Condolences ;)

As Herman Daly has noted: know your enemy.

I've found in particular the rationale around land rents for minerals and extraction, dating to David Ricardo, are an interesting place to poke around. Hotelling's Rule is based on that, though through an intermediary.

There's also the associated legal concept of the Rule of Capture, which is applied to the notion of property rights in mineral resources is also based on some curiously fallacious legal argument. Which also leads me to realise that amongst various categories of knowledge, legal practice seems to be its own animal, based variously on statute, precedent, and persuasion, rather than empirical foundations.

(Other realms of knowledge include revelatory knowledge, commonly in religion; convention and authority, in various fields; communities of practice as with technical arts and some societies; and poetic or literary knowledge, essentially of narrative and record which are passed down but again need have no basis in any external empirical foundations.)

There's the equivocation between economic wealth and accounting profits, which are ... somewhat related ... but divided by the fact that the former includes all accounting of external costs and benefits, whilst the latter does not. Financial systems are cost- and risk-externalising machines.

I've recently discovered Katharina Pistor through the Ezra Klein podcast. She writes on the relationship of property to economics. She is hitting on themes I'd been struggling towards and does some excellent analysis and research. Transcript:

<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...>

Book: The Code of Capital (2019) <https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D936D0247CB138F23F157A7...>

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have just published The Big Myth, which looks at the selling of the notion of free markets, specifically in the US. It's an outgrowth of their earlier work on disinformation in the tobacco, CFCs/ozone layer, lead, and oil / global warming disinformation campaigns by major corporations.

<https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/naomi-oreskes/the...>

I've yet to land a copy, but from several interviews the work seems useful though quite probably incomplete, as there was an earlier practice of such advocacy in Britain, as evidenced by The Economist's prospectus announcing in 1843 a new publication "THE ECONOMIST, which will contain— First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day..."

<https://www.economist.com/unknown/1843/08/05/prospectus>

A later editor of the Economist, Francis Wrigley Hirst, was key in persuading Oliver Wendell Holmes of the concepts of free markets and their applicability to the realm of free speech, ultimately leading to the expression "the free market of ideas" in a 1950s US Supreme Court judgement. That draws on (though mischaracterises) John Stuart Mill's writings on free speech and liberty as well.

I've written on that last variously on HN, this seems a reasonably coherent summary:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22850549>

For those interested in more, an Algolia search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

Susan Gordon's written on how J.S. Mill's notions have been distorted and misrepresented in "John Stuart Mill and the 'Marketplace of Ideas'" (1997) <https://philpapers.org/rec/GORJSM> (full text on Sci-Hub / LibGen).

Other criticism of the concept, Stanley Ingber, "The Marketplace of Ideas: A legitimizing myth": <https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...> (PDF)

There's more, though this is a good start and seems to be less generally acknowledged even amongst notable critics of economic orthodoxy. Steve Keen, Philip Mirowski, and Mariana Mazzucato would be other good names to read.