as “negative externalities” is inadequate in addressing the economic and moral significance of the Mandate. As an alternative, we suggest a Rawlsian approach. Specifically, we will borrow the Rawlsian notion of “collective asset” to articulate the moral appeal of the Mandate and its social insurance logic.     

Waves of Populism: A Recent Manifestation of Polanyi’s “Double Movement”?

Abstract:

Since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, there has been a new wave of populism in the United States and in Europe. The hypothesis of this article is that this GFC has created the conditions for the resurgence of populism. According to Polanyi’s work of 1944, The Great Transformation, the market is “utopian” and must be imposed by the state. Further, there is a disciplinary dimension, which separates the individual worker from the community, for the purposes of allowing the “prod of hunger” to be effective. This disciplinary dimension of the market, which is based on Polanyi’s analysis of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can be extended. Several phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have intensified the tensions inherent in the market: fragmented production by means of finely divided global supply chains, increasing inequality due to the market structure; automation, declining labor share; increasing indebtedness; financialization; and erosion of protective labor market institutions, such as welfare and unionization. Populist movements are part of the backlash or “double movement” against these tensions inherent in the market.

Polanyi’s analysis may contribute to a greater understanding of what may be a global inflection point at present.