Profits require that the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts. For example, half a chair is not half price of the full chair; most times you cannot sell two halves of a chair separately, or price them separately, even when you assemble the chair yourself from packaged parts. Similarly, the price a carpenter will charge for a chair is necessarily greater than the cost of the parts that make up the chair. In that sense, the whole cannot be reduced to the parts because the price of the whole is necessarily greater than the costs of the parts. If we equated prices to costs, there would…
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Free Market Economics vs. Capitalism
Free market economics is about competition between businesses, and it operates under the assumptions of a closed system in which wealth can be redistributed, but the total wealth must remain constant. Capitalism is the contrary idea that the economy is an open system in which wealth can be infused, in order to create a net growth for the economy. The wealth infusion is carried out by the wealthy using a business model that is stripped of risks, and the lender is certain to gain wealth over time, making the rich get richer and the poor poorer. This post discusses how free markets are different from capitalism; in the former, wealth…
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The Balanced Organization
Vedic philosophy describes the body as a universe and the universe as a body. Since the world is intended for living beings, there is no fundamental divide between “physical sciences”, “life sciences”, and “social sciences”. Thus, the cosmic structure, the social structure, the biological structure, and the psychological structure are parts of a single continuum. Given this continuum, we can presume that what lies in between the categories that Vedic texts already describe can also be described in the same way as the other types of entities on the continuum. I will use this post to illustrate the application of Vedic principles to sketch the foundations of an Organizational Theory,…
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How Culture Influences Religion
We generally think of religion as something that pertains to transcendence beyond the current material existence. The reality, however, is that the day-to-day practice of religion involves societies whose cultural norms must be compatible with the tenets of the religion. If there is a misfit between culture and religion, then most likely the religion would be changed rather than the culture. This fact has important implications for the understanding of religion, namely, that the vision of transcendence we create is often determined by the vision of material existence we currently want to lead. Similarly, those serious about the long-term viability of religion must pay close attention to its cultural fit.…
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Why Sāńkhya Doesn’t Have Objects of Action
Even a casual look at Sāńkhya reveals an apparent asymmetry in its ontology, namely that there are five sense-objects called Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether, corresponding to the five senses of knowledge Nose, Tongue, Eyes, Skin, and Ears respectively, but there aren’t corresponding sense-objects for the five senses of action, namely, Hands, Legs, Anus, Genitals, and Speech. Why do senses of knowledge have their corresponding objects and the senses of action don’t? This post delves into this question and demonstrates how action and sensation are unified in Sāńkhya. In getting to this conclusion, the post also discusses why many fundamental ideas in science such as “force”, “property” and “law”…
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The Varna System of Social Organization
Several of my previous posts articulated the conceptual basis of an economic system different than the one that presently exists. These foundations include: (1) the real economic value lies in the objective properties of matter rather than in its human perception, and an economic system when organized around this objective value tends towards stability, (2) the problems in the current economic systems—both socialism and capitalism—arise from the existence of middlemen either in the form of global corporations or governments, and (3) the economy and government should be localized in a geography to administer the exchange of goods and services, while the exchange of knowledge—ideas and methods—must be globalized, thus creating…
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Why My Website Has a Copyright Claim
Some readers noted after my previous post (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) that my website has a copyright sign (©) at the bottom of each page. So it seems that I’m protesting the existence of patents but I indicate that the protest itself (my article) is copyrighted. That would seem hypocritical. Would I allow anyone free access to copy the content of my website and the books that I have published, given that I’m advocating against intellectual property? This post compares patents with copyrights.
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Why Intellectual Property is a Flawed Notion
If you talk to a mathematician about their theories, they will say that mathematics is a discovery rather than invention. If you ask a physicist about their theory, they will claim that they are discovering the nature of reality rather than inventing it. But if you talk to a technologist or a corporation about their ideas, they will claim that they are inventing these ideas, and hence they own them. How can one idea be an invention while another is a discovery? This post discusses the nature of ideas and why they cannot be owned, although they can be kept secret. In other words, ideas can be trade secrets but…
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What the New World Order Could Be
The term “New World Order” often refers to a system of global governance and economics, including the system of monetary exchanges and trade established through institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the balance of power between the nations through organizations such as the United Nations. Over the years, these institutions have been undermined by their members, for aims of personal profit and power, giving rise to many regional and transnational groupings. Philosophically, however, the term also refers to any system that can be used to meet its original goals of global governance and economic policy. In recent times, the term is sometimes used to…
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Do Supply and Demand Define Economic Value?
Economists have taught us that nothing by itself has intrinsic value. The value, according to them, rather depends on supply and demand for that thing. If the supply is high and the demand is low, then the value automatically decreases. Conversely, if the demand is high and the supply low, then the value automatically increases. This idea has led to the notion that monetary value is a figment of our collective imagination; that there is nothing intrinsic in nature that has monetary value, and therefore economics isn’t the study of intrinsic value but rather the study of how humans perceive the value in things based on supply and demand. This…