The economics of collective action

by John Rogers Commons, Kenneth H. Parsons (Editor)

Genres: Economics

382 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

John Rogers Commons was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R....

Reviews

[Tommy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Negotiational psychology" instead of supply/demand curves.

...Adam Smith identified division of labor with division of ownership. But they are separate. Labor creates and exchanges useful things, but in doing so the laborers may be commanded by an owner, like the United States Steel Corporation, or by a sovereign owner like the communist state of Russia. Hence, starting with the division of ownerships, it is needful, first of all, to transfer ownership before the labor transfer is permitted by sovereignty. A laborer takes my apples from my orchard. Is he a laborer or is he a thief? The labor process is the same, but I may call in sovereignty in the shape of a policeman. The economists assumed that the ownership process was the same as the labor process. The many technicalities of law required to define ownership may be summarized, for economic purposes, as transfers of legal control by sovereignty, distinguished from transfers of physical control by labor. The early English economists, habituated to the Revolution of 1689, took for granted that the transfers of ownership were made by individuals, like the exchange of commodities, and, therefore, that sovereignty could be eliminated from economic theory. But recent revolutions do not permit us to take the economic behavior of sovereignty for granted, and both the law books and observations reveal that only sovereignty transfers ownership. Sovereignty had not been eliminated — it had been changed from arbitrary to stabilized sovereignty, from feudal to capitalistic sovereignty. Rather should we investigate all of the different kinds of economic transactions through which the expected succession of officials of sovereignty transfers legal control at the requests of subordinate individuals. In this book we have distinguished these economic transactions as bargaining, managerial, and rationing transactions.
A peculiarity of the American system of sovereignty is the separation of sovereign powers along many different lines. There are territorial divisions of municipal and local governments, state governments, and a national government. Within these territorial divisions are separations into legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and, in recent years, a further separation of administrative powers. Over all is a federal Constitution interpreted by a Supreme Court, designed to protect citizens against abuse of sovereign powers by this multitude of sovereigns. The main protection of economic significance is the protection against depriving citizens of life, liberty, or property without “due process of law,” which in its later development, is protection against depriving them of their economic power of collective action.