Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I'll treat you today, dear reader, to another blog post inspired by shenanigans over at Yahoo!Answers. Someone asked, "Can anyone philosophically justify the existence of private property?" Some further explanation indicated that he had titles to land especially in mind. For the record, my answer was what regular readers of this blog would likely expect.   The pragmatic answer is surely best: those social institutions are right which work, over time and on the whole. Private title to land is justified, if at all, only on that basis. Whether it IS justified by practical consequences is a fascinating empirical question. Consider Richard Pipes' book on this question, for example. That is much more interesting than trying to parse the differences between Locke and Rousseau on some primordial appropriation. But I'm bring this into Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed today because of another commenter. He ignored the specific matter of land and gave us a little lect...

An issue quite analogous to depreciation is depletion. For businesses that operate by extracting resources from the ground, surely one of their most important assets is the expected amount of oil, coal, diamonds, or whatever-it-might be that is still down there, yet to be extracted, on the land owned or leased by the company for this purpose. Over time, as oil [let us say] is removed, necessarily the remaining oil under there is depleted. The issue has often been politically contentious. Indeed, references to the oil depletion allowance in various stages of its development run like a Wagnerian motif through the various volumes of Robert Caro’s work on the life and times of Lyndon Johnson, who as both Representative and Senator from the oil-rich state of Texas was a stalwart defender of a very generous allowance for the tax accounting books, one which does not have to be duplicated in the financial accounting books. But let’s stick to the latter.   One way in which account...

  Continuing down the list of assets on a balance sheet (beyond those described in our last discussion of such a sheet), we come to a line for prepaid expenses. If our business has paid $1,800 for a year of insurance coverage, it will own something, a claim against the insurance company. This may not sound like an “asset” in a rough commonsensical sense of the world but … hey … the common sense cookie often crumbles. We have to recognize this as an asset in order to convey fairly the economic realities our books are designed to describe. We’ll move now to tools & equipment. Perhaps our business involves a conveyer belt, which we use to move a product from the back room to the front, where it is shown to the customers and, with luck, purchased. The conveyor belt is a fixed asset or, in less formal parlance, it’s part of our “overhead.”   When we bought the conveyor belt and had it installed (for, we will say, $500) we might have paid $100 cash, charging...