Surely it is not too much to ask a modern liberal theory of justice that it provide a coherent account of why some contracts, e.g., self-sale contract, should be deemed invalid and why the rights such contracts would legally alienate are inalienable. In that sense, the theory of inalienable rights provides a historical litmus test for liberalism.
Archives for Fatal Flaws
Many posts will be “The Fatal Flaw in” this or that so let’s make it a category.
Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument
What is the inalienable rights theory that descends from the Reformation through the Enlightenment and that answers the classical apologies for slavery and autocracy based on implicit or explicit voluntary contracts?
Inalienable Rights: Part II Intellectual History
Where did the ideas behind the inalienable rights theory emerge in the history of thought?
The fatal flaw in finance theory: Capitalizing “goodwill”
The fatal flaw at the root of today’s post is really what might be called “the fundamental myth” about the current property system, namely that the market-contractual role of being the residual claimant in a productive opportunity is treated as a “property right” that is currently owned by some legal party (e.g., the corporation having the contractual role) and that may be bought and sold as well as capitalized into the party’s current valuation.
The Fatal Flaw in Cost-Benefit Analysis
In Part I of this commentary on the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, the focus was on the social engineering perspective underlying the search for such an index. But at the end of that commentary, I noted that the Commission’s discussion of different indices was rather “academic” since there [...]