private property rights

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

In contemporary Africa people’s customary and collective resource rights are currently being pell-mell converted to an exclusionary private property rights regime by what many regard as fraudulent agreements between, for example, village chiefs (who have customarily held the land in trust for their people) and foreign interests. This constitutes what is generally referred to as a huge ‘land grab’ by capital and foreign states for control over Africa’s land and resources. Private property rights presuppose a social bond between that which is owned and a person, defined as a juridical individual, who is the owner and who has the rights of disposition over that which is owned.

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The existence of this social bond is recognised in almost all bourgeois constitutions and connects ideals of individual private property with notions of individual human rights, the ‘rights of man’ and doctrines and legal protections of those individual rights. The social bond between individual human rights and private property lies at the centre of almost all contractual theories of government. Private property rights are in principle held in perpetuity. They do not expire or dissipate through lack of use. They can pass from one generation to another through inheritance. As a result, there is an inner connection between private property rights and non-oxidisable forms of money. Only the latter can last in perpetuity. But the evolution of forms of paper and fiat money whose relative value is subject to degradation (through, for example, inflation) undermines the initially secure connection between the perpetuity and stability of money forms and that of private property.

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The contemporary version of this doctrine in advanced capitalist societies is that of eminent domain, through which the appropriation of private property in land to bring it into a condition of higher and better usage is legally justified. Private property in both land and money is only, therefore, contingently perpetual. The imposition of private property rights depends upon the existence of state powers and legal systems (usually coupled with monetary taxation arrangements) that codify, define and enforce the contractual obligations that attach to both private property rights and the rights of juridical individuals. There is a good deal of evidence that the coercive power of the state played an important role in opening spaces within which capital could flourish well before private property regimes became dominant.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
by Robert Higgs and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Published 15 Jan 1987

A market system rests on an indispensable foundation of private property rights. These are the effectively enforced expectations of private citizens that they can: (1) personally own property, including their own bodies and labor power, and exclude all others from deciding how the The Great Depression 181 property shall be used; (2) appropriate the income and enjoy any other benefits yielded by the property; and (3) transfer their rights freely to others by mutually satisfactory contractual agreements. Obviously many New Deal laws and similar state statutes either destroyed or attenuated private property rights. The U.S. Constitution, especially its Contracts and Due Process clauses but also its various limitations on the powers of the federal government, gave plaintiffs hope that many of the emergency legislative interventions would be found wanting by the courts.

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Despite the hot political debates that have greeted the successive steps of government expansion, there is surprisingly little scientific understanding of the forces tending to bring it about. J. HIRSHLEIFER We must have government. Only government can perform certain tasks successfully. Without government to defend us from external aggression, preserve domestic order, define and enforce private property rights, few of us could achieve much. Unfortunately a government strong enough to protect us may be strong enough to crush us. In recognition of the immense potential for oppression and destruction, some consider government a necessary evil. Ludwig von Mises, an arch-libertarian but not an anarchist, disputed this characterization.

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Despite major shortcomings, especially its oppression of blacks and Indians, the government created a political and legal environment conducive to rapid economic development, fostering what Willard Hurst, the eminent legal historian, has called a "release of energy."2 Inventiveness, capital formation, and organizational innovation flourished as never before. Specialization and trade increased 3 4 Framework prodigiously. During the nineteenth century th~ nation became the world's richest and freest society. The nation's second century, however, has witnessed a decline of the commitment to limited government and extensive private property rights. In 1900 the government still approximated a minimal state. Americans did not practice pure laissez-faire-no society ever did-but they still placed binding constraints on government and allowed relatively few projections of its power into the economic affairs of private citizens. That long-established restraint has largely dissolved during the past seventy years.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

Th is is the case also in India, where the special economic development zones policy now favored by central and state governments is leading to violence against agricul­ tural producers, the grossest of which was the massacre at Nandigram in West B engal, orchestrated by the ruling M arxist political party, to make way for large-scale Indonesian capital that is as much interested in urban property development as it is in industrial development. Private property rights in this case provided no protection. 20 REBEL CITIES And so it is with the seemingly progressive proposal of awarding private property rights to squatter populations in order to offer them the assets that will permit them to emerge out of poverty. Th is is the sort of proposal now mooted for Rio's favelas, b ut the problem is that the poor, beset with insecurity of income and frequent financial difficulties, can easily be persuaded to trade in that asset for a cash payment at a rela­ tively low price (the rich typically refuse to give up their valued assets at any price, which is why Moses could take a meat axe to the low- income Bronx but not to affluent Park Avenue).

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The creation of this kind o f public space radically diminishes rather t h a n enhances t he potentiality of commoning for all but the very rich. The real problem here, as in Hardin's original morality tale, is not the commons per se, but the failure of individualized private property rights to fulfill common interests in the way they are supposed to do. Why do we not, therefore, focus on the individual ownership of the cattle and indi­ vidual utility-maxim izing behavior, rather than the common pasture, as the basic problem to be addressed? The justification for private property rights in liberal theory, after all, is that they should serve to maximize the common good when socially integrated through th e institutions of fair and free market exchange.

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As of the end of 2009 ( after the worst of the crash was over), there were 1 1 5 billionaires in China, 1 0 1 in Russia, 5 5 in India, 52 in G ermany, 32 in Britain, and 30 in Brazil, in addition to the 413 in the Un ited StatesY The results of this increasing polarization in the d istribution of wealth and power are indelibly etched into the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly become cities of fortified fragments, of gated commun ities and privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance. Th e neoliberal protection of private property rights and their values b ecomes a hegemonic form of politics, even for the lower middle class. In the developing world in p articular, the city is spl i tt i n g into diffe rent sep arate d parts, with the apparent formation of many "microstates." Wealthy neighborhoods p rovided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts and private p o l i ce p a tro l ling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal set­ tlements where water is available on ly at p ubli c fountains, no s anitation system exists, electric ity is pirated by a privileged few, the roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where hou se sh aring is the norm. - Ea c h fra gme n t appears to live and function autonomously, sticking firmly to what it has been able to g rab in the daily fight for survival. 1 3 Under these conditions, ideals o f urban identity, citizenship, and belong­ ing, of a coherent urban politics, already threatened by the spreading malaise of the ind ividualistic neoliberal ethic, become much harder to sustain.

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer
Published 14 Apr 2013

Its use shall also serve the public good.”69 This is an example of a constitutional attempt to balance private property rights with the well-being of the society as a whole. But what we haven’t seen yet is a real strengthening of commons-based property rights that could spark a third Industrial Revolution featuring co-creative production and collaborative consumption, just as individual property rights sparked the first and second Industrial Revolutions. Two main myths have locked the understanding of property rights in what are now outdated tracks of thought: Myth 1: Only private property rights are efficient; other forms are not. Yes, it is true that private property rights have been a huge success story and remain an integral component of the rise of modern capitalism 2.0 and 3.0.

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Whereas earlier the accumulation of wealth had been criticized as greed, under the labor theory wealth was viewed as God’s reward for men’s work. The labor theory of property also created the underpinnings for the argument that poverty is the result of laziness. It thus weakened the ability of the state to intervene in private property rights for the well-being of society as a whole. Private property rights became a success story throughout the era of the first and second Industrial Revolutions. Yet, as discussed earlier, successful growth and the accumulation of material wealth came at the expense of negative externalities in the form of poverty and environmental overshoot.

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In the world of Locke, characterized by small populations, small-scale individual production, and seemingly unlimited resources, it made complete sense to think in terms of individual private property rights. In the twenty-first-century world, with seven billion people, massive distributed networks of co-creative production, and collaborative consumption, as well as increasing resource scarcity and a depleted set of commons, we have entered an era when insisting on the primacy of individual property rights is outdated and in conflict with the real needs of our time. There is a growing recognition that any form of private property rights should also include responsibilities to other stakeholders that might be affected by negative externalities of the goods or services at issue.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 1 Jan 2010

In the neoliberal theory of the Austrian philosopher/economist Friedrich Hayek, writing in the 1940s, this connectivity is tightly coupled: the only way, he argues, to protect radical egalitarianism and individual rights in the face of state violence (that is, fascism and communism) is to install inviolable private property rights at the heart of the social order. This deeply entrenched view has to be challenged head on if capital accumulation and the reproduction of class power are to be effectively challenged. In the field of institutional arrangements, therefore, a wholly new conception of property – of common rather than private property rights – will be required to make radical egalitarianism work in a radically egalitarian way. The struggle over institutional arrangements, then, has to move to the centre of political concerns.

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It includes all those peasant and indigenous populations expelled from the land, deprived of access to their natural resources and ways of life by illegal and legal (that is, state-sanctioned), colonial, neo-colonial or imperialist means, and forcibly integrated into market exchange (as opposed to barter and other forms of customary exchange) by forced monetisation and taxation. The conversion of common rights of usage into private property rights in land completes the process. Land itself becomes a commodity. These forms of dispossession, still extant but most strongly represented in the early stages of capitalist development, have many modern equivalents. Capitalists open up spaces for urban redevelopment, for example, by dispossessing low-income populations from high-value spaces at the lowest cost possible. In places without secure private property rights, such as China or the squatter settlements of Asia and Latin America, violent expulsions of low-income populations by state authorities often lead the way with or without modest compensation arrangements.

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For reasons that are much debated and which will probably never be finally settled, between the Catholic Church’s inquisition and repression of Galileo in the early seventeenth century and Watt’s invention of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century, there occurred in Europe, and in Britain in particular, a radical reconfiguration of the social, political, cultural and legal conditions that turned innovation and new ideas into an open sesame for the creation of wealth and power. A ruling class continued to rule, but not necessarily through the same personae or their biological descendants. The kind of society that emerged was grounded in private property rights, juridical individualism, some version of free markets and free trade. The state increasingly saw its role as the management of this economy as a way to augment its wealth and power. None of this worked perfectly according to the rubrics of John Locke and Adam Smith, and one only has to read Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, with its interminable legal struggles in Chancery, to recognise that British society was and still is constituted as a perpetual power struggle between the old and the new social orders.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

This is less of a problem in a society of tight small-scale farming fully engaged with its local ecological base, where the consequences of doing what you like are more apparent and more likely to react back directly on the doer. But more generally the solution depends ultimately on the fact that buying private property rights is not the same as buying the right to do absolutely anything on one’s property without any sanctions available to the wider community. Hard libertarian adherents of private property rights might say that such sanctions would revert private property to mere usufruct. But since, as I’ve stressed above, private property rights are – like all property rights – inherently collective in their very constitution, then every property regime is usufructuary in the final instance.

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But when we look at historic small farm societies, common property and private property rights usually occur together. Indeed, perhaps the most striking thing for those of us raised on the notion that private property is an invention of modern capitalism is the presence of something akin to private ownership in numerous non-capitalist small farm societies historically. In Robert Netting’s words: ‘Where land is a scarce good that can be made to yield continuously and reliably over the long term by intensive methods, rights approximating those of private ownership will develop.’11 Still, the way private property rights work in the global capitalist economy isn’t conducive to economic localism and small farm societies.

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Currently, few people enjoy such access. In some places, this is because of inadequate legal title that prevents them from securing access to land and its products, something that could arguably be improved by stronger private property rights. But it’s also because of the tendency of private property to concentrate in few hands, which isn’t likely to improve with stronger private property rights. Here is where the similarities between owning a toothbrush and owning a piece of land break down, essentially for two reasons. First, because land is a necessary prerequisite for most human activities, because it’s a limited and non-expandable resource in space and an almost unlimited one in time, then in situations when it’s tradeable for money on open markets its value tends to appreciate over time, rather than depreciate as with most other forms of capital.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It)
by Elizabeth S. Anderson
Published 22 May 2017

Opportunities—positive liberties—are vastly greater with the establishment of a system of property rights. This is a standard argument for a regime of private property rights. It is impeccable. Yet its logical entailments are often overlooked. Every establishment of a private property right entails a correlative duty, coercively enforceable by individuals or the state, that others refrain from meddling with another’s property without the owner’s permission. Private property rights thus entail massive net losses in negative liberty, relative to the state of maximum negative liberty. If Lalitha has private property in a parcel of land, her liberty over that parcel is secured by an exclusive right at the cost of the identical negative liberty of seven billion others over that parcel.

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It follows that even massive state constraints on negative liberty (in the form of enforcements of private property rights) can increase total liberty (in an accounting that weights positive liberty more highly than negative, as any accounting that can justify private property in terms of freedom must). State-enforced constraints on negative liberty can also increase total liberty through their enhancement of republican freedom. This is a venerable argument from the republican tradition: without robust protection of private property rights (which, as we have seen, entail massive net losses of negative liberty), a republican form of government is insecure, because the state is liable to degenerate into despotism, exercising arbitrary power over its subjects.

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Their pamphlets often denounced many injustices, as in Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered, which ranged from the sufferings of John Lilburne and his wife to political domination within the city corporation and the struggles of provincial merchants.20 Levellers were not always committed to a free market based on private property rights in our modern sense, but often defended customary rights, as part of their resistance to the power and domination of the rich. Those large numbers of early modern households already largely dependent on wage labor could not survive without other sources of income—a small cottage garden, or various forms of nonmarketized, or not quite marketized customary communal rights: the right to “glean,” to pick up the dropped corn at harvest, or to fatten a pig or graze a cow on common land.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 11 Mar 2013

Even a State that steals from its people on a massive scale -- like the Para-state -- is better than no State at all. Arbeit Macht Frei I'm a firm believer in the free market. I'm not a fan of free market economists. Here is how Wikipedia sums up the free market view of private property rights: According to the free market view, a secure system of private property rights is an essential part of economic freedom. Such systems include two main rights: the right to control and benefit from property and the right to transfer property by voluntary means. These rights offer people the possibility of autonomy and self-determination according to their personal values and goals.

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Empirical evidence suggests that countries with strong property rights systems have economic growth rates almost twice as high as those of countries with weak property rights systems, and that a market system with significant private property rights is an essential condition for democracy. According to Hernando de Soto, much of the poverty in the Third World countries is caused by the lack of Western systems of laws and well-defined and universally recognized property rights. De Soto argues that because of the legal barriers poor people in those countries can not utilize their assets to produce more wealth. It sounds sensible, doesn't it? The theory of strong private property rights, as the basis for democracy and prosperity is attractive. It appeals to our self-interest and seems to fit the empirical data.

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It actually sits right between the western European countries, all in the top 30, and those of the ex-Soviet block, that follow it. The centuries-long experiment in capitalism has thus produced clear empirical results. US worship of strong private property rights beats slavery, yet is barely better than Soviet-era central planning. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the right-wing economists are chewing on something cold and rubbery. The blind worship of strong private property rights has allowed many abuses. Broadly, it is an excuse for the rich and powerful to steal public assets and then claim they are the "wealth creators." It has been the plank for many a coup, invasion, and even genocide on grounds to stop "socialist" regimes and their "mad" policies.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
by Katharina Pistor
Published 27 May 2019

The legal and doctrinal battles over private property rights in land continued for much of the seventeenth century. Most treaties on property rights continued to assert that the king was the only one to have absolute rights, but some treaties began to prepare the grounds for private individuals to claim similar powers for themselves.31 By the early 1800s, a digest of case law concluded that “an absolute proprietor hath an absolute Power to dispose of his Estate as he pleases, subject only to the Laws of the Land.”32 A new legal concept of absolute private property rights was born. This new legal concept has since conquered the world.

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It is often treated as a coincidence that the economic success that separates modern economies from millennia of much lower growth rates and much greater volatility of wealth closely tracks the rise of nation-states that rely on law as their primary means of social ordering.10 Many commentators herald the advent of private property rights, seen as a critical restraint on state power, as the key explanation for the rise of the West.11 Yet, it may be more accurate to attribute this to the state’s willingness to back the private coding of assets in law, and not only property rights in the narrow sense, but also other legal privileges that confer priority, durability, convertibility, and universality on an asset.

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This question has concerned social and legal theorists for generations.60 One answer to this question is that law is backed by the coercive powers of a state; another reason is law’s capacity to focus collective expectations that minimize deviant behavior and encourage decentralized, private enforcement. Max Weber explained the power of law by invoking the state’s monopoly over the means of coercion.61 Through its courts, bailiffs, and police forces, states enforce not only their own commands, but also private property rights and the binding commitments private parties make to one another. This does not mean that state power is omnipresent. As long as the threat of coercive law enforcement is sufficiently credible, voluntary compliance can be achieved without mobilizing it in every case.62 Others have argued that systems of law can evolve in the absence of coercive state power.63 People have been governing themselves since long before the emergence of modern nation-states.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

A more modern example of property rights is the compulsory military draft. A society without a compulsory military draft is a society that has assigned to potential draftees a private property right over their labour power. Once potential draftees have the private property right, then the society can bargain with them for the supply of their labour, which is of course voluntary military service. Therefore, to those opposed to compulsory military service, the institution of private property rights is a solution. 14. One might therefore argue that trust and reciprocity are not an institution within themselves but rather a subset of the institution that is a mechanism for collective decision-making.

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Second, the table raises an important question: What is a “good” institution? The gaps in the table show that with the exception of trust, institutions do not cover all parts of the exchange process. Consider private property rights. As we have seen, they might help improve incentives for hunters to husband animals or firms to invest in intellectual property. But, by themselves, they are no guarantee of low haggling costs. Any statement, then, that “more” (or more secure) private property rights is a “good” institution for growth is incomplete. Such rights will not provide an incentive for exchange if there is expensive haggling over, say, hunting areas or the right to licence knowledge from patents.

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For the same reason, we would expect profit-maximising businesses to invest less in intangibles if their benefits spill over to others. An important role of institutions is to mitigate this effect. Sometimes this mitigation happens through intellectual property rights, such as patents or copyrights, which create an artificial legal restriction on spillovers: a private property right. Sometimes it happens through direct public subsidy, as when governments provide funding or tax credits for business research: a public property right. Other mechanisms are more complex. For example, academic research depends not only on public subsidy but also on a complex set of norms, rules, and nonmonetary incentives ranging from peer review and citation practices to H-indexes and Nobel Prizes.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 6 Mar 2012

Left unexplained here is why a free marketeer would resist the idea that property developers should be allowed to put tall buildings on valuable land. The memo from Heather Gass went on to explain that the initiative “is designed to abolish private property rights by rezoning and eminent domain.” But all zoning reflects a curtailment of private property rights, and suburban land is regulated. Reaching the crux of the matter, she decried plans “to force us out of our cars by advocating legislation that would penalize car owners by raising parking fees, bridge tolls, and other things associated with driving.”

