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This article redescribes early modern European defenses of private property in terms of a theoretical project of seeking to establish the true or essential nature of property. Most of the scholarly literature has focused on the historical and normative issues relating to the various accounts of original acquisition around which these defenses were organized. However, in my redescription, these so-called "original acquisition stories" appear as methodological devices for an analytic reduction and resolution of property into its fundamental elements and axioms. Through these stories, property is "created" in the form of the classical liberal paradigm of presumptively exclusive, private ownership of material things. The problem is that this project of "creation" is also a project which arbitrarily excludes or marginalizes other forms and systems of property, and especially usufructuary forms of common property. After critically explicating this early modern project of creation, I go on to argue that the classical liberal paradigm and its problems continue to inform property theory and discourse in the late modern era.

This paper integrates unproductive activity into a Marxist growth model based on Marx's reproduction schemes. Labor extraction and technological change are related to the production and distribution of surplus and thus are endogenous. Unproductive labor is shown to have potentially contradictory effects. It can squeeze profits and reduce growth or increase work intensity and develop productivity enhancing technological change, which increase profitability and growth. Empirical evidence indicates that both effects occurred in the postwar United States. Marx's reproduction schemes are also shown to rely on a classical growth dynamic in which the profit and savings rates determine the rate of growth.

This paper examines the effect of class conflict on industrial location both theoretically and empirically. It demonstrates that there is a sound theoretical basis and empirical support for the conclusion that U.S. industries have chosen to abandon agglomeration and scale economies in order to secure a distribution of income that favors capital at the expense of labor. The decline of the U.S. manufacturing belt is examined with reference to union density, bargaining power, and the effects that large-scale production plants have on these factors. The meat packing industry in the postwar United States serves as a case study to establish the specific ways that class conflict has shaped the scale profile and geographic distribution of production plants. The paper builds upon the class conflict approach to urban and regional economics pioneered by Matthew Edel and David Gordon and aims to demonstrate its explanatory power. JEL classification: R30, J51, B51.

The use of organic compounds in the European Union will in the future be regulated in accordance with the Council Directive 1999/13/EC of 11 March 1999 [1]. In this directive, any organic compound is considered to be a volatile organic compound (VOC) if it has a vapour pressure of 10 Pa or more at 20°C, or has a corresponding volatility under the particular condition of use. Introduction of such a limit will sometimes create problems, because vapour pressures cannot be determined with an infinite accuracy. Published data on vapour pressures for a true VOC will sometimes be found to be below 10 Pa and vice versa. When the same limit was introduced in the USA, a considerable amount of time and money were spent in vain on comparing incommensurable data [2].