Privilege and Creative Destruction

Privilege and Creative Destruction PDF Author: Stanley I. Kutler
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801839832
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In this now-classic work in legal and constitutional theory, Stanley I. Kutler examines one of the Supreme Court's most celebrated decisions. In 1837, the Court rules that the state of Massachusetts had the right to erect a free bridge over the Charles River even though it had previously chartered a privately owned toll bridge at the same location. The Court's decision fostered the idea of "creative destruction," a process that encourages new forms of property at the expense of older ones. Exploring the origins, context, and impact of this decision, Kutler integrates traditional American constitutional history with the "new legal history: that emphasizes the social and economic bases of legal change.

Privilege and Creative Destruction

Privilege and Creative Destruction PDF Author: Stanley I. Kutler
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801839832
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In this now-classic work in legal and constitutional theory, Stanley I. Kutler examines one of the Supreme Court's most celebrated decisions. In 1837, the Court rules that the state of Massachusetts had the right to erect a free bridge over the Charles River even though it had previously chartered a privately owned toll bridge at the same location. The Court's decision fostered the idea of "creative destruction," a process that encourages new forms of property at the expense of older ones. Exploring the origins, context, and impact of this decision, Kutler integrates traditional American constitutional history with the "new legal history: that emphasizes the social and economic bases of legal change.

The Abolition Of Antitrust

The Abolition Of Antitrust PDF Author: Gary Hull
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9780765802828
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"The essays in this book present a sustained economic, historical, moral, and legal broadside against the various federal statutes known as antitrust doctrine. They explode the cherished myths underlying the antitrust laws, and expose their intellectual fountainhead in a morality of self-sacrifice that is incompatible with individual rights, free enterprise, and objective law. With the publication of this text, businessmen, lawyers, economists, policy makers, legislators, and judges finally have access to a systemic critique of the antitrust laws. From here on, if antitrust continues to violate the rights of businessmen and to ravage the American economy, it is not for lack of knowing how and why."--Adam Mossoff, Assistant Professor of Law, Michigan State University The Abolition of Antitrust asserts that antitrust laws--on economic, legal, and moral grounds--are bad, and provides convincing evidence supporting arguments for their total abolition. Every year, new antitrust prosecutions arise in the U.S. courts, as in the cases against 3M and Visa/MasterCard, as well as a number of ongoing antitrust cases, such as those involving Microsoft and college football's use of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Gary Hull and the contributing authors show that these cases--as well as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act itself--are based on an erroneous interpretation of the history of American business, premised on bad economics. They equivocate between economic and political power--the power to produce versus the power to use physical force. For Hull, anti-trust prosecutions are based on a horrible moral inversion: that it is acceptable to sacrifice America's best producers. The contributors explain how key antitrust ideas, for instance, "monopoly," "restraint of trade," and "anticompetitive behavior," have been used to justify prosecution, and then make clear why those ideas are false. They sketch the historical, legal, economic, and moral reasoning that gave rise to the passage and growth of antitrust legislation. All of the theoretical points in this volume are woven around a number of fascinating cases, both historical and current--including the Charles River Bridge, Alcoa, General Electric, and Kellogg/General Mills. This is a dynamic and accessible work that is not simply a polemical argument for a particular policy position. Designed for the uninformed but educated layman, The Abolition of Antitrust also makes positive arguments in defense of wealth creation, business, and profit, explains the proper role of government, and offers a rational view of the meaning of contract and economic freedom. Gary Hull is director of the Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace (VEM) at Duke University, and has taught philosophy and business ethics at the Fuqua School of Business, Whittier College, and the Claremont Graduate School. He is coeditor of The Ayn Rand Reader.