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These are all good trends, but the fruits of these efforts should be enjoyed by as many people as possible. For this to happen, we need housing supply to grow. The Politics of Urbanism One way to think about the story I’ve been telling here is as a tale of big government run amok, an out-of-control abridgment of private property rights. A better way to think about it is that over the past several decades, there’s been a revolution in our understanding of what property rights entail. We’ve switched from a system in which owning a piece of real estate means you’re entitled to do what you want with it, to one in which owning a piece of real estate means you get wide-ranging powers to veto activities on your neighbors’ land.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
by David Harvey
Published 2 Jan 1995

And it is with this doctrine—its origins, rise, and implications— that I am here primarily concerned.1 Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary.

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Under the assumption that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, or of ‘trickle down’, neoliberal theory holds that the elimination of poverty (both domestically and worldwide) can best be secured through free markets and free trade. Neoliberals are particularly assiduous in seeking the privatization of assets. The absence of clear private property rights—as in many developing countries—is seen as one of the greatest of all institutional barriers to economic development and the improvement of human welfare. Enclosure and the assignment of private property rights is considered the best way to protect against the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ (the tendency for individuals to irresponsibly super-exploit common property resources such as land and water).

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The somewhat chaotic evolution and uneven geographical development of state institutions, powers, and functions over the last thirty years suggests, furthermore, that the neoliberal state may be an unstable and contradictory political form. The Neoliberal State in Theory According to theory, the neoliberal state should favour strong individual private property rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade.1 These are the institutional arrangements considered essential to guarantee individual freedoms. The legal framework is that of freely negotiated contractual obligations between juridical individuals in the marketplace.

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer
by Eoin Ó Broin
Published 5 May 2019

It is hard to see how it could be defended legally insofar as it would be general in application (i.e. to all landlords and not just those with excessive rents) and no compensation would be provided for loss of earnings (as would otherwise be the case when for example the State uses Compulsory Purchase Order powers). While the Constitution allows for restrictions to private property rights when such limitations are to protect the common good and in accordance with principles of social justice, any such restrictions need to be proportionate and fair. One could seek to amend the Constitution to allow the State to regulate private contracts in this way, though given the need for immediate relief for renters and the widescale implications for large sectors of the economy of such a change, such a proposal would take too long and would be difficult to win.

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They are rationally connected to an objective of sufficient importance to warrant interference with a constitutionally protected right and, given the serious social problems which they are designed to meet, they undoubtedly relate to concerns which, in a free and democratic society, should be regarded as pressing and substantial. At the same time, the court is satisfied that they impair those rights as little as possible and their effects on those rights are proportionate to the objectives sought to be attained.41 The key issue is not whether the State can interfere in private property rights, by compulsorily acquiring land at below market prices to meet social and affordable housing need, but whether specific interventions are justified and appropriate compensation provided. The Society of Chartered Surveyors of Ireland’s reports cited earlier shows that the land element of housing prices is significant and rising.

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The campaign will include conferences discussing policy alternatives, a statewide petition to build public support for a legal right to housing, a series of regional rallies and lobbying of Local Authorities on delivery of public housing, along with the holding of a major statewide demonstration later in 2019. Speaking at the launch, Sheila Nunan, President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, said: This week marks the centenary of the First Dail and the Democratic Programme, which demanded that private property rights be ‘subordinated’ to wider public welfare. Today’s housing emergency graphically illustrates the failure to do so. Last October, with support from Raise the Roof in the form of a major rally, the Dail overwhelmingly passed an opposition motion demanding action of evictions and rents, increased investment in public housing and the creation of a legal Right to Housing.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

Today, then, more than three centuries after the siege of Vienna, the key question is how far the West is still capable of maintaining the scientific lead on which, among many other things, its military superiority has for so long been based. Or perhaps the question could be phrased differently. Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West’s winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government? Property Freedom is … a Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his Person, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, within the Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will of another … The great and chief end therefore, of Men’s uniting into Commonwealths … is the preservation of their Property.

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Some people make the mistake of calling that idea ‘democracy’ and imagining that any country can adopt it merely by holding elections. In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law – to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government. ‘There are few words which are used more loosely than the word “Civilization”,’ declared the greatest of all Anglo-Americans, at a time when civilization as he understood it stood in mortal danger. ‘What does it mean?’ His answer is as perfect a definition of the political difference between the West and the Rest as has ever been formulated: It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians.

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The reality of Chávez’s regime, however, is that it is a sham democracy, in which the police and media are used as weapons against political opponents and the revenues from the country’s plentiful oil fields are used to buy support from the populace in the form of subsidized import prices, handouts and bribes. Private property rights, so central to the legal and political order of the United States, are routinely violated. Chávez nationalizes businesses more or less at will, from cement manufacturers to television stations to banks. And, like so many tinpot dictators in Latin American history, he makes a mockery of the rule of law by changing the constitution to suit himself – first in 1999, shortly after his first election victory; most recently in 2009, when he abolished term-limits to ensure his own indefinite re-election.

The Locavore's Dilemma
by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu
Published 29 May 2012

As the geographer Brian Murton observes, famines have plagued humankind for at least 6,000 years and have long been used by scholars and chroniclers to “slice up history into manageable portions.”9 While researchers still disagree on the widespread, recurring, and severe character of prehistorical hunger, there is a general consensus that, with the invention of agriculture, famines typically resulted from a succession of mediocre harvests rather than from an isolated crop failure. Some could be traced back to human factors such as wars, ethnic and religious persecution, price controls, protectionism, excessive taxation, and lack of respect for private property rights. Others were due to natural origins, such as unseasonable temperatures, excessive or insufficient rainfall, floods, insect pests, rodents, pathogens, soil degradation, and epidemics that made farmers or their beasts of burden unfit for work.10 In many cases, a number of these factors were involved.

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Besides, while the building and maintenance of massive structures entailed enormous sums of money, it paled in comparison to the amounts required to provision a decent sized city for even a short period of time. As such, Torfs stated, the very notion of effective public granaries had always been impractical. Efficient provisioning, he concluded, should be left in the hands of farmers and merchants, with government intervention limited to guaranteeing freedom to trade and private property rights, a prescription that has been validated by recent scholarship.20 Writing six decades before Torfs, the British agricultural writer William Harte had similarly concluded that the best public granaries were “vast tracts of country covered with corn,” wherever they may be.21 Despite the sad historical record, numerous individuals working for organizations such as the prestigious International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI),22 NGOs such as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy23 and Share the World’s Resources,24 several American consumer, environmental, religious and development groups,25 and producers’ cartels are still making the case for government-managed food reserves in the name of increased food security and reduced price volatility.

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In countries where massive domestic food surpluses were generated as a result of government programs, further subsidies were needed to dump them on world markets and less developed economies. Governmental inability to recognize traditional community practices for the management of common resources such as fisheries, grazing lands, and irrigation systems or to clearly define and enforce private property rights also promotes short-term abuse.46 Overall, it has been estimated that perhaps up to two thirds of the 1,000 billion dollars spent on subsidies related to agriculture, water, fisheries, energy production, forestry and transport are counterproductive as they damage both the economy (through increased budget deficits, unemployment, and trade distortions) and the environment (through increased pollution and mismanagement of natural resources).47 Once adopted, counterproductive agricultural policies are rarely rolled back as most politicians would rather avoid confronting powerful constituencies.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

For innovation to flourish, individuals need (1) the freedom to challenge old ideas and adopt new ones, (2) the freedom to put new ideas into practice, (3) the freedom of others in society to adopt or reject the innovator’s ideas, and (4) the freedom of the innovator to profit from successful innovations. This is what political equality protects, above all by guaranteeing to every individual freedom of thought and speech, freedom of contract, and private property rights (including intellectual property rights). Freedom of thought and speech protect the individual’s ability to adopt and advocate any idea he wants, without interference. No pope, king, mob, or dictator can stop an innovator from challenging conventional wisdom. Freedom of contract protects the individual’s ability to enter into whatever economic relationships and transactions he judges to be in his interest.

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An innovator doesn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to enter a new field, offer a new product, or charge what he thinks the market will bear. (By the same token, he cannot force anyone to invest in his business, work for his company, or buy his product, which would violate their freedom of contract.) Private property rights protect the right of producers to earn and use property. This is crucial for innovation in two basic ways: it gives people the ability to innovate and the incentive to innovate. Without property rights, independent action is impossible. Most new ideas fail, and most of the ideas that eventually succeed were once considered foolish by the mainstream.

…

The only reason an innovator such as Larry Page can start an untested company is because he’s free to use his resources as he judges best (and to enlist the help of anyone he can convince to voluntarily support him). And the only reason an innovator will take on the huge risk of starting an untested company (and the only reason he can convince others to risk their time and money in his undertaking) is because there is an opportunity for huge rewards. Private property rights ensure that whatever gains an innovator makes, he gets to keep. We can now see why innovation as a way of life arose only in the modern West. Political inequality had always meant that the concerns of the powerful trumped the autonomy of the individual. It was only when the West made a commitment to political equality that it was slowly able to remove those shackles.

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

It is further evidenced with the flood of market-killing, anticapitalist plans from the infinite government-centric, socialist-type programs promoted by the Democratic Party, which fall under the newly minted nomenclature of the “Green New Deal” and the war on “man-made climate change,” which I discuss in a later chapter. So far-reaching are these plans that the principle of private property rights would be gutted—again, in the name of the greater good and the larger community. Moreover, since the institution of the federal income tax over a century ago, at the birth of American progressivism, redistribution of wealth through the heavy taxation of labor, income, and wealth, supported by Marxist-like class-warfare political propaganda, is a central objective of the Democratic Party.

…

People moved to population centers, thereby further increasing the population of cities, out of economic necessity—that is, to find jobs, to start businesses, to live among similar ethnic groups, and for scores of other self-interested and understandable reasons. It had nothing to do with “deploying” people and resources. And there can be no doubt whatsoever that this movement has as its purpose to abolish or cripple the capitalist economic system and, by necessity, constitutional republicanism and its emphasis on individualism and private property rights. For example, Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist from Greece and an ICREA research professor at ICTA–Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, whose influence is considerable among the eco-radicals in the United States, explains in his book In Defense of Degrowth that “[s]ustainable degrowth is defined as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions.

…

In ecological economics we do recognize the political nature of the economy…. Often though we reproduce the economistic distinction between an economy out there, with its own laws and processes, and a political process which distributes the fruits of this process or sets limits to it….”23 Therefore, principles upon which America was founded, such as private property rights, the free flow of commerce, voluntary exchange, and the sanctity of the individual, and the establishment of a government around these principles, which is intended to undergird these principles and limit its own authority to molest or alter them, are dismissed. In her book Return of the Primitive—The Anti-Industrial Revolution, published more than forty years ago, Ayn Rand presciently exposed the purpose of this movement: “The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship.

Libertarian Idea
by Jan Narveson
Published 15 Dec 1988

We approximate the “ideal market” in the real world by reinforcing the internalizations that define it. The morality you need consists in recognition and respect for private property rights, starting with such rights in one‟s own person (this being the fundamental “factor of production”), and of the obligation to live up to one‟s agreements (not really a separate principle but 191 a theorem derivable from the recognition of private property rights). But there is appreciable misunderstanding about certain of the “ideal market” properties when we turn to the task of realworld applications. I shall note some of these below.

…

Cohen argues that Nozick‟s condition amounts to comparing one‟s situation after the appropriations of others with one‟s situation had the item appropriated remained unowned. But this condition, he insists, is too weak. He points to conceivable cases in which allowing private ownership might make one, or even the acquirer himself, worse off; and he concludes, after considerable analysis, that “theses about consequences are foundational to Nozick‟s defense of private property rights, and the rights he asserts consequently lack the clarity and authority he would like us to suppose they have.”14 And he proposes, for instance, that “when assessing A‟s appropriation we should consider not only what would have happened had B appropriated, but also what would have happened had A and B cooperated under a socialist economic constitution.”

…

Or it requires an evaluation, a judgment that the latter option is something one shouldn‟t take even if it is available. And none of these things can reasonably be claimed to be entailed just by being a rational agent.37 Another False Start: An Argument from “Survival” Professor Ellen Paul, in considerable contrast to many of her fellow enthusiasts for private property rights, puts forth an explicit argument for them in her interesting study Property Rights and Eminent Domain. It will be instructive to have a brief look at it. The argument opens with the observation that people engage in purposive activity with a view to their “survival”. In order to survive people must be able to move about, and so to be “free to move about”, in particular to act upon the world they live in.

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law
by Timothy Sandefur
Published 16 Aug 2010

Washington, D.C. 20001 www.cato.org The book then charts the changes that occurred when Progressive-era judges began to tear away those protections and concludes with an account of current controversies involving abusive licensing laws, freedom of speech in advertising, rules that override private property rights without just compensation, and more. Distributed to the trade by National Book Network www.nbnbooks.com Cato Institute 1000 Massachusetts Ave., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20001 www.cato.org The Right to Earn a Living explains how Americans can restore the Constitution’s long-neglected protections for the right that Supreme Court Justice William Douglas once called “the most precious liberty that man possesses.” 

…

Chapters 10 and 11 deal not with constitutional rights but with the ways in which today’s entrepreneurs are hampered by vague tort theories like “public nuisance” and “interference with contract,” as well as by courts that manipulate or nullify contracts to serve subjective notions of fairness. Chapter 12 discusses regulatory takings, an area of the law where economic freedom and private property rights strongly overlap. Finally, chapter 13 looks forward to what the future might hold for the right of Americans to pursue happiness by practicing a gainful trade. xvii 1. “The Most Precious Liberty Man Possesses” This book is intended as a general overview of the legal status of the right of individuals in the United States to engage in gainful trade, whether as entrepreneurs, investors, corporate directors, or otherwise.

…

It is “fairer to allocate any resulting financial loss” to the government and the taxpayers rather than to “those whose rights . . . have been violated.”50 The public is ultimately responsible for the wrongs committed by government, and it is proper for the general public to pay. The Owen decision was joined by Justices Thurgood Marshall, William O. Douglas, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and Byron White—many of whom refused to apply the same logic to government actions violating private property rights.51 The argument that government should not have to compensate for regulatory takings because it would restrict the discretion of bureaucrats would also justify insulating government from liability for anything.52 Indeed, under that principle, private corporations should also be immune from tort liability since corporate officers 267 The Right to Earn a Living also need to make difficult decisions and it would be easier for them to do so if they did not need to worry about being required to pay damages for injuring people.

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
by Elinor Ostrom
Published 29 Nov 1990

Most of the institutional arrangements used in the success stories were rich mixtures of public and private instrumentalities. If this study does nothing more than shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve CPR problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation, it will have accomplished one major purpose. At the same time, no claim is made that institutional arrangements supplied by appropriators, rather than by external authori­ ties, will achieve optimal solutions. The Mojave case clearly illustrates this point. But the survival, over long periods of time, of the resources de­ scribed in Chapters 3 and 4, as well as the institutions for governing those resources, is testimony to the achievement of at least a minimal level of "solution. " This study has an additional purpose beyond challenging the presump­ tion that universal institutional panaceas must be imposd by external au­ thorities to solve smaller-scale, but still complex, uncertain, and problems.

…

Having described the general problem of overuse in relation to such resources, Rolph indicates that "the government (any of the three branches) is called upon to allocate user rights as a means of limiting a production or a consumption activity" (Rolph 1983, p. 51). In regard to the groundwater users, she writes that "they turned to the government for a program that would limit use eq­ uitably among the existing users" (Rolph 1983, p. 51). She was puzzled by what appeared to her to be a contradiction in that users were allowed to acquire private property rights to what was a public or a communal re­ source. She argues that "if the government had foreseen a future shortage of the resource, it might have laid claim to it in 'the beginning,' before any users had made investments" (Rolph 1983, p. 51). As she puzzles about options, she asks this: 214 215 Governing the commons As the government steps in to limit use, should it simply allocate complete property rights to a small sub-group of the users while stripping the rest of their limited communal rights?

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Common Property Resources, Storage Facilities and Ownership Structures: A Cournot Model of the Oil Market. Economica 51 :235-52. Siy, R. Y., Jr. 1982. Community Resource Management: Lessons from the Zanjera. 266 I References Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Smith, R. J. 1981. Resolving the Tragedy of the Commons by Creating Private Property Rights in Wildlife. CATO Journal 1:439-68. Smith, R. T. 1988. Trading Water: An Economic and Legal Framework for Water Marketing. Washington, D.C.: Council of State Policy and Planning Agencies. Smith, V. L. 1969. On Models of Commercial Fishing. Journal of Political Econ­ omy 77:181-98. Snidal, D. 1979.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

And it is sometimes suggested that in a perfectly free market there can be no impediment in principle to people selling themselves into slavery, just as it is sometimes suggested there can be no impediment in principle to their selling their body parts. After all, such markets are supposedly secured by private property rights and, the argument goes, if people have private property rights those must include rights over their bodies and the product of their future labour. Yet this view of Smith is a direct inversion of the truth: Adam Smith despised slavery and the slave trade, and he argued with enormous force that, far from resulting from natural liberty, both were abetted by mercantilism and monopoly.

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How can the doctrines of the Communist Manifesto owe anything to The Wealth of Nations? These issues are too large to be debated properly here, but we can note some parallels and points of contact. In Marx’s imagined future, history can only lead to the ultimate triumph of the proletariat, the abolition of private property rights and the common ownership of the means of production and exchange; at that point markets of any kind will cease to exist in favour of collective ownership and the administrative distribution of goods. But that historical process—indeed the course of history itself—is ultimately economically determined, according to Marx.

…

The global foreign exchange markets are often thought of as the nearest thing to a perfectly free market. It is true that they are astonishingly large and astonishingly liquid—the most recent estimate of the Bank for International Settlements is that trading averaged $5.1 trillion a day in April 2016—but they are also very closely bound by rules and regulations. Even private property rights themselves—in the modern sense of free and clear legal title to dispersed ownership—are a far more recent creation than is often recognized. The effect of the Norman invasion of 1066 was to appropriate all real property in Britain and bring it under the ownership of King William, as catalogued in Domesday Book; in the feudal system this land was not privately owned, but merely held under a tenurial relationship with the Crown, conditional on payment of tax or a commitment of military service or other work in kind to a superior.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

For a long time, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism — by which we mean an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production (the main factors used in the production process) with the aim of profit maximisation, the enforcement of private property rights by the state, and the allocation of resources through the market mechanism. The system may create inequality, unemployment, frequent crises, and environmental degradation but, we have been told, the alternative is far worse. Socialism — a system under which the means of production are owned collectively — has only ever lead to death and destruction.

