1812 Stephen Pearl Andrews (d. May 21, 1886), anarchist abolitionist, Modern Times community founder (with Josiah Warren; 1799 - 1874), born at Templeton, Massachusetts, USA.
He was a lawyer, author (The Sovereignty of the Individual) and free-love advocate; it is said that he knew 32 languages.
He started with a brilliant career at the American bar and sacrificed it by his zealous work for the abolition of slavery. Andrews also contributed frequently to the Truth Seeker, a journal of rational thought that is still in publication (other eminent contributors included Thomas Edison, Clarence Darrow, Mark Twain, Robert G Ingersoll, HL Mencken, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Margaret Sanger). By the 1860s he was propounding an ideal society called Pantarchy, and from this he moved on to a philosophy he called "universology", which stressed the unity of all knowledge and activities.
Andrews was cited in the article on Anarchism by none other than Prince Peter Kropotkin in the famed 1910 edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Others who Kropotkin cites include Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, Josiah Warren, Herbert Spencer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, August Spies, Albert Parsons ...
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Pip Wilson posted item above at 7:37 PM | Permalink
1 Comments:
The Cost Principle applied to commerce, in place of the value principle, is analogous to replacing the principle of might making right with a concept known as the rule of law.
Caveat emptor
"55. Human beings are subject to various wants. Some of these wants have to be supplied to sustain life at all: others render life comfortabe and happy. If an individual produced, with no aid from others, all the numerous things requisite to supply his wants, the things which he produced - his products - would belong to himself. He would have no occasion to exchange with others, and they would have no equitable claims upon him for anything which was his.
56. But such is not the case. We all want continually for our own support or comfort those things which are produced by others. Hence we exchange products. Hence comes trade, - buying and selling, - Commerce, including the hiring of the labour of others. Trade is, therefore, a necessity of human society, and consists of the exchange of the labour, or the products of the labour, of one person, for the labour, or the products of the labour, of another person.
57. It is clear, if this echange is not equal, if one party gives more than his own labour - either in the form of labour or product - than he gets of the labour of the other, - either in the form of labour or product, - that he is opressed, and becomes, so far as this inequality goes, the slave or subject of the other. He has, just so far, to expend his labour, not for his own benefit, but for the benefit of another. To produce good or beneficent results from trade, therefore, the exchanges should be equal. Hence it follows that the essential element of beneficent Commerse is EQUITY, or that which is just and equal between man and man.(Stephen Pearl Andrews, The Science of Society)
A sound work ethic based upon true and equitable commerce is either our furture, sooner or later, or not. If not then our existence is severly limited.
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