The Abolition of Antitrust

The Abolition of Antitrust PDF Author: Nathan Edmonson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000938794
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The Abolition of Antitrust asserts that antitrust laws--on economic, legal, and moral grounds--are bad, and provides convincing evidence supporting arguments for their total abolition. Every year, new antitrust prosecutions arise in the U.S. courts, as in the cases against 3M and Visa/MasterCard, as well as a number of ongoing antitrust cases, such as those involving Microsoft and college football's use of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Gary Hull and the contributing authors show that these cases--as well as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act itself--are based on an erroneous interpretation of the history of American business, premised on bad economics. They equivocate between economic and political power--the power to produce versus the power to use physical force. For Hull, anti-trust prosecutions are based on a horrible moral inversion: that it is acceptable to sacrifice America's best producers. The contributors explain how key antitrust ideas, for instance, "monopoly," "restraint of trade," and "anticompetitive behavior," have been used to justify prosecution, and then make clear why those ideas are false. They sketch the historical, legal, economic, and moral reasoning that gave rise to the passage and growth of antitrust legislation. All of the theoretical points in this volume are woven around a number of fascinating cases, both historical and current--including the Charles River Bridge, Alcoa, General Electric, and Kellogg/General Mills. This is a dynamic and accessible work that is not simply a polemical argument for a particular policy position. Designed for the uninformed but educated layman, The Abolition of Antitrust also makes positive arguments in defense of wealth creation, business, and profit, explains the proper role of government, and offers a rational view of the meaning of contract and economic freedom.

Creating a Nation of Joiners

Creating a Nation of Joiners PDF Author: Johann N. Neem
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674030794
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville published his observations in Democracy in America, Americans have recognized the distinctiveness of their voluntary tradition. In a work of political, legal, social, and intellectual history, Neem traces the origins of this venerable tradition to the vexed beginnings of American democracy in Massachusetts.

The Transcendentalists and Their World

The Transcendentalists and Their World PDF Author: Robert A. Gross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374711887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

The Investment Frontier

The Investment Frontier PDF Author: John Denis Haeger
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438405375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The American West did not grow in isolation from the East. On the contrary, New York financiers and other eastern entrepreneurs were crucial to America's western economic development, providing the necessary capital and expertise to transform the West into a productive part of the nation's economy. This thesis is powerfully demonstrated by John Denis Haeger in this study concerning the "Old Northwest" (the present-day states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin) during the years 1815-1840. The result of years of research in manuscript collections and government documents, the book provides a comprehensive picture of early land speculators, examining their investments in farm lands, town lots, banks and transportation improvements, as well as their influence on western businessmen and institutions. It also explores their political and economic affairs on the East Coast, since these matters dramatically affected the scope of their western investments. Historians' generalizations about nonresident investors or eastern speculators have previously assumed a common type and business method when, in fact, easterners possessed varying economic goals and utilized different business strategies. To demonstrate this, Haeger compares and contrasts the promoter Charles Butler and the conservative speculators Isaac and Arthur Bronson, key figures among New York's financial elite, whose careers and strategies are for the first time described in detail. The activities of these investment pioneers, whose "every move was calculated to return profits," challenge the traditional images of westward expansion as a largely unplanned and spontaneous movement of people and capital.

States' Rights and the Union

States' Rights and the Union PDF Author: Forrest McDonald
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700612270
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Forrest McDonald has long been recognized as one of our most respected and provocative intellectual hsitorians. With this new book, he once again delivers an illuminating meditation on a major theme in American history and politics. Elegantly and accessibly written for a broad readership, McDonald's book provides an insightful look at states' rights-an issue that continues to stir debate nationwide. From constitutional scholars to Supreme Court justices to an electorate that's grown increasingly wary of federal power, the concept of states' rights has become a touchstone for a host of political and legal controversies. But, as McDonald shows, that concept has deep roots that need to be examined if we're to understand its implications for current and future debates. McDonald's study revolves around the concept of imperium in imperio-literally "sovereignty within sovereignty" or the division of power within a single jurisdiction. With this broad principle in hand, he traces the states' rights idea from the Declaration of Independence to the end of Reconstruction and illuminates the constitutional, political, and economic contexts in which it evolved. Although the Constitution, McDonald shows, gave the central government expansive powers, it also legitimated the doctrine of states' rights. The result was an uneasy tension and uncertainty about the nature of the central government's relationship to the states. At times the issue bubbled silently and unseen beneath the surface of public awareness, but at other times it exploded. McDonald follows this episodic rise and fall of federal-state relations from the Hamilton-Jefferson rivalry to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, New England's resistance to Jefferson's foreign policy and the War of 1812, the Nullification Controversy, Andrew Jackson's war against the Bank of the United States, and finally the vitriolic public debates that led to secession and civil war. Other scholars have touched upon these events individually, but McDonald is the first to integrate all of them from the perspective of states' rights into one synthetic and magisterial vision. The result is another brilliant study from a masterful historian writing on a subject of great import for Americans.