…

Despite losing the twin elections of 1974, Heath maintained the support of much of the Conservative establishment and newspapers. He was expected to win. But instead he was ousted by the young upstart elected on a radical new economic programme that would eventually come to be known as neoliberalism: the theory that human wellbeing is best advanced by liberating the entrepreneurial spirit through free markets, private property rights, and free trade, all supported by a strong state.22 Her name was Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s radical, neoliberal economic agenda had been forged decades earlier in the Swiss village of Mont Pélerin.23 In 1947, a group of economists from all over the world met to develop a new programme that would begin the fightback against the “Marxist and Keynesian planning sweeping the globe”.

…

The elite that gathered at Mont Pélerin decided, then and there, that they would exhaust their time, money, and intellectual resources in an effort to bring down the system of state capitalism which they saw as paving the way to totalitarianism. Their political manifesto — the “Statement of Aims” — included commitments to promote the free initiative and functioning of the market, prevent the encroachment of private property rights, and establish states and international institutions that uphold these ideals. The Statement of Aims also claimed that “[t]he group does not aspire to conduct propaganda”. Yet they hatched a plan to translate these principles into an economic policy agenda that would undermine the social democratic consensus all around the world.

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism
by Sharon Beder
Published 1 Jan 1997

The final document was so watered down that the word ‘vision’ had been left out of its title.63 Property Rights Groups The term ‘wise use’ is now being used by two main types of groups: (i) those who advocate opening up of public lands for logging, mining and cattle as well as off-road vehicles and motorcycles, and (ii) those who lobby against any restriction of use of private lands—property rights advocates.64 Wise Use groups in the west of the USA are dominated by “western ranchers, corporate farmers, and business people whose margin of profit is directly threatened by any fee increases on grazing, water reclamation, and other uses of public lands”. One of their heroes, Wayne Hage, has published a book called Storm Over Rangelands, which argues for private property rights on federal grazing allotments. Environmentalists counter that grazing rights on public lands, for example, affect only one in fifty livestock operators, most of whom are big businesses.65 Meanwhile Wise Use groups in the eastern USA have also taken up the theme of private property rights and their protection. They argue that environmental regulations impede their ability to develop their land in the way they want. By taking up this issue the Wise Use Movement has been able to expand into the Eastern states.

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By taking up this issue the Wise Use Movement has been able to expand into the Eastern states. In Trashing the Economy, Arnold and Gottlieb argue that private property rights are sacred. They claim that the environment movement is “actively destroying private property rights on a massive scale” by preventing people from using their land. Their Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise argues that “the right to liberty is dependent upon the right to own property—together they form the most basic civil rights.”66 Whilst the anecdotes of suffering at the hands of the government always involve the ‘little’ people, those who have most to gain from any further protection of private rights are the large landowners such as the banks, developers, agribusiness and the timber industry.

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Rather than bureaucratize the environment, we should privatize our efforts to protect the environment. . . behind every tree should stand a private steward, a private owner, willing and legally enabled to protect that resource.70 The British IEA also argues that property rights can help to protect the environment: “The legislation of rhino horn will fail without certain institutional changes, such as greater recognition of private property rights. . . Ideally, most rhinos should be privately owned, and ranched to supply their horn and other products to market.”71 Economic instruments are being advocated as a technocratic solution to environmental problems, premised on the conservative think-tank’s view of the problem—that environmental degradation is caused by a failure to ‘value’ the environment and a lack of properly defined property rights.

Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy
by Richard Murphy
Published 14 Sep 2017

First, like unitary taxation, it is based on the obvious fact that the world’s multinational corporations are, in effect, single entities. Second, AMCT reflects the fact that, just as the corporation is seamless when it crosses boundaries, so too are the benefits the corporation obtains from incorporation, limited liability, the rule of law, the upholding of contracts and private property rights, the maintenance of regulation that ensures people can have confidence to trade with it in safety, and much else besides. This implies that, while no entity but a nation-state can impose taxes, the obligation to pay those taxes exceeds the obligation to any state in particular: just as there are universal rights, so too are there universal obligations that transcend borders, and the duty of a multinational corporation to pay tax is one of them.

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The appropriate balance of these potential new and changed taxes will be for each jurisdiction to decide upon, but it is highly likely that wealth, as the only tax base that is currently growing steadily, will be increasingly made subject to tax. The first reason to do this will be to tackle inequality and its consequences. A second will be to correct for the past under-taxation of wealth. Finally, the wealthy have by far the largest stock of private property rights, and they should make an appropriate contribution to the state for all it does to protect those rights. They do not do so at present. The post–tax haven world should thus be a place of increasing economic equality. This is not the place to reiterate all the social, health, economic, educational and other opportunities that increasing equality is known to give rise to, because others have done that.

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Secrecy jurisdictions have deliberately challenged the rule of law in a profoundly aggressive fashion: their aim has been to prevent other states from imposing their chosen regulations, including those on tax. While libertarians like to claim that all taxation is theft, they forget that it is in fact a property right like any other, created by the same parliamentary legal process that invariably supports all private property rights, and enforced through the same courts to which a citizen may resort if they think their own claims to their property have been violated. The extra-territorial challenge from a tax haven to the right of a state to uphold its own law is thus not an action to defend liberty, but is instead akin to a challenge to the right of that state to self-determination.

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside
by Dieter Helm
Published 7 Mar 2019

Withdrawal from the EU, falls in the value of the pound, and climate change may increase the attractiveness of British holiday destinations in the coming decades. From the Romantic movement on, these wider public interests in the countryside came to challenge the idea that the land is a matter of purely private property rights, and gradually these have been attenuated. For most of the history of agriculture the challenge to the sole rights of the owners had been about who should own the land, rather than the multiple public claims upon it. Land reform is a long-running political saga, going back centuries, and brings into play the rights of tenants against landlords, and the rights to the commons, which were trampled on in the enclosure processes with the repeated parliamentary approval of specific enclosures.21 This public interest is in the public goods, and the ownership question arises in terms of who should have access to them, and who should pay for them.

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The southwest coast is dotted with these. Natural capital at the edge of the sea is a major attraction for walkers, and there has been a long history of battles for access, largely now finally won. The early coastal paths joined up local rights of way, but the continuity around the whole coast has come up against private property rights, in some cases including claims to own the beaches. The project for a path around the whole of England’s coast is due to be completed by 2020, making it at 2,795 miles the longest such managed path in the world. From a strictly natural capital perspective, filling in the last gaps is of limited value to nature.

…

Economists sometimes argue that if something is not owned it will be misused, and they point to the tragedy of the commons. Overgrazing, overfishing and overhunting will be the inevitable result. What we need to do to protect and enhance nature, according to this view, is to put a fence around it and exclude others. Most recently this idea has been extended to the atmosphere. The creation of private property rights in carbon, and then their trading, makes carbon a private good, to be bought and sold. Some economists would like to see this principle extended to the oceans, and in particular to the Arctic and Antarctic.1 The privatisation route does not, however, remove the public elements, and it is just bad economics to assert this.

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less
by Garett Jones
Published 4 Feb 2020

Their measure of judicial independence combines three features: • The term length of supreme court judges • The term length of administrative court judges (often in charge of enforcing regulations created by the nation’s top executive, not by the legislature) • Whether judges pay explicit attention to the decisions of past judges—that is, whether case law is a key ingredient in each judge’s decision-making recipe Note that the first two have some overlap with measures of central bank independence (long terms mean you’re less accountable to the person who hired you), and the third has some overlap with our earlier measure of what makes for a good judge (sticking fairly close to old decisions creates predictability in the society). At the raw level of correlation, La Porta and his colleagues find these good outcomes in countries with more judicial independence. First, private property rights have stronger protection (so it’s harder for the government to just take your house without paying you for it, for instance). Second, it takes fewer steps to legally start a new business (less red tape). Third, there tend to be fewer employment regulations (so hiring is less like an undivorceable marriage).

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Maybe we don’t need independent judiciaries with long terms; maybe we just need to hand out copies of Blackstone’s legendary Commentaries on the Laws of England. So they checked that too. And in the end, it turns out that their simple three-variable index of judicial independence still does a very good job of predicting stronger private property rights. Maybe the conventional wisdom is right and judges who hold their jobs for a long time and pay attention to past decisions are more willing to say “No!” when government officials want to take somebody’s house to build a highway or tell a business owner she can’t sell her engineering firm to a politically unpopular conglomerate.

…

when government officials want to take somebody’s house to build a highway or tell a business owner she can’t sell her engineering firm to a politically unpopular conglomerate. It turns out that even if you know that a nation officially uses British common law, even if you know how rich it is, how far from the equator, and how much diversity it has, greater judicial independence is still a robust predictor of stronger private property rights. By my reading of the paper by La Porta and his colleagues, greater judicial independence is also a solid predictor of less government ownership of banks, less labor market regulation, and less red tape to start a new business. (That’s a personal interpretation. Interpreting statistical results sometimes is a bit like evaluating a painting, a matter of taste.)

Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now
by Guy Standing
Published 19 Mar 2020

The gradual collapse in the income distribution system began with the adoption of what is now called ‘neoliberalism’ in the 1980s, led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and guided by a bunch of economists linked to the Mont Pelerin Society. Neoliberalism may be characterized as the belief in open ‘free’ markets, defined by privatization, the sanctity of private property rights, free trade and minimal roles for protective labour regulations and collective bodies, which neoliberals see as distorting market forces. But, though preaching belief in free markets, neoliberalism actually ushered in an era dominated by finance with the most unfree market system ever envisaged, regulated in favour of corporations and rentiers.

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See also individual entries definition 1, 4–8 reasons for need 8–9 security 98, 113, 114 system 1, 20, 23, 26, 32, 37, 52, 70, 84, 90–1, 122 n.7 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) 94 behavioural conditionality 70, 73, 77, 114 behaviour-testing 4, 39, 70, 84 benefits 5, 7, 27 conditional schemes 41 social assistance 23 BET365 11 Beveridge, William 8–9, 38 Beveridge model 21 Big Bang liberalization 18 BJP 92 black economy 40, 60 B-Mincome 99–100 Booker, Cory 101 brain development 98–9 132 Branson, Richard 54 Brexit 53 Britain 6, 8–10, 12–18, 20, 23–4, 26–7, 30–1, 33–4, 37–8, 40–2, 55, 57, 59, 90, 101, 104, 112 British Columbia 95 British Constitution 1 Buck, Karen 57 bureaucracy 40, 49, 100, 102 Bureau of Economic Analysis 16 Business Property Relief 58 California 69, 96–7 Canada 35 capacity-to-work tests 6, 104 cap-and-trade approach 34 Capita 50 capital dividend 59 capital fund 89–90 capital grants 59, 75, 76, 92 carbon dividends 37 carbon emissions 33–4 carbon tax 34–5, 37 care deficit 53 care work 36, 53, 67, 74, 84 cash payments 111 cash transfers 99 ‘casino dividend’ schemes 88 charities 48 The Charter of the Forest (1217) 1 Chicago 99 Child Benefit 57, 58, 72, 123 n.4 childcare 99, 110–11 child development 88 Child Tax Credits 81 chronic psychological stress 26 Citizens Advice 46–8 Citizen’s Basic Income Trust 7, 122 n.7, 123 n.4 citizenship rights 1, 29 civil society organizations 79 Index climate change 34 Clinton, Hillary 126 n.4 Clinton, Bill 105 Coalition government 41, 50 cognitive performance 33 collateral damage 53 common dividends 7, 20, 21, 59–60, 69, 73, 75, 83, 84, 85 Commons Fund 8, 35, 57, 59, 89 community cohesion 3 resilience 23 work 84 ‘community payback’ schemes 102 Compass 59 compensation 2, 7, 16, 104 ‘concealed debt’ 24–5 conditional cash transfer schemes 90 Conservative government 9, 85 Conservatives 23 consumer credit 24 consumption 23 contractual obligations 46 Coote, Anna 113 cost of living 25, 49, 52, 83 council house sales 76 council tax 25 Crocker, Geoff 122 n.15 cross-party plans 80 crowd-funded schemes 100 deadweight effects 102 ‘deaths of despair’ 27 Deaton, Angus 10 debt 23–6, 67, 85 debt collection practices 24–5 decarbonization 34 dementia 33 democratic values 69 Democrats 37 demographic changes 15   Index 133 Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) 11–12, 42–8, 50–2, 73, 81, 92, 129 n.6 depression 28, 94 direct taxes 56, 58 disability benefits 6, 49–52, 83 Disability Living Allowance (DLA) 49–51 Disabled People Against Cuts 52 Dividend Allowance 58 ‘dividend capitalism’ 8 domestic violence 29, 87 Dragonfly 92 due process 46, 49 ecological crisis 33, 37, 39, 114 ecological developments 21 ecological disaster 35 ecological taxes and levies 37 economy benefits 20, 60 crisis 106 damage 34 growth 20, 36, 106 industrialized 20 insecurity 21, 35, 39, 89 security 75, 80, 84, 88 system 15, 27, 38 tax-paying 60 uncertainty 8, 22–3, 31 ‘eco-socialism’ 8 ecosystems 33 Edinburgh 80 education 88, 108 Elliott, Larry 122 n.15 employment 16, 22, 39, 60–1, 81, 89, 93–4, 102, 106, 107, 110, 114 Employment Support Allowance (ESA) 27, 41, 49–51 England 28, 63, 110–11 Enlightenment 85 Entrepreneurs’ Relief 18 equality 31, 85 Europe 37 European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) 120 n.1 European Heart Journal 33 European Union 6, 17, 41 euthanasia 113 extinction 33–7 ‘Extinction Rebellion’ 33 Fabian Society 57–8 Facebook 97 family allowances 56 family benefits 56 family insecurity 23 federal welfare programs 106 Fife 24, 80 financial crash (2007–8) 23, 26, 34 financialization 116 n.22 financial markets 18 Financial Services Authority 123 n.15 Financial Times 19, 123 n.15 financial wealth 18 Finland 28, 61, 93–5 food banks 10, 29–30, 43, 109 food donations 29 food insecurity 108–9 fossil fuels 33–4 France 12, 17, 18, 32, 38, 57 free bus services 112 freedom 8, 30, 84, 85, 101, 114 ‘free food’ 108–9, 129 n.6 ‘free’ labour market 106 free trade 13 Friends Provident Foundation 75 fuel tax 35 fund and dividend model 89 funding 29, 59, 62, 69, 71–2, 112 134 G20 (Group of 20 large economies) 15 Gaffney, Declan 57 Gallup 105 GDP 14, 17–18, 23–4, 34, 36, 59, 89, 108 General Election 91–2, 94 ‘genuine progress indicator’ 36 Germany 17–18, 38, 100 Gillibrand, Kirsten 101 Gini coefficient 9, 12 GiveDirectly 91 Glasgow City 80 globalization 14 Global Wage Report 2016/17 14 global warming 33, 37 Good Society 75, 106 The Great British Benefits Handout (TV series) 92 Great Depression 9 Great Recession 23 greenhouse gas emissions 34, 36 gross cost 110 The Guardian 101, 103, 122–3 n.15 Hansard Society 37 Harris, Kamala 101 Harrop, Andrew 57 Hartz IV 100 HartzPlus 100 health 67, 87, 100 human 33 insurance premiums 35 services 60 healthcare costs 28 hegemony 14 help-to-buy loan scheme 76 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) 64, 73, 81 Hirschmann, Albert 56 household debt 24 Index household earnings 16 household survey 12 House of Commons 110–11 housing allowance 95 Housing Benefit 24, 41, 53, 71 housing policy 53 hub-and-spoke model 112 Hughes, Chris 97 humanity 33 human relations 3 ‘immoral’ hazard 109 ‘impact’ effects 78 incentive 62 income 81 assistance 88 average 83 components 11 distribution system 4, 13–14, 38, 67, 84, 107, 114 gap 9 growth 16 insecurity 27 men vs. women 15–16 national 14, 36 pensioners’ 16 rental 13–15, 20 social 14, 16–17 support payments 110 tax 1, 7, 57, 89, 111 transfer 85 volatility 22 India 68, 80, 90–2 Indian Congress Party 91 inequality 2, 4, 9–13, 21, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 54, 80, 85, 114 growth 17 income 9–10, 15–17, 19 living standard 20 wealth 18–19, 76 informal care 111   Index 135 inheritance tax 58 in-kind services 111 insecurity 21–3, 29, 38, 39, 47, 67, 85, 106 Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) 10 Institute for Public Policy Research 125 n.17 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) 75, 111 Institute of New Economic Thinking 123 n.15 Institute of Public Policy Research 59 insurance schemes 8 intellectual property 14–15 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 34 International Labour Organization (ILO) 14, 122 n.4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 31, 34 international tax evasion 18 interpersonal income inequality 83 inter-regional income inequalities 83 intra-family relationships 3 involuntary debt 26 in-work benefits 22 Ireland 35 Italy 18 labour 31, 107 inefficiency 106 law 101 markets 8, 14, 32, 39, 40, 60, 62–3, 96, 100, 106 regulations 13 supply 67, 95 Labour governments 85 labourism 106 Lansley, Stewart 59 Latin America 90 Left Alliance 94 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 113 Liberal government 35 life-changing errors 51 life-threatening illness 33 Liverpool 80 living standards 20, 23, 33, 36, 53, 59, 92 Local Housing Allowances 24 London Homelessness Project 92–3 low-income communities 33 low-income families 21 low-income households 17 low-income individuals 86 Low Pay Commission 63 low-wage jobs 60, 107 Luddite reaction 32 lump-sum payments 35, 59, 76 Jackson, Mississippi 99 JobCentrePlus 47 job guarantee policy 101–7 job-matching programs 106 Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) 41, 46 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 21 McDonnell, John 129 n.13 McKinsey Global Institute 31 Macron, Emmanuel 35 Magna Carta 1 ‘Making Ends Meet’ 97 ‘mandatory reconsideration’ stage 51 Manitoba 87–8 Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment (Mincome) 87 market economy 105, 114 master-servant model 101 Kaletsky, Anatole 123 n.15 Kenya 90–2 Khanna, Ro 103 Kibasi, Tom 113 136 Index Maximus 50 means-testing 4, 39, 42, 48, 58, 61–2, 70, 84, 88, 90, 109–10, 114 benefits 5, 7, 27, 40, 46, 56, 71–3, 81, 129 n.6 social assistance 23, 41, 95, 122 n.7 system 6 medical services 28 Mein Grundeinkommen (‘My Basic Income’) 100 mental health 26, 28, 94 disorders 88 trusts 28 mental illness 33, 68 migrants 7, 113 ‘minimum income floor’ 45 Ministry of Justice 51 modern insecurity 22 modern life 31 monetary policy 59 Mont Pelerin Society 13 moral commitment 75 moral hazard 109 mortality 27, 76 multinational investment funds 34 Musk, Elon 31, 54 Namibia 90–2 National Audit Office (NAO) 24, 43–4, 46, 76 National Health Service (NHS) 8, 24, 27–8, 44, 68, 80, 108, 111 National Insurance 18, 22, 124 n.4 nationalism 37 National Living Wage 63 National Minimum Wage 63–4 national solidarity 3 Native American community 88 negative income tax (NIT) 23, 87, 95, 100 neo-fascism 37–8 neoliberalism 13, 84 Netherlands 96 New Economics Foundation (NEF) 57, 113, 122 n.15 non-resident citizens 113 non-wage benefits 16 non-wage work 74 North America 67 North Ayrshire 80 North Carolina 88 North Sea oil 89–90 Nyman, Rickard 23 Oakland 96–7 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 14–15, 17, 36 Ontario, Canada 95–6 open economy 84 open ‘free’ markets 13, 15 opportunity dividend 59 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 18, 23, 27, 31 Ormerod, Paul 23 Osborne, George 19 Paine, Thomas 2, 75 Painian Principle 2 panopticon state 55 Paris Agreement (2015) 34 participation income 74–5 paternalism 42, 55 pauperization 63 Pawar, Alderman Ameya 99 pay contributions 21 pension contributions 18, 58 Pension Credit 41 Pericles Condition 75 permanent capital fund 71 personal care services 110–11   Index 137 personal income tax 35 Personal Independence Payment (PIP) 49–51 personal insecurity 23 Personal Savings Allowance 58 personal tax allowances 17, 58, 59 perverse incentives 50 physical health 26, 94 piloting in Britain 67–81 applying 80–1 rules in designing 70–80 policy development 3, 69 political decision 78 political discourse 92 political instability 35 political system 38 populism 37–8, 75 populist parties 37 populist politics 39 Populus survey 55 post-war system 8 poverty 2, 4, 10–12, 22, 27, 29, 36, 38, 40, 60–1, 89, 100, 108–9, 114, 125 n.17, 129 n.6 precarity 29–30, 38, 39, 60–1, 85, 103, 129 n.6 Primary Earnings Threshold 124 n.4 private debt 23–4, 39 private inheritance 2 private insurance 85 private property rights 13 private wealth 18 privatization 13, 17, 112 property prices 76 prostitution 43 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) 51 public costs 28 public debt 23 public inheritance 61 public libraries 47 public policy 97 public sector managers 103 public services 4, 17, 62, 108, 112, 114 public spending 89 public wealth 18 ‘quantitative easing’ policy 59 quasi-basic income 89, 98 quasi-universal basic services 30 quasi-universal dividends 35 quasi-universal system 61, 70, 90 Randomised Control Trial (RCT) 124–5 n.14 rape 44 Ratcliffe, Jim 12 Reagan, Ronald 13 Reed, Howard 59 refugees 7 regressive universalism 57 regular cash payment 7 rent arrears 24 controls 53 rentier capitalism 13–21, 107, 116 n.22 republican freedom 2–3, 30, 84 Republicans 37 Resolution Foundation 10, 15, 19, 25, 76 ‘revenue neutral’ constraint 7 right-wing populism 37–8 robot advance 31–3 Royal College of Physicians 33 Royal Society of Arts 55, 59, 124 n.12 RSA Scotland 125 n.17 Rudd, Amber 9 Russia 113 138 Sanders, Bernie 101 scepticism 31 schooling 67, 89 Scotland 69, 80, 111 Second World War 19, 21 security 8, 38, 55, 68, 84 economic 3, 4, 49, 56 income 73–4 social 8, 22, 49 Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) 68 self-employment 45 Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 3, 115 n.3 Smith, Iain Duncan 42 ‘snake oil’ 113 social assistance 3, 28 social benefit 20 social care 102, 104, 110–11 social crisis 106 social dividend scheme 92 Social Fund 29 social inheritance 2 social insecurity 21 social insurance 22, 85 social integration 44 social justice 2, 8, 20, 69, 84, 101, 114 social policy 8, 23, 26, 30, 42, 53, 84–5, 96 social protection system 32 social relation 100 social security 10, 70–1, 95 social solidarity 3, 8, 39, 61, 84–5, 91 social spending 17 social status 104 social strife 35 social value 29 ‘something-for-nothing’ economy 19–20, 61 Index Speenhamland system 63 State of the Global Workplace surveys 105 statutory minimum wages 106 stigma 47, 55 stigmatization 41, 109 Stockton 97–9 Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) 97 stress 26–9, 39, 51, 67, 68, 85, 93 student loans 24 substitution effects 102–3 suicides 26–7 Summers, Larry 105–6 Sweden 113 Swiss bank Credit Suisse 12 Switzerland 35 tax advantages 49 and benefit systems 17, 18, 69, 110 credits 3, 17, 24, 63, 105, 106 policies 16 rates 72 reliefs 17–18, 57–8, 61 tax-free inheritance 19 technological change 105 technological revolution 14, 31, 114 ‘teething problems’ 42 Thatcher, Margaret 13 Thatcher government 9, 18 The Times 92 Torry, Malcolm 122 n.7 Trades Union Congress 24 tribal casino schemes 76 ‘triple-lock’ policy 16 Trump, Donald 37 Trussell Trust 29, 43 Tubbs, Michael 97–8   Index 139 Turner, Adair 123 n.15 two-child limit 44 UK.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Published 20 Mar 2012

