Author: Matt Bruenig

No violence but personal violence

When I use the word violence in the context of discussing theories of property, I mean a specific thing by it: acting upon the bodies of others without their consent. This is as neutral a definition of “violence” as you will find. It is the definition of violence implied by the concept of self-ownership. It… Continue reading No violence but personal violence

Violence Vouchers: A Descriptive Account of Property

I’ve argued here and elsewhere that property is an institution of involuntary, violent, coercive aggression (I, II, III, IV, V, et al). These arguments are clearly correct, but they are lacking in one important respect: they don’t constitute a full descriptive account of the institution of property. They describe certain characteristics of property — that… Continue reading Violence Vouchers: A Descriptive Account of Property

On FiveThirtyEight

Nate Silver launched FiveThirtyEight this week along with a really long manifesto. In it, he attacks a lot of other journalism and especially opinion writers. This is easy to do because a lot of journalism is pretty bad, often for the reasons he provides. A number of other writers did not take kindly to Silver… Continue reading On FiveThirtyEight

Piketty on Marx

In his new book, Piketty has a rather lucid interpretation of Marx’s hypothesized “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” that also helps illuminate his hypothesis that capital’s share of income will grow in the next century. For Marx, the logic of capitalism would either cause the rate of profit to fall endlessly or… Continue reading Piketty on Marx