Inventing the Charles River

Inventing the Charles River PDF Author: Karl Haglund
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262083078
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
An illustrated account of the creation of the Charles River Basin, focusing on the precarious balance between transportation planning and the stewardship of the public realm. The Charles River Basin, extending nine miles upstream from the harbor, has been called Boston's "Central Park." Yet few realize that this apparently natural landscape is a totally fabricated public space. Two hundred years ago the Charles was a tidal river, edged by hundreds of acres of salt marshes and mudflats. Inventing the Charles River describes how, before the creation of the basin could begin, the river first had to be imagined as a single public space. The new esplanades along the river changed the way Bostonians perceived their city; and the basin, with its expansive views of Boston and Cambridge, became an iconic image of the metropolis. The book focuses on the precarious balance between transportation planning and stewardship of the public realm. Long before the esplanades were realized, great swaths of the river were given over to industrial enterprises and transportation—millponds, bridges, landfills, and a complex network of road and railway bridges. In 1929, Boston's first major highway controversy erupted when a four-lane road was proposed as part of a new esplanade. At twenty-year intervals, three riverfront road disputes followed, successively more complex and disputatious, culminating in the lawsuits over "Scheme Z," the Big Dig's plan for eighteen lanes of highway ramps and bridges over the river. More than four hundred photographs, maps, and drawings illustrate past and future visions for the Charles and document the river's place in Boston's history.

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story PDF Author: R. Kent Newmyer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807841648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
The primary founder and guiding spirit of the Harvard Law School and the most prolific publicist of the nineteenth century, Story served as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1811 to 1845. His attitudes and goals as lawyer, politician, judge, and leg

Enterprising Elite

Enterprising Elite PDF Author: Robert F. Dalzell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674257658
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
More than any other single group of individuals, the Boston Associates were responsible for the sweeping economic transformation that occurred in New England between 1815 and 1861. Through the use of the corporate form, they established an extensive network of modern business enterprises that were among the largest of the time. Their most notable achievement was the development of the Waltham-Lowell system in the textile industry, but they were also active in transportation, banking, and insurance, and at the same time played a major role in philanthropy and politics. Evaluating each of these efforts in turn and placing the Associates in the context of the society and culture that produced them, the author convincingly explains the complex motives that led the group to undertake initiatives on so many different fronts. Dalzell shows that men like Francis Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton, and Amos and Abbott Lawrence are best understood as transitional figures. Although they used modern methods when it suited their interest, they were most concerned with protecting the positions they had already won at the top of a traditional social order. Thus, for all the innovations they sponsored, their commitment to change remained both partial and highly selective. And while something very like an industrial revolution did occur in New England during the nineteenth century, paradoxically the Associates neither sought nor welcomed it. On the contrary, as time passed they became increasingly preoccupied with combating the forces of change. In addition to the light it sheds on a crucial chapter of business history, this gracefully written study offers fresh insights into the role and attitudes of elites during the period. Furthermore it contradicts some of the prevailing thought about entrepreneurial behavior in the early phases of industrialization in America.