To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it also must permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers. THE CONTRAST OF South and North Korea, and of the United States and Latin America, illustrates a general principle. Inclusive economic institutions foster economic activity, productivity growth, and economic prosperity. Secure private property rights are central, since only those with such rights will be willing to invest and increase productivity. A businessman who expects his output to be stolen, expropriated, or entirely taxed away will have little incentive to work, let alone any incentive to undertake investments and innovations.

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By the 1840s, the Ottomans were trying to reform institutions—for example, by reversing tax farming and getting locally autonomous groups under control. But absolutism persisted until the First World War, and reform efforts were thwarted by the usual fear of creative destruction and the anxiety among elite groups that they would lose economically or politically. While Ottoman reformers talked of introducing private property rights to land in order to increase agricultural productivity, the status quo persisted because of the desire for political control and taxation. Ottoman colonization was followed by European colonization after 1918. When European control ended, the same dynamics we have seen in sub-Saharan Africa took hold, with extractive colonial institutions taken over by independent elites.

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Economic growth Stalin style was simple: develop industry by government command and obtain the necessary resources for this by taxing agriculture at very high rates. The communist state did not have an effective tax system, so instead Stalin “collectivized” agriculture. This process entailed the abolition of private property rights to land and the herding of all people in the countryside into giant collective farms run by the Communist Party. This made it much easier for Stalin to grab agricultural output and use it to feed all the people who were building and manning the new factories. The consequences of this for the rural folk were calamitous.

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell
Published 29 Jul 2019

The economic freedom index that Bob helped create is probably the best way to measure whether a country has a more capitalist or socialist system. The index uses a zero-to-ten scale, with higher scores indicating a more capitalist system. If a country earns a high score on the index, that generally means that country keeps government taxation low, respects private property rights, maintains the value of its currency, lets people trade freely, and keeps regulations to a minimum. So how does Sweden stack up? Overall, Sweden gets a 7.54 rating, which is good enough for twenty-seventh place out of the 159 countries in the study. Sure, Sweden taxes the bejesus out of its citizens.

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They suck because no one cares. The people who own casas particulares care because they profit when people opt to stay in them. Their desire for more money leads them to reinvest some of their revenue to maintain and improve their property, so that more people will choose to stay with them in the future. Private property rights give people the incentive to preserve resources (like housing) for the future. The managers of the state-owned hotels don’t have the same incentive because they don’t benefit from the hotel being in better condition in the future. What is true for accommodation is also true for food, as we discovered throughout our trip.

Capitalism: the unknown ideal
by Ayn Rand
Published 15 Aug 1966

As soon as it became apparent that radio broadcasting had opened a new realm of material resources which, in the absence of legal definitions, would become a wilderness of clashing individual claims, the government should have promulgated the equivalent of a Homestead Act of the airways—an act defining private property rights in the new realm, establishing the rule that the user of a radio frequency would own it after he had operated a station for a certain number of years, and allocating all frequencies by the rule of priority, i.e., “first come, first served.” Bear in mind that the development of commercial radio took many years of struggle and experimentation, and that the goldrush of the “wishers” did not start until the pioneers—who had taken the risks of venturing into the unknown—had built it into a bright promise of great commercial value.

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Bear in mind that the development of commercial radio took many years of struggle and experimentation, and that the goldrush of the “wishers” did not start until the pioneers—who had taken the risks of venturing into the unknown—had built it into a bright promise of great commercial value. By what right, code, or standard was anyone entitled to that value except the men who had created it? If the government had adhered to the principle of private property rights, and the pioneers’ ownership had been legally established, then a latecomer who wished to acquire a radio station would have had to buy it from one of the original owners (as is the case with every other type of property). The fact that the number of available frequencies was limited would have served, not to entrench the original owners, but to threaten their hold, if they did not make the best economic use of their property (which is what free competition does to every other type of property).

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Some professional broadcasters tried to divide their frequencies by private agreements, which they could not enforce on others; nor could they fight the interference of stray, maliciously mischievous amateurs. This state of affairs was used, then and now, to urge and justify government control of radio. This is an instance of capitalism taking the blame for the evils of its enemies. The chaos of the airways was an example, not of free enterprise, but of anarchy. It was caused, not by private property rights, but by their absence. It demonstrated why capitalism is incompatible with anarchism, why men do need a government and what is a government’s proper function. What was needed was legality, not controls. What was imposed was worse than controls: outright nationalization. By a gradual, uncontested process—by ideological default—it was taken for granted that the airways belong to “the people” and are “public property.”

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

The description of market economies they espouse, which I shall call the American business model, believes that greed is the dominant human motivation in economic matters; that regulation of economic activity is mostly undesirable and should be minimized; that the economic role of the state should be limited and largely confined to the enforcement of contract and private property rights; and that taxation should not rise above the levels needed to enable government to achieve these objectives and provide a modest welfare safety net. These propositions are maintained by many U.S. conservatives and by most people engaged in business and finance around the world. They are, however, hard to sell, particularly outside the United States.

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These then are the basic roles of government in a free society: to provide a means whereby we can modify the rules, to mediate differences among us on the meaning of the rules, and to enforce compliance with the rules on the part of those few who would otherwise not play the game" (Friedman [1962], 25). s The claims of the American business model are of four kinds: self-interest rules-self-regarding materialism governs our economic lives. · market fundamentalism-markets should operate freely, and attempts to regulate them by social or political action are almost always undesirable. the minimal state-the economic role of government should not extend much beyond the enforcement of contracts and private property rights. Government should not itself provide goods and services, or own productive assets. low taxation-while taxation is necessary to finance these basic functions of the minimal state, tax rates should be as low as possible and the tax system should not seek to bring about redistribution of income and wealth.

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It is not easy to see how the current coevolution of technology and institutions in the Internet and genome will play itself out. But no one could think that the outcome of these debates doesn't matter. "Let them steal," said Anatoly Chubais, mirroring Friedman. 24 Russia's economic disaster is an enduring reproach to those who claim that the only requirement of a market economy is a system of private property rights. The quality of economic institutions-which it is too simple to characterize as property rights-is the most important difference between rich and poor states. The possibility of many different property rights regimes, with differing effects on economic efficiency, is a fundamental challenge to the efficiency claims of the Arrow-Debreu model.

How to Fix Copyright
by William Patry
Published 3 Jan 2012

Leaving aside the absurdity of resolving such questions by reference to Blackstone, no form of property has ever been exclusive in the “sole and despotic” sense, even in Blackstone’s time. Private property rights do provide an important underpinning for the successful functioning of capitalism. Private property rights constrain the power of the State; they provide an incentive to work and take risks. But private property rights are not and have never been absolute: their reach depends on the specific circumstances—the nature of the property, the presence or absence of what economists call externalities (a cost or a benefit that is not captured in prices),4 and the character of the market in which the property is traded.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

‘Structural adjustment programmes’ forced on governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia by the IMF obliged them to pursue export-led industrialisation, cut welfare spending, rush privatisation measures, reduce government spending, lower salaries of civil servants and cut their numbers and, above all, enforce private property rights. Much has been written about the disastrous consequences of this blueprint strategy. By weakening civil services while directing funds into the privatisation of crucial economic sectors, the scope for corruption and ecological neglect was vastly increased. It created the conditions for ‘crony capitalism’, enabling well-connected individuals and companies to take control of key sectors and turn themselves into plutocrats through opportunistic networking and clientelism.

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First, markets should be established and liberalised. Since there was a shortage of goods and services, this would lead to inflation, which would be controlled by slashing public expenditure and dismantling old state structures. Privatisation was to be rushed, because otherwise there might be more socialistic reform. Private property rights were to be vigorously established. Only after these reforms was the state to be reconstructed with a new system of social protection. The outcome was predictable and predicted. In the short term, there was hyperinflation, with some countries experiencing price rises that went into thousands of per cent a year – in the case of Ukraine, over 10,000 per cent in 1993.

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The Charter’s greatest achievement was to set a framework for defending common rights – local communities, usufruct, reproduction, resource restoration and nature preservation rights. Throughout British history – and in other countries where similar principles were embedded in laws and practices – the Charter quietly acted as a moral break on commerce. It was a defence of common rights against private property rights. Weakened during the twentieth century, with more enclosure and commercial intrusion, it has been battered in the austerity era. It is time for a fightback. NOTES 1 S. Sierakowski, ‘Open letter to the Parties: Time for the Neo-Dissidents’, Dissent Magazine, Spring 2013. 2 The latest to try is Matteo Renzi, social democratic Prime Minister of Italy in 2016, who has made it easier to fire employees, provided more subsidies to firms, reduced their taxes and cut social spending.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind
Published 20 Feb 2020

The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers.” These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely.

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What Orwell called Burnham’s “great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America” exist today under the names of NATO and NAFTA, the EU, Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and the informal sphere of influence coalescing around China. While private property rights have not been abolished, even in so-called capitalist countries they have been diluted and redefined beyond recognition. Vast numbers of temporary holders of corporate shares that are frequently bought and resold by intermediaries like mutual funds are said to “own” corporations. Ordinary people with loan repayment or installment plans who in effect are renting houses, cars, and phones from banks or corporations likewise are owners in name only.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
by Quinn Slobodian
Published 16 Mar 2018

All but ignored by existing histories, the questions of empire, decolonization, I n t r o d u ctio n 25 and the world economy ­were at the heart of the neoliberal proj­ect from its inception. ) ) ) The fact that the paradigmatic product of Geneva School neoliberalism— the WTO—­has been riven with exceptions, infractions, and ignored rules only shows that the clash of economic ideas is far from finished and that the world economy continues to be redefined.66 As one historian notes, one of the most striking facts about the elaborate l­egal regime established to protect private property rights in the postwar period is that “it did not work.” 67 The early twenty-­first ­century has been marked by ever more countries refusing investment treaties or withdrawing from existing ones.68 Ever more countries are choosing not to turn to the IMF for loans, chastened by the punishments delivered by electorates a­ fter past programs of austerity imposed by diktat.

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The German Society’s president, the Deutsche Bank head Hermann Josef Abs, who had overseen the expropriation of Jewish property in the Third Reich, became an international spokesperson for property rights in the second half of the 1950s. A ­ fter the Society drafted an “International Convention for the Mutual Protection of Private Property Rights in Foreign Countries,” Abs made his case before the American Society of International Law in 1956 and, most influentially, in a San Francisco speech at the International Industrial Development Conference on October 15, 1957, in which he cited the ICC statement. The speech, titled “The Safety of Capital,” was reported in Time magazine ­under the headline “A Cap­i­tal­ist Magna Carta” in an issue that featured Ludwig Erhard on its cover.

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Seventy-­ nine U.S. firms ­were expropriated in 1967–1971; fifty-­seven ­were expropriated in 1972–1973.10 Investors received compensation equal to the seizure in almost ­every case, but the uncertainty produced by the apparent unsettling of norms of private property was a widespread concern in Northern business and government circles.11 Opponents of the NIEO sought to fine-­tune the rules for the world trading system in response to the disruption of predictability for foreign investors produced by such moves. What use ­were rules, ­a fter all, if the North flaunted them in its power and the South deviated from them to compensate for its relative weakness? As we have seen, since the 1930s the Geneva School neoliberals believed that empire could end as long as private property rights—or what I adapt Hayek to call xenos rights—­were protected worldwide and the ­free flow of capital and goods disciplined the be­hav­ior of postcolonial states. By extending the demand for sovereignty and autonomy from the realm of politics into the realm of property, the NIEO was in direct opposition to the normative neoliberal model of double government.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

Karl Marx set a political agenda of abolishing private property; one of the first things that all Communist regimes inspired by him did was to nationalize the “means of production,” not least land. By contrast, the American Founding Father James Madison asserted in Federalist No. 10 that one of the most important functions of governments was to protect individuals�� unequal ability to acquire property.1 Modern neoclassical economists have seen strong private property rights as the source of long-term economic growth; in the words of Douglass North, “Growth will simply not occur unless the existing economic organization is efficient,” which “entails the establishment of institutional arrangements and property rights.”2 Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of the top agenda items pursued by market-oriented policy makers has been privatization of state-owned enterprises in the name of economic efficiency, something that has been fiercely resisted by the Left.

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In the former USSR, the 4 percent of land that remained privately owned accounted for almost one-quarter of total agricultural output. In China, once collective farms were disbanded in 1978 under the leadership of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, agricultural output doubled in the space of just four years. A good deal of theorizing about the importance of private property rights concerns what is called the tragedy of the commons. Grazing fields in traditional English villages were collectively owned by the village’s inhabitants; since no one could be excluded from access to these fields, whose resources were depletable, they were overused and made worthless. The solution to the risk of depletion was to turn the commons into private property, whose owners would then have a strong incentive to invest in its upkeep and exploit its resources on a long-term, sustainable basis.

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The custodian of the law was a large and venerable institution, the ulama or scholars who interpreted the law and operated the system of religious courts that had jurisdiction over family, marriage, inheritance, and a host of other matters of personal status. The sultan did not presume to interfere in the quotidian administration of law at this level. Private property rights and usufructuary rights to state land were similarly protected (see chapter 19). Even the chaotic succession struggles were prescribed, in a certain way, by Islamic law, which forbade primogeniture as a principle of succession. The system became increasingly rule bound, moreover, as a result of the requirements of delegation.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Economic incentives are said to increase the production of culture and information in society. Another tradition borrows from John Locke’s classic defence of private property. It is a moral argument stating that the individual is entitled to an ownership right over the product of his labour. A similar approach draws loosely from the thinking of Hegel and Kant and argues that private property rights are instrumental to ensure the integrity of an author. Only with such a right is he able to prevent unwanted appropriations and distortions of his artistic work. After listing these three schools on intellectual property, William Fisher introduces a fourth stance which he calls ‘social planning theory’.

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It was primarily a trade-legislative act and not a copyright act. Its thrust was directed against the old monopoly, and yet, the statute played right into the hands of the publishers. In the disguise of an author’s right, legislative protection became much stronger than it had been as a publisher’s right. The Statute of Anne established a full-fledged private property right, involving not just the right to copy a work but also rights to change the work, to exclude others from the use of it, and the option to transfer the rights over it.13 Copyright’s heritage in censorship and autocratic rule must not be forgotten in the current discussion on intellectual property.

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Sport is big business and business needs protection.23 Of graver concern is the trend towards patenting life-forms and genetic information.24 The expansion of established forms of intellectual property is coupled with the invention of entirely new categories of ownership. One case that was mentioned previously is the right of publicity doctrine in the US. The right of publicity doctrine originated as a protection clause against unwanted coverage in the media. Over the years, celebrities and the film industry have wrestled case law into a fully fledged private property right. Through a series of court rulings, the right of publicity doctrine has gone from a law protecting privacy to an ownership right over peoples’ appearance. The difference is that as a private property, the right to display a celebrity can be signed away to a third party and be enforced in court against non-paying infringers.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy
by Robert A. Sirico
Published 20 May 2012

Trade, Contracts, and Interest Rates The opposite of a culture of theft and moral chaos is a market governed by the rule of law, one in which contracts are enforced, the politically unconnected are allowed to trade in the market just as freely as the politically well-connected are, and entrepreneurs and investors are able to agree freely on mutually satisfying terms, based on a transparent system of interest rates. Trade, contracts, and interest rates may seem to be mundane subjects, but these institutions are fundamental aspects of economic liberty—and concrete guarantors of freedom more generally. Let’s take a brief look at each of the three. The freedom to trade is a necessary adjunct to private property rights. A secure right to property means little if people are not permitted to exchange their property for other property that they desire more. This is the essence of trade. International trade organizations, protracted debates about globalization, and convoluted trade agreements have turned the field of international trade into a complex matter, but trade is, at its root, simply an exchange between two parties who both stand to benefit.

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The question then becomes what kind of political order functions best to channel the power and energy of science and human endeavor toward environmentally positive activity and away from what is destructive? Despite what the Marxist protesters I met in Nicaragua may have thought as they packed their duffle bags to go join the environmental movement in the United States, it isn’t socialism. In fact, it’s precisely those systems that fail to defend private property rights that are most inclined to abuse the earth. There’s a name for this in economics—“the tragedy of the commons.” Private property is the best preserver of creation, and no greater environmental spoilage has been witnessed than in the old socialist Eastern bloc countries, where private property was abolished.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

The inclination of the late-nineteenth-century Supreme Court was to move the United States in precisely the opposite direction from Prussia, toward a minimal delegation of authority, not in the interests of democratic accountability but to protect private property rights. The Court in the period after the Munn and Wabash decisions was becoming steadily more conservative, taking the view that corporations were legal “persons” whose rights deserved equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. The amendment, enshrining the right of all American citizens to the “due process of law,” was enacted in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to protect the rights of newly freed African American slaves, but the Court used it subsequently to protect private property rights. Between 1887 and 1910, the Court handed down 558 Fourteenth Amendment decisions, the most notable of which was the 1905 Lochner v.

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It provided strong protections of the rights of its citizens in an impersonal manner, even though these citizens did not have the political right to hold their rulers accountable through elections. The Rechtsstaat proved to be an excellent platform for economic development because it encompassed strong protection of private property rights and provided for the enforcement of contracts. The German kaiser was spoken of as an “absolute” ruler, but he could not arbitrarily confiscate the holdings of his citizens or personally intervene in their legal proceedings. As a consequence, Germany industrialized with great rapidity in the period from 1871 to 1914 and in many respects overtook Britain as the leading industrial power in Europe.

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The United States took a very different path toward political modernization (see Figure 9). The United States inherited from Britain a strong rule of law in the form of the Common Law, an institution that was in place throughout the colonies well before the advent of democracy. The rule of law, with its strong protection of private property rights, laid the basis for rapid economic development in the nineteenth century. The early introduction of universal white male suffrage, however, had a decidedly negative impact on American state building by making clientelism pervasive throughout virtually all levels of government (the dotted line in Figure 9).

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

The Qing Dynasty had collapsed in 1911 because of its inability to keep those imperatives in balance. A generation of intermittent civil war followed, exacerbated by Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and northern China, and ended in the victory of Mao Zhedong’s Red Army over Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949. The abolition of private property rights lay at the heart of the new regime. In Mao’s words, Chinese history was to be understood in terms of ownership of the earth. “Under the bondage of feudalism [peasants] had no freedom of person,” he wrote in 1938. “The landlord had the right to beat, abuse or even kill them at will, and they had no political rights whatsoever.

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Certainly to Thomas Jefferson, whose blueprint would globalize the idea of privately owned land during the nineteenth century, British politics and British property appeared equally moribund. What he dreamed of was a fairer, more democratic way of owning the earth. Jefferson’s underlying suspicion about the scope of private property rights crystalized into outright hostility while he was minister, or ambassador, to France. The catalyst was an encounter in October 1785 with a poor woman on the outskirts of the royal hunting park at Fontainebleau. Although surrounded by unused but potentially productive land, the woman and her two sons had to survive on the few cents a day she could earn by casual labor, while the royal family and aristocrats with rental incomes of more than $2.5 million a year reserved for their own pleasure vast tracts of ground that could have provided a living for the poor.

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Once a limit on resources began to make itself felt, the conditions for this egalitarian state began to crumble. Those with land grew wealthier from its rising price, the poorest no longer found it possible to buy what had once been available to everyone. Wealth became concentrated in fewer hands, and the inequality inherent in private property rights made itself apparent. No one perceived this more clearly than the most influential critic of rural capitalism, the journalist and self-taught economist Henry George. By the end of the 1870s, it was impossible to avoid seeing extremes of poverty—nothing shocked George more than the appearance after 1873 of children begging on the streets of New York and San Francisco—accompanied by the unparalleled opulence of the champagne-swilling Gilded Age.

Kicking Awaythe Ladder
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 4 Sep 2000

They include restrictive macroeconomic policy, liberalization of international trade and investment, privatization and deregulation.2 The 'good institutions' are essentially those that are to be found in developed countries, especially the Anglo-American onesl The key institutions include: democracy; 'good' bureaucracy; an independent judiciary; strongly protected private property rights (including intellectual property rights); and transparent and market-oriented corporate governance and financial institutions (including a politically independent central bank). As we shall see later in the book, there have been heated debates on whether or not these recommended policies and institutions are in fact appropriate for today's developing countries.

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Backing up this claim is a rapidly growing body of literature, especially from the World Bank and its associates, which tries to establish statistical correlation between institutional variables and economic development, with the supposed causality running from the former to the latter.3 Exactly which institutions should go into the 'good governance' package differs from one recommendation to another, not least because we still do not fully understand the relationship between particular institutions and economic development. However, this package of 'good institutions' frequently includes democracy; a clean and efficient bureaucracy and judiciary; strong protection of (private) property rights, including intellectual property rights; good corporate governance institutions, especially information disclosure requirements and bankruptcy law; and well-developed financial institutions. Less frequently included but still important are a good public finance system and good social welfare and labour institutions providing 'safety nets' and protecting workers' rights.4 Critics argue that, apart from the fact that the international financial institutions (IFIs) do not have an official mandate to intervene in most of these 'governance' issues/ the institutions of developed countries can be too demanding for developing countries in terms of their financial and human resource requirements.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 3 Mar 2020

They understood that if they were to prosper, societies needed to control their fertility, to put aside part of what they currently produced to invest in future production, and to trade freely. These were profound insights, on which economics still largely lives. Where they fell short was in understanding how societies develop institutions favourable to such activity. To this day, many, perhaps most, economists take private property rights as given, and explain the greater wealth of some societies in terms of their more efficient distribution of property, without showing much curiosity about why inefficient property distributions persisted for so long, or what functions they played in the life of their societies. This chapter traces ‘growth’ economics from the insights of the classical economists to the emergence of development economics as a distinct subfield of economics in the second half of the twentieth century, and the gradual dissolution of the developmental perspective into the neoclassical Washington Consensus.

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Economists of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank induced poor countries, as a condition for loans, to ‘liberalise’ their financial markets, reduce trade barriers, privatise public enterprises, cut down on state spending, and allow production decisions to be taken in the global marketplace. A related realisation was that most Third World governments were too incompetent and corrupt to be entrusted with ambitious ‘catch-up’ plans.15 Instead, in line with the New Institutional Economics (see Chapter 8), increasing emphasis was placed on creating enforceable private property rights, so as to equalise private and social rates of return. Exploiting comparative advantages became the accepted name of the game in east and south-east Asia. The new growth engine was market integration. Instead of trying to accumulate physical capital, developing countries should concentrate on exporting what they could get most for and importing what they had to pay least for, and using the profits of trade to build up ‘human capital’.

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies
by Charles de Ganahl Koch
Published 14 Sep 2015

He begins by building on the answers to basic questions such as “How do we know things?” and “How do we know what’s true and what’s right?” The more books I read, the more passionately I embraced the truth that widespread human well-being demands a system that clearly defines and protects private property rights, allows people to speak freely without intimidation or legal repercussions, refrains from interference with private parties’ agreements and exchanges, and allows human action—rather than arbitrary notions about how much things “should” cost—to guide prices. Allowing people the freedom to pursue their own interests (within the limits of just conduct) is the best and only sustainable way to achieve societal progress.

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Since the company, rather than the employee, owns the property and the profits, the employee has a fiduciary responsibility to the company that should guide any decision rights. Think of them as property on contract. This is why our employees’ decision rights are constrained by our Guiding Principles, including the obligation to create value for the company. Similar to private property rights in society, decision rights in an organization can be subdivided and come in many and varied forms. Employees with broad decision rights over how their daily work is done may have much less authority over operating and capital expenditures or matters relating to other workers. At the same time, other employees’ main responsibilities need to be ensuring that these expenditures are profitable and well controlled.

Against Intellectual Monopoly
by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine
Published 6 Jul 2008

The economic incentives of innovators or, more generally, of entrepreneurs were nobody’s concern in issuing letters of patent. The statute, therefore, replaced the super-monopolistic power of expropriation and arbitrary grants of monopoly the Crown had enjoyed until then, with the milder temporary monopoly actual inventors would receive from Parliament. This, no doubt, represented progress in terms of private property rights and incentives to private economic initiative. Further, the range of products to which patent protection could and would be given was greatly reduced, as it was restricted to actual inventions (that is, forget the monopoly of salt) that satisfied the tight requirement that “they be not contrary to the law nor mischievous to the state by raising prices of commodities at home, or hurt of trade, or generally inconvenient.”3 Last but not least: All Monopolies and all Commissions, Grants, Licenses, Charters and Letters Patent heretofore made or granted or hereafter to be made or granted to any Person or Persons, Bodies Politic or Corporate whatsoever, of, or for the sole Buying, Selling, Making, Working or Using any Thing within this Realm . . . or of any other Monopolies, or of Power, Liberty or Faculty . . . are altogether contrary to the Laws of this Realm, and so are and shall be utterly void and of none effect and in no wise to be put into use or execution.4 In current parlance, the Statute of Monopolies amounted to a gigantic liberalization or deregulation of the British economy, which came together with a strengthening of private property rights, a reduction of royal power, and the establishment of restrictive – by current standards, extremely restrictive – criteria for patent grants.

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Further, the range of products to which patent protection could and would be given was greatly reduced, as it was restricted to actual inventions (that is, forget the monopoly of salt) that satisfied the tight requirement that “they be not contrary to the law nor mischievous to the state by raising prices of commodities at home, or hurt of trade, or generally inconvenient.”3 Last but not least: All Monopolies and all Commissions, Grants, Licenses, Charters and Letters Patent heretofore made or granted or hereafter to be made or granted to any Person or Persons, Bodies Politic or Corporate whatsoever, of, or for the sole Buying, Selling, Making, Working or Using any Thing within this Realm . . . or of any other Monopolies, or of Power, Liberty or Faculty . . . are altogether contrary to the Laws of this Realm, and so are and shall be utterly void and of none effect and in no wise to be put into use or execution.4 In current parlance, the Statute of Monopolies amounted to a gigantic liberalization or deregulation of the British economy, which came together with a strengthening of private property rights, a reduction of royal power, and the establishment of restrictive – by current standards, extremely restrictive – criteria for patent grants. These historical facts are worth keeping in mind vis-à-vis the frequent claims that the introduction of patent privileges in seventeenth-century England played a crucial role in spurring the subsequent Industrial Revolution.

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In spite of the miracles that our mimetic instinct has been performing for us over the millennia, imitation has received very bad press in the literature concerned with innovation and ideas. This is not a view that we share, as imitation is a powerful tool of economic development. It should be clear, in fact, that acts of imitation, carried out while respecting ordinary private property rights and the rights to personal privacy, are key components of the competitive markets that benefit us on a daily basis. Imitation may or may not require reverse engineering; most times it does, as it is rather difficult to imitate a product without even looking at it and examining its internal components.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

But the state also had a case: Baron Arlington had been compensated for his land; the pledges it had given over the return of land were less clear cut than the Martens presented; and there was a clear public interest in maximising food production in a country that still laboured under rationing. Did private property rights trump this national need? What constituted fair recompense? As ever, the devil was in the detail. But the complex facts of the case became buried beneath a simple fable pitting the Leviathan of the state against a plucky individual. The subsequent public inquiry in 1954 came down heavily on the side of the Martens, causing the responsible Minister of Agriculture, Thomas Dugdale, to resign.

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The pillage of the commons by private owners and corporations gives the lie to the modern myth about the ‘tragedy of the commons’. This slander, that common land was a free-for-all where self-interested commoners depleted a shared resource, was propagated by the right-wing ecologist Garrett Hardin as a reason for extending private property rights. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Commons were closely regulated by local communities – a fact that can still be glimpsed in the modern registers of ownership, where occasional references to archaic commons officials open windows onto a forgotten world. The ‘Piecemaster of Atherstone Common’, for example, administers land in Warwickshire at the behest of the commoners, while ‘the Constable of the Graveship of Holme’ oversees rights to digging peat across seven townships in North Yorkshire.

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Now, a property in Mayfair is worth £21,000 per square metre. Is it really too much to ask landowners to give a little of this collectively generated wealth back to the community in some way? And yet, landowners have always ferociously lobbied to preserve their privileges and resist any infringement of their absolute private property rights over land. Landowners, for instance, lobbied hard to exclude farming and forestry from being included within the planning system when it was first set up, ensuring it remained focused on urban land use decisions. Landowners clubbed together to abolish the country’s only attempt at levying a land value tax a century ago, and overcame all subsequent attempts by progressive governments to put in place development charges on land.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 8 May 2017

They could then see if certain phrases were significantly more likely to be used by Democrats or Republicans. Some were indeed. Here are a few examples in each category. PHRASES USED FAR MORE BY DEMOCRATS PHRASES USED FAR MORE BY REPUBLICANS Estate tax Death tax Privatize social security Reform social security Rosa Parks Saddam Hussein Workers rights Private property rights Poor people Government spending What explains these differences in language? Sometimes Democrats and Republicans use different phrasing to describe the same concept. In 2005, Republicans tried to cut the federal inheritance tax. They tended to describe it as a “death tax” (which sounds like an imposition upon the newly deceased).

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Likewise, Democrats and Republicans presumably both think that Saddam Hussein, the former leader of Iraq, was an evil dictator. But Republicans repeatedly mentioned him in their attempt to justify the Iraq War. Similarly, “workers’ rights” and concern for “poor people” are core principles of the Democratic Party. “Private property rights” and cutting “government spending” are core principles of Republicans. And these differences in language use are substantial. For example, in 2005, congressional Republicans used the phrase “death tax” 365 times and “estate tax” only 46 times. For congressional Democrats, the pattern was reversed.

India's Long Road
by Vijay Joshi
Published 21 Feb 2017

Relevant examples are minerals under the ground, fish in the sea, the earth’s atmosphere, and telecom spectrum. Here, the state may have to act to prevent a ‘tragedy of the commons’.14 Unfettered markets are likely to lead to chaotic over-​use, even exhaustion, of scarce resources that are un-​owned or under common ownership. One solution is for the state to allocate private property rights (though it may quite properly appropriate the rents created thereby, for example by auctioning the resources). Sometimes this may not be possible and other kinds of state intervention would be called for.15 Taxes, subsidies, and sometimes mandates and prohibitions may at times be required to alter market outcomes by over-​riding consumer desires for so-​called ‘merit goods’ and ‘demerit goods’.

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Sometimes, small communities can organize themselves to prevent a ‘tragedy’ by specifying the legitimate claimants of the scarce resource, and formulating and enforcing the rules for using it (see Ostrom 1990). When the number of potential claimants is large, this generally proves to be impossible. For example, it would be impossible to define and enforce private property rights to fish in the open sea, not least because fish are mobile! There may also be externality reasons for encouraging or discouraging these goods. But, strictly speaking, goods are ‘merit goods’ or ‘demerit goods’ only if the state believes that, in consuming them, individuals make consumption decisions they would later regret or, more generally, are not in their own best interests.

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This is the case with many common property resources, in which ‘open access’ leads to over-​use and over-​exploitation. For example, unrestricted fishing can lead to depletion of fish stocks, and unrestricted use of the atmosphere as a sink for carbon emissions can lead to global warming. The remedy has to involve defining property rights. Sometimes it may be possible to set up private property rights and leave the allocation of the resource to private trading and negotiation. But in many cases this is completely unsuitable. Sometimes, it may be possible for the community to exercise the property right to the resource and organize its use sensibly. But community control is fragile and can easily break down.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City
by Anna Minton
Published 24 Jun 2009

To achieve this, it introduced the requirements of ‘just compensation’ and development for ‘public use’ as preconditions for condemning land and providing compensation. However, in 2005 Kelo v. London, a landmark Supreme Court case, broadened the definition of ‘public use’ to give far more emphasis to economic development when deciding if property can be seized.10 Because the Supreme Court Judgement was interpreted by many as undermining private-property rights, national outrage was sparked at what was seen as a direct attack on the constitution. In the UK the entirely obscure Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 similarly allowed, for the first time in history, that the ‘economic well-being’ alone of an area would be sufficient to justify the use of compulsory purchase, a point confirmed by legal experts.

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Peter Hall agreed that ‘Non-Plan’ had more in common with the New Right than the New Left, but he also claimed that the essay had an affinity with anarchism, arguing that ‘right and left met around the back of the stage’.14 In its bid to free the market, ‘non plan’ was also in favour of not knowing how things were going to turn out when a project began, with the authors complaining how, under the system then, ‘nothing must be allowed simply to “happen”’, and praising plans which had not turned out as the planner had intended. Erasing the psychedelic painting on the Beatles’ former Apple boutique in London’s Baker Street was put forward as an example of how planning suppressed British culture, showing that ‘non plan’ was not that concerned about private-property rights in the face of graffiti which might be considered culture. On the other side of the Atlantic, Kevin Lynch, a planner and urban designer who became a professor at MIT during the 1960s, was also very interested in creating environments which were not planned, where everything was ‘fluid and open’.15 In contrast to non-plan, he was particularly interested in open spaces which operated outside the market, the parts of the city which had not been committed by the planning system and which were free for people to use and enjoy as they liked, where, he claimed, ‘the individual has a chance to demonstrate mastery’.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

The digital revolution is increasing the importance of social wealth in two key ways. Firstly, new technologies increase our potential productivity and output as a society; because we are capable of becoming richer thanks to digital technology, the economic return to economically important social institutions, such as a government capable of enforcing private property rights, is rising. The gap between the incomes of societies capable of supporting these institutions and those that cannot is growing. In 1980, Americans were thirty times richer than residents of the Central African Republic. In 2015, they were ninety times richer.26 (In contrast, America was forty times richer than China in 1980, as its market reforms were just getting under way; it is now only four times richer.)

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Social capital – behavioural patterns that live in our heads – do too. Economists reckon that growth, and especially the very long-run growth that contributes to wide divergences in living standards across countries, depends on the quality of institutions. Institutions are things such as private-property rights and the rule of law: rules of the game that make possible long-term investment in education or physical capital or intellectual property. But these institutions are not real things that exist out in the world somewhere. You cannot go to Washington or London and visit the place where the rule of law is kept.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins , Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane
Published 28 Feb 2017

For Enlightenment thinkers, then, landed property was a form of freedom. Although, as we shall see, Locke’s natural rights theory of land was rejected by classical political economists, it can be seen to underpin mainstream (neoclassical) economic theory, which presents private market exchange and private property rights as ‘natural’, with their origins in universally accepted rules not subject to particular political or social arrangements. This appeal to natural law gives mainstream theory a significant advantage: The derivation of natural moral theory has provided the foundation for the use of economic theory to support specific ideological viewpoints … this tendency has justified laissez-faire economic policies as if they were based on natural laws.

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This appeal to natural law gives mainstream theory a significant advantage: The derivation of natural moral theory has provided the foundation for the use of economic theory to support specific ideological viewpoints … this tendency has justified laissez-faire economic policies as if they were based on natural laws. Always behind the legitimization activities of economists is the belief that markets are ‘natural’ institutions and market outcomes are natural outcomes, and the institutions necessary for markets, such as private property rights, are ‘natural rights’. (O’Hara, 1999, pp. 782–783) Often overlooked in Locke’s work, however, was the ‘Lockean proviso’ that property was only natural so long as there was sufficient common land for others to enjoy. Locke believed that there was plenty of unclaimed land in America, so that the rules for a time when land was not scarce applied to the time when he was writing, and he did not need to deal with the eventual scarcity of unclaimed land.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Indeed, the clue is right there in the word ‘controls’: the conditions under which an asset is held and commercialized are just as important to its capacity to generate rents as the conditions of its materialization in the world. An asset can be both highly valuable and incredibly scarce and yet wholly incapable of generating rents if scarcity cannot be attached to the rights to access and commercially exploit it. Equally, rent is out of the question if an asset can be readily protected by secure private property rights but it exists and is accessible in abundance. Opportunities to earn rent are predicated on the scarcity both of an asset and of the power to monetize it. Recognition of such power is another key ingredient that was missing from Keynes’s famous critique of the functionless investor, and his call for her euthanasia.

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The UK government had committed to ‘a radical liberal fiscal regime’, becoming ‘the textbook example and the model pupil of liberal governance in oil’.55 Indeed, there is an argument to be made that, from the early 1980s, the UK oil-and-gas sector was not only a model of radical liberal governance specifically in hydrocarbons and, as such, a prototypical example of a privatized natural-resources rentier regime, but also a model of and for (neo)liberal rentierism much more generally, both in the UK economy and further afield: it was the domain in which this model was first fully developed and perfected. This development was never just about low taxes and the serving up by the government of robust and expansive private-property rights – although these were unarguably its key mechanisms. It was also characterised by two crucial phenomena that tend to accompany rentierism in view of the rentier’s inherent monopoly power. One is weakened labour; the other is a throttling of innovation. Both have been persistent features of the UK oil-and-gas industry, and integral elements of its status as liberal rentier archetype.

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Insofar as this is true, Harvey continued, ‘we can regard rent as a side-payment allowed to landowners in order to preserve the sanctity and inviolability of private property in general’.111 Private landownership is the ideological bulwark of private property ownership in toto. This argument is deeply suggestive with respect to the recent history of the UK. Why did the 1980s and 1990s not see more concerted resistance to the advance of neoliberalism and, with it, to the broadly based elevation of private property rights, manifested among other things in the privatization of more or less everything that could be privatized? I hazarded one answer in Chapter 2, in the form of the country’s North Sea oil-and-gas dividend and its cushioning welfare provisions for workers thrown onto the metaphorical slagheap.

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 23 Dec 2010

Since 1978, income per capita in China has grown at an average rate of 8.3 percent per annum—a rate that implies a doubling of incomes every nine years. Thanks to this rapid economic growth, half a billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty.18 During the same period China transformed itself from near autarky to the most feared competitor on world markets. That this happened in a country with a complete lack of private property rights (until recently) and run by the Communist Party only deepens the mystery. China’s experience offers compelling evidence that globalization can be a great boon for poor nations. Yet it also presents the strongest argument against the reigning orthodoxy in globalization—emphasizing financial globalization and deep integration through the WTO.

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Many a former Socialist economy has painfully discovered that property rights reform often flounders because domestic courts are too fragile to enforce the new rules. As the Berkeley economist Yingyi Qian emphasizes, property rights were effectively more secure when backed up by partnerships with the local government than they would have been under a standard regime of private property rights.21 China’s strategy to open its economy to the world also diverged from received theory. The standard list of recommendations for countries pursuing this goal includes: dismantling quantitative restrictions on imports; reducing import tariffs and their dispersion; and making the currency convertible for trade transactions.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century
by Mark Walker
Published 29 Nov 2015

The same point applies to the idea that it is close to impossible to form monopolies on a world scale. Here again, the proper test would be to let international courts enforce agreements between producers to form monopolies. A World with Unrestricted Private Property Rights Since there is no unpolluted historical record to adjudicate the question of whether natural monopolies will form, we will have to try and determine what would happen in different situations. Suppose there were no government restrictions on private property rights in the name of competitiveness. Imagine the US government, in both its legislative and judicial branches, promises not to interfere in the market if firms use predatory pricing to eliminate competition, or form cartels, and imposes no restrictions on voluntary acquisition resulting in natural monopolies.

Money: Vintage Minis
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 5 Apr 2018

HOW EXACTLY DID the Dutch win the trust of the financial system? Firstly, they were sticklers about repaying their loans on time and in full, making the extension of credit less risky for lenders. Secondly, their country’s judicial system enjoyed independence and protected private rights – in particular private property rights. Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property. Instead, it flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property. Imagine that you are the son of a solid family of German financiers. Your father sees an opportunity to expand the business by opening branches in major European cities.

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values
by Sharon Beder
Published 30 Sep 2006

Caslin, III, CEO of the NFTE, testified to a US congressional hearing that 63 per cent of students who had taken NFTE courses viewed the market economy more favourably, while 33 per cent didn’t change their view: An entrepreneurial culture promotes a personally productive and responsible lifestyle. The Culture of Entrepreneurship brings with it traditions, beliefs, values, attitudes, morals, interests, lifestyle, an innovative and opportunity-obsessed, problem-solving skill set, value exchange, private property rights and voluntary trade.17 In Australia, Australian Business Week (ABW) involves teams of students managing a simulated company and competing with other teams of students in school, state and national championships. There is now also a primary school programme that is supposed to help children ‘become flexible, good communicators, entrepreneurial and more able to take calculated risks’.

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The materials are to help teachers explain the ‘innate fairness of capitalism’ to students.71 A number of other foundations also support FTE including the Citigroup Foundation, the GE Fund and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.72 In this way FTE can offer its programmes free to teachers and cover their accommodation costs for out-of-town workshops and conferences as well. The Gillette Company is another of FTE’s major sponsors. Together with FTE it has put together an instructional programme called ‘Is Anything Ever Really Free? Explaining the Basics of Economics to Children’, which explains seven key economic principles, including private property rights, incentives, voluntary exchange and competition. Each concept is explained in a different way for different age groups. For example, competition is explained to 5 to 8 yearolds in terms of buying a cat. If there is only one pet store in town then the store can charge whatever it wants because there is no competition.

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
by Brett Chistophers
Published 25 Apr 2023

‘Nobody knows we’re there …’ – true words spoken by the chief executive of Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world’s leading asset managers in the housing and infrastructure space – is the epigraph, for good reason, to this book. The book’s aim, therefore, is to ensure that people do know – and know why it matters. The Age of Asset Management The business of capitalist asset management has existed in one form or another for as long as private-property rights, surpluses of financial wealth and meaningful opportunities for wealth investment have coexisted. Among the holders of wealth surpluses, there have always been corporations and individuals keen not to handle investment of those surpluses themselves, but rather to outsource such activity to expert, professional managers.

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It was not a state newly persuaded of the merits of public ownership of critical infrastructures of socioeconomic reproduction. The state was not ‘stepping up’ as asset owner, or indeed as service provider, at least beyond the extent to which the latter was absolutely necessary. The state that has ‘returned’ remains first and foremost a handmaiden of private property and private-property rights – in other words, a quintessentially neoliberal state. By late 2021, furthermore, the seemingly radical notion that ‘anything we can actually do, we can afford’, had receded almost as quickly as it had materialised the year before. ‘That idea disappeared very quickly as soon as the market conditions changed, and once you saw a little bit of inflation coming up’, Daniela Gabor told the New Republic’s Kate Aronoff.

Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants
by Bethany McLean
Published 13 Sep 2015

In 2012, Argentina nationalized assets belonging to a Spanish oil company called Repsol; in 2014, Argentina agreed to pay Repsol part of what it was owed in order to bring foreign investment back to the country. A joke goes: “What’s the difference between the GSEs in the United States and Repsol in Argentina?” The punchline: “Argentina settled.” In Washington, there is a distinct lack of sympathy for the investors and for the argument about their private property rights. Berkowitz recalls complaining to one politically plugged-in person, only to be told to “grow up.” There are some in D.C. circles who believe the government only left Fannie and Freddie’s common and preferred shares in private hands because it had to do so to avoid putting their debt on the federal budget.

A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories)
by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf
Published 27 Sep 2006

For India, the eighteenth century thus offers a dramatic contrast with the Mughal agrarian order of the seventeenth, when overseas commerce was of secondary importance. Furthermore, although the industrial revolution was not yet underway, the British economy had already become suffused with a dynamic commercial ethos sustained by secure private property rights. In India the British could hold out to indigenous mercantile classes, first in the presidency capitals and then in the countryside, as local rulers did not, the attractive prospect of freedom from arbitrary exaction. Part of the reason for Britain’s success too lies, quite simply, in the fact that after 1757, by its conquest of Bengal, the East India Company had gained control of India’s richest province.

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One of the tasks of the Khandesh Bhil Agency was to extend loans to tribes in order to make them take up settled agriculture. In similar fashion, groups such as the Banjara carriers, whose pack animals had accompanied eighteenth-century armies, together with herders such as Gujars and Bhattis, found their grazing grounds restricted by assessment of waste lands and the creation of private property rights, while their employment opportunities declined with the disbandment of armies. Those who persisted in wandering found themselves the objects of suspicion, and began to be stigmatized as ‘criminal tribes’. Such suspicion fuelled one of the most famous episodes in the history of British India – the campaign against thagi (thuggee), which gave the English language the word thug.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

The elite’s collective capacity to extract surplus from primary producers determined the proportion of overall resources that was available for appropriation, and the balance of power between state rulers and various elite groups decided how these gains were apportioned among state coffers, the private accounts of state agents, and the estates of the landed and commercial wealth elite.38 The same features of premodern states that funneled resources toward the powerful also served as a powerful check on the concentration of income and wealth. Predation, disregard for private property rights, and the arbitrary exercise of authority not only helped create fortunes but also could just as easily destroy them in the blink of an eye. Just as state office, proximity to power, and the favor of rulers raised the well-connected to great wealth, the machinations of rivals and rulers’ desire to curb the influence of their associates and to absorb their ill-gotten gains could just as easily rob them of their riches if not their lives.

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At the other end of the spectrum, feudal societies having weak rulers, such as Spring and Autumn China or medieval Europe, allowed lords to enjoy relatively secure control of their assets. The same was true of the Roman Republic prior to its terminal crises, when aristocrats collectively ruled the polity for their own benefit and were appropriately keen to uphold private property rights. Most premodern societies, and more than a few contemporary developing countries, fall in between these ideal-typical extremes, combining sometimes violent political intervention in private property relations with a measure of respect for personal wealth. I explore this relationship in greater detail in the following pages.39 Rents from access to political power are not exclusive to low levels of development.

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Shennan 2011 also puts great weight on the shift from intangible to material property resources and its potential for creating inequality. 23 Smith et al. 2010a: 92 (defensibility); Boix 2015: 38 table 1.1.B (global survey); Bowles and Choi 2013 (property rights). The latter develop a formal model in which climate amelioration renders farming more productive and predictable and leads to an expansion of agriculture and private property rights (8834 fig. 2). 24 Wright 2014. 25 Mesopotamia: Flannery and Marcus 2012: 261–282, esp. 264–266, 268, 272, 274, 281. See also 451 for a cemetery with more than 1,000 burials in Susiana (Khuzestan), ranging from graves rich in copper and fancy painted pottery to poor ones with cooking pots, and see Price and Bar-Yosef 2010: 159 for inequality among more than 100 graves in Tell Halula on the Euphrates. 26 Biehl and Marciniak 2000, esp. 186, 189–191; Higham et al. 2007, esp. 639–641, 643–647, 649; Windler, Thiele, and Müller 2013, esp. 207 table 2 (also on another site in the area). 27 Johnson and Earle 2000 provide an excellent survey of social evolution.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
by Charles Montgomery
Published 12 Nov 2013

The urban strategist Todd Litman summed up zoning’s effect thus: “It seemed that segregation was just the natural working of the free market, the result of the sum of countless individual choices about where to live. But the houses were single—and their residents white—because of the invisible hand of government.” What’s amazing is how, despite their love of liberty, Americans have embraced the massive restriction of private property rights that the separated city demands. Once a neighborhood is zoned and built, it gets frozen like a Polaroid from the day everyone moves in. As if the power of municipal zoning wasn’t enough, suburban developers in the last few decades have set up homeowner associations that encourage residents to exert even more control over one another.

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Hillsborough County Conservative Examiner columnist Warren Pledger issued this phantasmagorical warning: by paying for light-rail, “tax payers will be purchasing the cattle cars that sneaky government officials hope to utilize in the forced transportation of proletariat workers traveling between their apartment buildings and the government owned factories seven days a week.” Such imaginative interpretations are actually pretty standard among Tea Party urbanists. In city after city, opponents to New Urbanism and “smart growth” claim that local planners are part of an international conspiracy to force everyone to abandon their cars, give up their private property rights, and live in United Nations–mandated “habitation zones.” In the 2010 midterm elections, Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes accused his Democratic opponent of using a Paris-style bicycle-share program to convert Denver into a “United Nations Community.”* In this debate, the city emerges not merely as a system for living, but as a symbol, an expression of political values.

The Great Lakes Water Wars
by Peter Annin
Published 15 Jun 2018

“Allowing one governor from another state to deny a water diversion to citizens that cannot vote for that governor is a very serious problem,” complained Wisconsin state senator Mary Lazich, Republican from New Berlin.17 Ohio officials, led by State Senator Timothy Grendell, were concerned that the Compact infringed on private-property rights, and they too wanted the Compact amended. “If all the Compact said [was], ‘Thou shalt not divert water out of the Great Lakes Basin,’ we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Senator Grendell said. “But the Compact also has some language that creates at least some uncertainty—if not a certainty—that private water rights in Ohio would be converted to public trust property.”18 Given that half the Great Lakes states had already adopted the Compact as is—by overwhelming majority votes—proposals to amend it were seen as deal-breakers.

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The Compact news was completely overshadowed by the Great Recession. On the Canadian side of the border, as expected, Ontario adopted the International Agreement that mirrors the Compact with little drama or fanfare in 2007, and Québec followed in 2009. The Compact may have been signed, but the effective date would have to wait until after the Ohio private-property rights constitutional referendum was voted on, thanks to the unusual stipulation in Ohio’s Compact implementing legislation that delayed the Compact’s effective date until after that November vote. The combination of the financial crisis and the Ohio referendum meant the Compact’s actual effective date was also met with little fanfare or news coverage.

The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market
by Paul de Grauwe and Anna Asbury
Published 12 Mar 2017

Several owners preferred living on a badly maintained street to paying up, so it turned out to be impossible to put down a decent road surface. All the residents lived in magnificent houses, but the street leading to them had remained stuck in medieval times.  EXTERNAL LIMI TS OF CAPI TALISM This incident illustrates the core problem of public goods. They are goods which benefit everyone and over which no one can exercise a private property right. These differ fundamentally from private goods such as bread, cars, books, or houses. These are goods which become my private property as soon as I buy them, enabling me to prevent others from using them. I have an exclusive right to these private goods. Ownership rights for public goods are collective.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
Published 6 Nov 2018

Private ownership of land is inherently more efficient precisely because the land is not then a free good. When land has scarcity legally attached to it, the argument runs, its owner is incentivised to use it efficiently. There is, needless to say, a long and venerable liberal tradition of Western thinking on the purported ‘disciplining’ role of private property rights, stretching at least as far back as John Locke. Such thinking has surfaced, and been put to effective political work, in all manner of historic–geographic conjunctures, from that of the nineteenth-century colonial territories characterised by ‘wasteful’ traditions of indigenous landownership and use, to that of the no less ‘wastefully’ and ‘inefficiently’ used common lands of pre-enclosure Britain itself (see Chapter 2).1 The same thinking permeates neoliberal Britain, not least where matters of public landownership are at stake.

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But while they do often go hand in hand, they are not equivalent, and the former does not necessarily imply the latter. There are many real-world examples of resources being privately owned but being allocated through non-market mechanisms. For British land to be used with maximum efficiency, in any event, institutions such as the ASI and IEA have long insisted on the necessity of both private property rights and markets. The latter help to ensure efficient use because they process relevant information – and signal it in market prices – more effectively than a collective agent such as the state ever can. Traditionally lacking market mechanisms for allocating its own land, then, the British public sector came under attack in the 1980s from the aforementioned ‘adherents of the free market’, with their argument that the state is prey to ‘the serious possibility of a major collective error’.2 This particular argument is vital to our story for two reasons.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

Market failures – where the freely functioning forces of supply and demand failed to distribute scarce resources in a way that optimized social welfare – were believed to be few and far between. The role of government should be confined, therefore, to the establishment of a stable currency, to private property rights (despite the fact that most of the population owned little or no property), to the creation of courts to enforce contracts, to basic education, to infrastructure to facilitate commerce, and to the security of the nation state. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards there was also recognition that to prevent a breakdown of the financial system, a central bank should intervene and lend when others were too fearful to do so.

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A final theoretical inspiration for policy at this juncture emanated from the analysis of economic growth by economic historians such as Douglass North, another Nobel laureate. This work emphasized the importance of political, economic and social institutions and incentive structures, including constitutions, legal systems, private property rights and moral codes.3 It suggested that in looking to encourage development, seeking just to raise aggregate savings and investment totals – as was fashionable during the Keynesian heyday of ‘growthmanship’ – could get you only so far. It was also vital that the ‘rules of the economic game’ were appropriately set.

Alternatives to Capitalism
by Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright

Figure 13 Combined configurations of social empowerment What about Markets? The framework elaborated above says almost nothing explicitly about markets. To be sure, the dominance of economic power in capitalism rests in significant ways on the centrality of markets as the organizing principle for the exchange of private property rights. And it is certainly the case that the subordination of economic power to social power—either directly or indirectly via the state—would entail pervasive democratic regulation of markets far beyond the kinds of constraints on markets within capitalism.8 But the framework itself does not imply either the possibility or desirability of abolishing markets.

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain
by Mark Casson
Published 14 Jul 2009

R E L AT I O N S B E T W E E N PA R L I A M E N T A N D T H E B OA R D O F T R A D E It should not be inferred, however, that the entire system of railway promotion was Xawed. The system of appraising railway projects through Select Committees was a tried and tested system that had been used previously for turnpike trusts and canals. Parliament was broadly sympathetic to innovation, but interference with private property rights through compulsory purchase of land was a serious business, especially when it was to be done for private proWt. Parliament needed to be certain that a major infrastructure project like a railway would beneWt the public. It is not unduly fanciful to suggest that Committees attempted an early form of social cost–beneWt analysis.

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Free market ideology was most important in the early and most intensive phase of railway building, up to 1866. Commitment to free markets was based on the notion that they were well suited, in some sense, to the British character. There was no ideological commitment to the absolute supremacy of private property rights, since railway building relied heavily on state-sponsored compulsory purchase of land. During the early phase of railway building, social conservatism manifested itself mainly in a preoccupation with local interests, and with the importance of each person playing their appointed role within the local community.

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Far from defending individual property rights unequivocally, government presided over a system in which large amounts of private land were acquired, subject to arbitration, on the authority of the state. It is a mistake to assume that, as in the United States, land could simply be acquired by pushing forward the frontier of settlement. By 1830 Britain was already a relatively mature and densely populated country, and government regularly authorized the subordination of private property rights to the public interest. If there was a governing principle in early Victorian society, it was that advances in technology created the potential for sustained improvement in the standard of living. Unlocking this potential required good institutions, and since not all institutions were fully rational, institutional reform was required.

A Short History of Progress
by Ronald Wright
Published 2 Jan 2004

In fact, not even one new food staple has been developed from a wild plant since prehistoric times. All of our crop science — whether selective breeding or genetic manipulation — is mere piggybacking on the work of ancient civilizations. Appropriate research should be rewarded, but if we are going to allow private property rights over ancient food staples, then royalties should be paid to the heirs of the true inventors, most of whom are struggling peasants who need the cash a lot more than Monsanto. Small wonder the have-not countries are suspicious of the rich countries’ motives in aggressively promoting hybrid and engineered staples that threaten to contaminate and destroy the crop diversity that still exists in agriculture’s old heartlands. 57.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism
by William Baker and Addison Wiggin
Published 2 Nov 2009

Success at the voting booth at securing additional takings threatens to realign incentives so much that producers may no longer see their rewards justified by risks. Such a majority would continue to egg on its representatives to dig surrounding our constitutional foundation, threatening private property rights and the freedom to conduct business without government intrusion. There is a paradox of freedom, that it can mean absolution from responsibility: from repaying debt to honoring familial commitments to enjoying sheer self-indulgence and neglecting to save or plan for the future, be it one’s own or that of the nation.

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Moreover, the Obama administration has worked behind the scenes to use the partial nationalization of banks to demote secured creditors and transfer private property to unions when financial pressures opportunistically erupted. In connection with the bankruptcy of Chrysler, the U.S. Treasury demanded that the auto company’s assets be stripped away from the coverage of senior lender’s liens, which violates private property rights and a host of prior court rulings. During prebankruptcy negotiations, banks that are heavily dependent upon TARP funding from the government laid the groundwork for this expropriation of fixed income collateral by accepting roughly 20 cents on the dollar, thus enabling the United Auto Workers to own 55 percent of the company’s stock (and Fiat 20 percent).

Anarchy State and Utopia
by Robert Nozick
Published 15 Mar 1974

But since no single source significantly affects one individual, it still will not pay any individual to sue any individual polluter. It is ironic that pollution is commonly held to indicate defects in the privateness of a system of private property, whereas the problem of pollution is that high transaction costs make it difficult to enforce the private property rights of the victims of pollution. One solution might be to allow group suits against polluters. Any lawyer or law firm may act for the general public and sue, being required to distribute a proportion of the amount collected to each member of the included public who claims it from them. (Since different people are differently affected by the same polluting acts, the lawyers might be required to distribute different amounts to those in different specified groups.)

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This elegant proposal unfortunately involves central decision as to the desirable total amount of pollution.) Popular discussions often run pollution problems together with that of conserving natural resources. Again, the clearest examples of misdirected activity have occurred where there are no clear private property rights: on public lands denuded by timber companies and in oil fields under separately held pieces of land. To the extent that future people (or we later) will be willing to pay for the satisfaction of their desires, including trips through unspoiled forests and wilderness land, it will be in the economic interests of some to conserve the necessary resources.

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

This substantially explains why the average capacity of utility-scale solar systems (which was 19 MW for systems installed in the US in 2020) is much lower than in the case of wind (178 MW, for onshore).8 Second, and of fundamental importance to the wider argument developed in this book, once these installation costs have been met, and until equipment replacement becomes necessary after, say, twenty-five years, that, at least in terms of significant expenses, is basically that, especially in the case of solar. Solar and wind energy are literally free gifts of nature: unlike oil or natural gas, nobody enjoys private property rights to them, and they do not need to be extracted – at considerable expense – from the Earth’s crust. They are simply there, waiting to be harvested, by anybody who cares to do so. In short, if it costs a significant amount to build a large-scale solar or wind power facility, it costs very little to operate it.

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Last but not least, steam fitted much better in the brave new world of capitalist private property. Large-scale, reservoir-based water power schemes would perhaps have been preferable to steam for capital at large, but such inherently collective arrangements fell foul of opposition from individual capitalists who saw such schemes as a restraint on their independence and private property rights. Private property and water ‘did not mix well’; the latter, invested in at scale, required ‘complicated communal relationships’. Coal and steam did not suffer the same ‘collective drawbacks’.9 For our purposes, in any event, the specific reasons for the victory of the steam engine and coal are less important than the more general implication of Malm’s account.

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
by Peter Barnes
Published 29 Sep 2006

And it changes in response to specific natural scarcities, as indicated by specific prices. 58 | THE PROBLEM The question is, which of these approaches would work better—mandatory social responsibility, or increases in the price of nature? The answer, without doubt, is the latter. Free Market Environmentalism One other version of privatism is worth considering. Its premise is that nature can be preserved, and pollution reduced, by expanding private property rights. This line of thought is called free market environmentalism, and it’s favored by libertarian think tanks such as the Cato Institute. The origins of free market environmentalism go back to an influential paper by University of Chicago economist Ronald Coase. Writing in 1960, Coase challenged the then-prevailing orthodoxy that government regulation is the only way to protect nature.

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction
by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham
Published 17 Jan 2020

However, an important starting point for understanding neoliberalism is David Harvey’s (2007: 2) argument, that it is ‘in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that propose that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’. However, as we shall discuss, the way in which this is put into practice is more complicated. Therefore, as Peck (2013: 153) notes, using the term ‘must not be a substitute for explanation; it should be an occasion for explanation’. In order to explain how neoliberalism has facilitated the growth of the gig economy, there are two turning points to begin from.

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy
by Callum Cant
Published 11 Nov 2019

She pushed through a kind of ‘authoritarian populism’ based on the smashing of the organized working class and its trade unions, the repression of minorities (urban black and Asian communities and LGBT people, in particular), and a huge sell-off of state assets.23 The economic form of this offensive was a ‘neoliberal’ reorganization of the state and the economy. David Harvey describes neoliberalism as: ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade’.24 That ‘liberation’, for workers, has meant losing many of the protections against the most aggressive forms of capitalism that they had won over the previous century. Neoliberalism is, in short, an economic doctrine of class war from above. In the workplace, British bosses regained the initiative through the reorganization of production via global logistics, the use of new technology to reduce worker leverage, and cooperation with the state in the smashing of trade unionism and introduction of restrictive new laws.

Twilight of Abundance: Why the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short
by David Archibald
Published 24 Mar 2014

He attributes the divergence between the West and the Rest to what he called six “killer apps”: 1.Competition. Europe was fragmented in the sixteenth century, and this created competition between countries, which in turn encouraged improvement. 2.Science. Most innovations in machinery and weaponry came from Europe. 3.Property rights. Professor Ferguson’s view is that respect for private property rights encourages productivity and the accumulation of wealth. 4.Medicine. Western advances in vaccinations increased life expectancy. 5.Consumerism. Increased consumption grew trade and GDP. 6.The work ethic. Protestantism stressed hard work, saving, and reading. Quite correctly, Professor Ferguson wrote that the greatest dangers facing us are probably not “the rise of China, Islam, or carbon dioxide emissions” but “our own loss of faith in the civilisation we inherited from our ancestors.”3 There is one point of overlap between the assessments of Hanson and Ferguson—namely, the crucial importance of private property safe from seizure.

The Death and Life of Monterey Bay: A Story of Revival
by Dr. Stephen R Palumbi Phd and Ms. Carolyn Sotka M. A.
Published 12 Nov 2010

At the same time, the landlord at China Point, the Pacific Improvement Company, strongly pushed in court proceedings to evict the village. The village had a 50-year history of occupation but no formal lease with previous owner David Jacks and no written guarantees from the new railway landlord. Court battles pivoted on the long occupancy versus private property rights. But by 1906, the lease was revoked. The courts said that the village must move. Villagers were stubborn and refused, but they could hardly expect to resist for long. In May 1906, the final disaster stuck, turning the village to ashes. It has never been clear how the fire started, but a wall of flame consumed China Point on May 16.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c [sic]. While the creation of a monopoly state bank and the abolition of private property rights are extreme measures, others would undoubtedly find support among a modern audience, particular free education of all children and the abolition of child labour. But this is a political rather than an economic programme. So how did Marx envisage the operation of the economy in what the manifesto calls a classless ‘association’ that has replaced bourgeois society?

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

Much of the subsequent development of the state can be seen as a consequence of steps taken to enhance its ability to raise revenues—the third task. The nation-state that emerged had somewhat contradictory powers. It was strong in its ability to defend itself against external enemies and defeat internal threats to the state, yet it was compelled to respect the private property rights of its citizens. The constitutionally limited state was an important milestone in the path towards free markets. The security of private property did away with the need for private players to protect themselves through anti-competitive medieval business associations, such as guilds. It allowed them to compete as individuals.

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WHY INDIA HAS NOT DONE AS WELL AS CHINA China and India used to be sleeping Asian giants, but China awoke first. They used to be equally poor, but now China has raced ahead. China’s initial advantages of a healthier and better educated workforce were perhaps more important in the early flush of liberalization, and its lack of a competitive market or private property rights were not disadvantages—indeed, they allowed the state to push favored industries. Construction is probably the most important sector in the early phases of industrialization. It is a sector that employs unskilled workers—and hence can absorb many that leave agriculture. It is also a sector that contributes to the growth of other sectors, as businesses spring up to make use of the infrastructure.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

First-order commodification, what I call pastoralism, made land into a form of abstract private property relation. Second-order commodification, generally called capitalism, much advanced the abstraction of the private property relation into fungible things. Third-order commodication, which I call vectoralism, extends abstraction much further, subordinating information to whole new kinds of private property rights, and in the process creating new kinds of class relations. On top of the class relation of landlords and peasants, and of capitalists and the working class, there is a relation between a vectoralist class that owns the vector of information in one form or another, and a hacker class that has to produce new forms of information that can be made into private property.

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
by Branko Milanovic
Published 15 Dec 2010

The October Revolution in 1917 “subtracted” from under the capitalist control one of the key countries in the world with the largest landmass. The birth of fascism in Italy in 1922, with its many imitators in Central and Eastern Europe, further “downplayed” the role of economics because fascist states, while being capitalist (in the sense that they protected private property rights even more fiercely than the liberal regimes they overthrew), imposed a much greater role for the state in the economy and tended to see trade in mercantilist terms, that is, as a zero-sum game, not as mutually beneficial. The chaos of the civil war in China and the brutal colonization of Africa (again, a noneconomic action) further limited the scope of “free” economics.

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 20 Nov 2016

Keeping this in mind it is still important to consider the changes of the past few decades. David Harvey argues that neoliberalism is ‘in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that propose that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’.51 These ‘political economic practices’ have risen to a position of hegemony since the 1970s. The result has been programmes of ‘deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision’. The result of these forced ‘neoliberal freedoms have, after all, not only restored power to a narrowly defined capitalist class.

The Joy of Tax
by Richard Murphy
Published 30 Sep 2015

Peace reduces the amount of tax required to be extracted from an economy. The relationship is almost that simple, and most would think that this outcome would be a good thing. That said, even the most fundamental of libertarian thinkers seems to think tax acceptable if it relates to the maintenance of law and order and the preservation of private property rights (some of them seem to think there is little further role for government); but if you look on these two goals as ‘keeping the peace’ then you have a further link between tax and peace. However, in proposing ‘peace’ as a principle to underpin the tax system I am using the word to represent something much more than these rather limited aspirations.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

Since competition is so central, neoliberal ideology holds that all decisions about how society is run should be left to the workings of the marketplace, the most efficient mechanism for allowing competitors to maximize their own good. Other social actors — including the state, voluntary associations, and the like — are just obstacles to the smooth operation of market logic, and they ought to be dismantled or disregarded. In theory, at least, neoliberalism promotes entrepreneurship by providing the defense of private property rights and upholding market freedoms. In practice, some economic actors — such as banks deemed “too big to fail” — get to game the system, while others — such as people on welfare — are demonized as scroungers. Let’s see how this plays out. Suppose your instincts lean vaguely leftwards, and that you therefore reject most neoliberal policies, but unwittingly share the basic outlook behind them.

The City: A Global History
by Joel Kotkin
Published 1 Jan 2005

Merchants and artisans in places like northern Italy financed their own defensive armed forces.3 In a world where imperial boundaries were vague and often meaningless, cities constituted the one reliably defined space.4 Safe behind their walls, urban merchants and artisans enjoyed an independence unimaginable in the cities of the East. There was no emperor, caliph, or sultan to restrain the private property rights or the guild privileges of the commercial classes.5 In the West, the autonomous city and nascent capitalism grew together. “The love of gain,” writes Henri Pirenne, “was allied, in them, with local patriotism.”6 Italy emerged as the focal point for the renewal of urbanism. Blessed with an urban infrastructure left over by the Romans, Italy in the early years of the second millennium became terra di citta, or “the land of cities.”7 The First Crusade in 1095 exposed these Italian cities to the model presented by their more advanced counterparts in the Islamic world.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

War was an investment decision by the state: the state needed sufficient revenue to conquer foreign markets. Mainstream political economy, following the lead of Smith and Ricardo, rejected this programme. The state’s two essential economic tasks were to remove barriers to trade and to secure private property rights. It should be granted power and revenue proportional to these tasks, but no more. 74 t h e or i e s of t h e f e r t i l e a n d b a r r e n s t a t e Central to this view was that trade sprang up spontaneously if obstacles were not placed in its way. This was as true of international as of domestic trade.

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It shaped the European institutions adopted by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, with control of inflation assigned to an independent European Central Bank, and a ‘Stability and Growth Pact’ to set a cap on government deficits. Finally, and less directly, analysis of economic growth by historians such as Douglass North emphasized the importance of the right individual incentives for economic development, including private property rights and moral codes. This insight started to yield very different policy prescriptions from the concentration on boosting 198 t h e t h e ory a n d p r ac t ic e of mon e ta r i sm aggregate saving and investment totals fashionable in the heyday of Keynesian development economics. The shift was quite quick.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

The Essence of the Classical Model of Economics In sum, the classical model developed by Adam Smith and endorsed by his disciples in generations to come consisted of four general principles: 1. Thrift, hard work, enlightened self-interest, and benevolence toward fellow citizens are virtues and should be encouraged. 2. Government should limit its activities to administer justice, enforce private property rights, engage in certain public works, and defend the nation against aggression. 3. The state should adopt a general policy of laissez-faire non-interventionism in economic affairs (free trade, low taxes, minimal bureaucracy, etc.). 4. The classical gold/silver standard restrains the state from depreciating the currency and provides a stable monetary environment in which the economy may flourish.

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich
by Ndongo Sylla
Published 21 Jan 2014

It was later adopted in the 1970s by a group of economists from Latin America in order to promote a pro-market stance (Steger and Roy, 2010). Neoliberalism postulates that the most effective and fairest way to advance society’s welfare is to promote free enterprise and free trade. To this end, the state must guarantee the respect of individual liberties and private property rights. It should also ensure a smooth running of the market economy. For instance, it must not step in to set prices, impose tariffs or introduce other forms of distortions. The trio of deregulation, privatisation and promotion of a minimal social state is the de facto mode of ‘governance’ promoted by neoliberalism, which is also in favour of the isolation of central banks from any democratic pressure.

The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity
by Paul Collier
Published 10 May 2010

Until recently the wild forests of the Amazon had natural protection because the wood and the land were not sufficiently valuable to warrant being cut down. No more. The government opened up the land for private farming. Economists refer to this as the “common pool” problem, or the “tragedy of the commons.” In the absence of private property rights all natural assets are liable to be plundered unless defended by local social conventions, and such conventions do not usually survive rapid social change. The plunder of renewable assets is even more of a disaster than that of nonrenewables. When a renewable asset becomes extinct not just some future generation, but every future generation is deprived of its rights.

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists
by Linda McQuaig
Published 30 Aug 2019

Calhoun’s brinksmanship not only foreshadowed the South’s secession from the Union a few decades later, it also demonstrated the intense determination of Southern planters to shield their wealth from the taxing power of the majority. Calhoun’s ardent defence of the planter class went considerably beyond that of James Madison, the key drafter of the U.S. Constitution, who was himself a slave owner, as were a number of the other Founding Fathers. Madison had been careful to ensure the Constitution protected private property rights, including the property rights of slave owners, and that it included features that made it difficult for the majority to impose collective action. (The Electoral College and the Senate, for instance, were designed to favour less populous states, making it more difficult for the nation’s majority to get its way.)

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
by Oded Galor
Published 22 Mar 2022

In 1689, the king gave royal consent to the Bill of Rights, which abolished the monarch’s powers to suspend parliamentary legislation and to raise taxes and mobilise armies without Parliament’s consent. England became a constitutional monarchy. Parliament began to represent a relatively wide range of interests, including those of the rising mercantile class, and Britain established inclusive institutions that protected private property rights, encouraged private enterprise, and promoted equality of opportunity and economic growth. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, Britain intensified its attempts to abolish monopolies. The Royal African Company, to which King Charles II had awarded a monopoly over the African slave trade, was just one of many companies to lose power.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning
by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
Published 31 Oct 2019

They were aspiring converts, whose identification of normalization with Westernization eventually allowed a reactionary counter-elite to capture the most politically potent symbols of national identity. In Russia, by contrast, post-Soviet elites merely pretended that they were imitating Western norms as well as Western institutions, when they were only using the façade of democratic elections and voluntary market exchanges based on legally secured private-property rights to preserve their power, pocket the country’s wealth, and block the kinds of democratic reform that would have threatened insider privilege and perhaps led to state collapse and further territorial disintegration. They were strategic impostors. China, by contrast, was both openly and clandestinely borrowing from the West while insisting that the country’s developmental trajectory retained its ‘Chinese characteristics’.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
by Lizabeth Cohen
Published 30 Sep 2019

The outraged residents of North Harvard were enthusiastically supported by radical students and young faculty at Harvard, including some of UPA’s founders, in a strange alliance with the right-wing John Birch Society, which saw an ideal opportunity to blast urban renewal as a violation of private property rights. At Chester Hartman’s instigation, nine members of the Boston chapter of the American Institute of Planners sent an open letter to the mayor and the BRA registering disapproval of this “throwback to the bulldozer type of urban renewal … essentially a West End in miniature” and urging low-rent housing on any vacant land.

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That purchase price was then converted to an annual rental, per University Towers Inc.’s agreement; “Construction Expected to Start Next Week on 16-Story University Towers Structure,” NHR, July 22, 1958. 129. Bernard J. Frieden and Lynn B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 44. Martin Anderson, a conservative critic of urban renewal based on the government’s violation of private property rights, also objected to it for the difficulty that private developers had turning a profit in their renewal activities; The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949–1962 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 107–23. 130. H. Ralph Taylor, interview by David G. McComb, March 25, 1969, Washington, D.C., General Services Administration, National Archives and Records Service, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, transcript, 6–8; “13-Term N.Y.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Published 6 Feb 2015

In one of the most notorious parts of the decision, Justice Kennedy argues that construed as a person (or as an aggregate or association of persons), corporations straightforwardly share with all persons the right to speak in the political sphere. A corporation’s potentially greater power to finance the broadcast of its speech is no more relevant to constriction of this right than are the greater buying capacities of the rich to constriction of their private-property rights. Equality, for neoliberals as for classical economic liberals, pertains to rights’ distribution, not to the effects of rights’ exercise. Justice Kennedy also formulates corporate rights to political speech as bearing directly on citizen information gathering: “The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it,” and “for these reasons, political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it, whether by design or inadvertence.”37 Thus, Kennedy aims to protect both corporate rights to speak and citizen rights to know; he argues that the 164 u n d o in g t h e d e m o s latter are abridged when government intervenes in the marketplace of speech.

A Fine Mess
by T. R. Reid
Published 13 Mar 2017

“Introduction of flat-rate proportional income tax helped to boost economic activity and create new working places.”6 But nobody can measure how much of the post-independence boom in Estonia was due to the experiment with the flat tax. There were a lot of other things going on. In the 1990s, all the eastern European nations saw significant economic growth with the development of free markets and private property rights. They benefited from the so-called enlargement effect; that is, they all got major financial support from the European Union, which wanted to enlarge its membership by taking in the former Soviet states. They all offered much lower labor costs than the western European nations. Beyond that, Estonia was the closest of the new nations to Scandinavia, and thus cashed in on investment and tourism—Tallinn opened several lavish Vegas-style casinos—from wealthy countries like Finland and Sweden.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

This versatility has made neoliberalism a sometimes contradictory project, but one that succeeds precisely by transforming these contradictions into productive tensions.3 These tensions and variations have led some to believe that the term ‘neoliberalism’ is meaningless and should be relegated to polemics. But the term has some validity, even if it is often used loosely. In popular perception, neoliberalism is usually identified with a glorification of free markets – a position that also entails a commitment to free trade, private property rights and the free movement of capital. Defining neoliberalism as the veneration of free markets is problematic, however, because many ostensibly neoliberal states do not adhere to free-market policies. Others have argued that neoliberalism is predicated upon instilling competition wherever possible.4 This makes sense of the drive towards privatisation, but it fails to explain the debates within neoliberalism about whether competition is an ultimate good or not.5 Some take into account these tensions within neoliberalism and recognise it as the political, rather than economic, project of a particular class.6 There is certainly some truth to this claim, but, taken at face value, it cannot explain why neoliberal ideology was rejected for so long by the capitalist classes that purportedly benefit from it.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

The Myth of Ownership On closer examination, the intuition that people have a moral right to keep all of their pretax income quickly crumbles. The high incomes of people in modern industrial democracies are not a consequence of their efforts alone. They’re in large measure the result of vast current and past public investments in infrastructure, education, and institutions for defining and enforcing private property rights. It’s easy to lose sight of the central role such investments continue to play in our prosperity. Decades ago I had an opportunity to observe firsthand what life was like in an environment that had not benefited from investments of this sort. Fresh out of college, I served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer math and science teacher in a small village in Nepal, which was then, and remains, one of the poorest countries on the planet.

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City
by Tony Roshan Samara
Published 12 Jun 2011

Scholars across a range of disciplines have documented the rise and dominance of an approach to governance, across a variety of scales, informed by key principles of contemporary neoliberalism, including, most notably, the preeminence of the “free market” in allocating goods and services, the retreat or reconfiguration of the state to accommodate the requirements of transnational market forces, and an emphasis on policies promoting and protecting free trade, foreign direct investment, and private property rights.21 The following section discusses why the urban scale is of particular importance for understanding this project, the politics of urban security governance that are integral to defining it, and the specific role that policing, crime, and the criminal play in its execution; doing so will provide the necessary theoretical and conceptual framework for the subsequent discussion of Cape Town.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 1 Jan 2008

The Harvard economic historian David Landes concludes that China failed to “generate a continuous, self-sustaining process of scientific and technological advance.”7 Its achievements ended up being episodic and ephemeral. This was the tragedy of Asia: even when there was knowledge, there was no learning. Is Culture Destiny? Why did non-Western countries stand still while the West moved forward? These questions have been debated for centuries, and there is no neat answer. Private property rights, good institutions of governance, and a strong civil society (that is, one not dominated by the state) were clearly crucial for growth in Europe and, later, the United States. In contrast, the Russian czar theoretically owned his entire country. In China, the Ming court was run by mandarins who disdained commerce.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

Both had been colonized by the British during the seventeenth century, and both had been settled in large part by slaves brought from Africa to work on sugar plantations. Both had escaped from the heavy hand of colonial power during the 1960s, and upon winning their independence, both had chosen to maintain a British-style parliamentary democracy, private-property rights, and the traditions of common law. The similarities ended there. After their respective emancipations, Barbados had enjoyed a relatively steady rate of growth and a rising standard of living. Jamaica, on the other hand, struggled with high unemployment and runaway inflation. Measured in 2002, nearly forty years after their independence, Barbados’s per capita gross domestic product had outpaced Jamaica’s by a factor of three, and the gap between the two nations’ per capita incomes had expanded by a factor of five.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

These are universal functions in the sense that it is difficult to envisage how any market-based economy can develop in their absence. But these tasks do not tell us much about the form that the requisite institutions should take. As East Asia has amply shown, market incentives can be generated with institutions that take, from the best-practice perspective, highly unusual forms. Even private property rights can be dispensed with, it seems, if there are arrangements (as in the case of China’s TVEs, township and village enterprises) that provide effective and substantial control rights to investors. Function does not map into unique forms.6 I also argued that democracy was a sort of metainstitution, allowing each society to choose and shape its institutions in contextually appropriate ways.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
by Joseph N. Pelton
Published 5 Nov 2016

But what about out beyond the reaches of Earth orbit and new attempts to acquire resources that are in what is called “deep space”? The Issue of Space Mining as It Relates to Space Security On November 25, 2015, the United States adopted a new act that was intended to entitle American companies to private property rights with regard to natural resources they would mine in outer space. This act, H.R. 2262, the U. S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, is known more simply as the Space Act of 2015 [11]. This has already aroused several concerns (or possible conflicts) internationally, primarily because the mining of asteroids and other celestial bodies in outer space could generate billions, if not trillions, of dollars in revenue and could also have serious implications for the space environment and the long-term sustainability of space in proximity to our planet.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

Ayau’s new university, with its emphasis on free markets and a free society, charted a very different course from that of the old university. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2008: “Whereas San Carlos University actively aided leftist guerrillas, [Universidad] Francisco Marroquín preached the sanctity of private property rights and the rule of law. The cheeky Ayau chose red as the school’s official color ‘on the theory that it had been expropriated by the communists and we shouldn’t cede them exclusivity.’ ”4 Starting with “forty students in a rented house,” UFM was able within a decade to buy forty acres in the center of the city.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

For the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, freedom was defined in negative terms as the right to exclude others. Ennobling the idea of private property rights allowed the emerging bourgeoisie of Europe to create an alternative legal bulwark to counter ancient obligations to the Church and feudal estates and the limitations imposed by craft guilds, as well as the many other conventions that kept them indentured to an old order. Understandably, an emerging capitalist class came to see private property rights as a symbol of personal freedom. Property rights, protected by law, meant that no man could be bullied, oppressed, or made subject to another man’s will.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 Dec 2007

For further details, see H-J. Chang (2006), Public Investment Management, National Development Strategy Policy Guidance Note, United Nations DESA (Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and UNDP (United Nations Development Program), Box 15. Chapter 5 1 Property rights need not be private property rights, as is implicitly assumed by many people who emphasize the role of property rights. There are many communal property rights that work well. Many rural communities from all over the world have communal property rights that effectively regulate the use of common resources (e.g., forest, fishery) to prevent their over-exploitation.

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
by William Blum
Published 31 Mar 2002

In the six^year period leading up to the 1996 elections, NED spent close to a million dollars in a country with a population of some 2.5 million, the most significant result of which was to unite the opposition into a new coalition, the National Democratic Union. Borrowing from Newt Gingrich's Contract With America, the NED drafted a "Contract With the Mongolian Voter", which called for private property rights, a free press and the encouragement of foreign investment.25 The MPRR had already instituted Westen>style economic reforms, which had led to widespread poverty and wiped out much of the communist social safety net. But the new government promised to accelerate the reforms, including the privatization of housing.26 The Wall Street Journal was ecstatic that "shoclotherapy" was now going to become even more shocking, as with the sale of state enterprises.

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future
by Michael Levi
Published 28 Apr 2013

The two friends, who shared a stretch of land not far from the West Virginia border, were clearly used to sparring. Their disagreement didn’t fit into neat lines. “I’m a far leftist, is where I’m coming from,” explained Dix, whose views on everything from capitalism to Karl Marx confirmed that. Then he launched into a spirited defense of private property rights, particularly his right to lease his land 22 • THE POWER SURGE to gas drillers. Nor was Taylor, whom I had first seen the previous day sermonizing at the rally in Columbus, a Luddite who just wanted technology to go away. A few minutes spent listening to him extol the virtues of the latest milk-processing equipment and marveling at his cuttingedge creamery were enough to dispel that suspicion.

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 4 Jul 2007

For further details, see H-J. Chang (2006), ‘Public Investment Management’, National Development Strategy Policy Guidance Note, United Nations DESA (Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and UNDP (United Nations Development Program), Box 15. Chapter 5 1 Property rights need not be private property rights, as is implicitly assumed by many people who emphasize the role of property rights. There are many communal property rights that work well. Many rural communities from all over the world have communal property rights that effectively regulate the use of common resources (e.g., forest, fishery) to prevent their over-exploitation.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

Working paper 7587, National Bureau of Economic Research, Washington, D.C. Grafton, R. Quentin, Squires, Dale, and Fox, Kevin J. 2000. “Private Property and Economic Efficiency: A Study of a Common-Pool Resource.” Journal of Law and Economics 43, 679–714. Grafton, R. Quentin, Squires, Dale, and Kirkley, James E. 1996. “Private Property Rights and Crises in World Fisheries.” Contemporary Economic Policy 14, 89–99. Grampp, William D. 2000. “What Did Smith Really Mean by the Invisible Hand?” Journal of Political Economy 108, 441–465. Green, W. M. 1989. “Early Cuneiform.” Wayne W. Senner, ed., In The Origins of Writing. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

That ideology is often called neoliberalism, and it is, in the framing of the anthropologist David Harvey, “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” Where the theory goes, “deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” tend to follow, Harvey writes. “While personal and individual freedom in the marketplace is guaranteed, each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-being.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

If possessors know that their possessions can be taken by others at any time and that they will not receive the proceeds of any bid, they will be discouraged from taking care of and improving their property. In this situation, you might well let your house fall into disrepair. Like George’s tax proposal, the Vickrey Commons does not give people good investment incentives. A response could be to use private property rights where investment incentives are more important than allocative efficiency (George’s “artificial capital”), and common property (with uses distributed through auctions) where allocative efficiency is more important than investment efficiency (George’s “land”). Indeed, the current system of ownership in the United States vaguely echoes this formulation.

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism
by Ruth Kinna
Published 31 Jul 2019

A perennial anarchist complaint about party-approved forms of Marxism is that it presents socialism as scientific, encouraging abstruse theory that is difficult to understand and a technical approach to political argument; Marxism politicized science to use it as a tool to beat the bourgeoisie, but in Goodman’s terms, it promoted a concept of scientific objectivity or neutrality. The beauty of propaganda by the deed was that it did not rely on the mastery of complex theory. Burning land registry documents or refusing to respect a prohibition on a meeting in order to provoke an aggressive police response effectively taught hard lessons about the flimsiness of private property rights and legal bias and intolerance. Even if these lessons were inspired by heaps of written propaganda and a good amount of anarchist theory, the actions were hands-on, vivid and intelligible. Deeds educated to the extent that they transformed compliance into rebellion, fostering the critical, non-dominating cultures that anarchists championed.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy
by George Magnus
Published 10 Sep 2018

Earlier in the book, we saw how important this was to China, to a degree under Mao but much more so later. The rule of law, to which Chinese officials often refer even though they actually have a system of rule by law, is central to the security and neutrality of contracts and rights, and to the independent adjudication of disputes. Where legal systems enforce and protect private property rights and contractual arrangements, savers and investors are much more likely to be willing and able to channel money into the financing of companies and longer-term projects, and financial markets are more likely to flourish. As economic development proceeds, and especially as countries become more complex, good governance is essential in addressing challenges and weaknesses.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
Published 2 Mar 2021

No one considered the possibility that deep drilling and powerful diesel pumps could reach water located far beneath the surface and rapidly deplete entire water tables. Drilling technology and pumps changed the playing field, and not just by lowering it. As Barry McBee, chair of the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission, argued, these old rules do not “protect private property rights at all, and the Ozarka case is evidence of that. Farmers and ranchers believe they should have absolute rights to their water. Well, the rule of capture says they have that—unless the guy next to them has a bigger pump. Their rights become quite ephemeral at that point.” In Texas today, attachment means surface owners own the groundwater flowing beneath, but only until another surface owner pumps it up.

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

Similar neglect of unowned land occurred in the Soviet Union. According to Soviet economists, “forested areas that are cut down are not reseeded,”{630} though it would be financial suicide for a lumbering company to let that happen on their own property in a capitalist economy. All these things illustrate, in different ways, the value of private property rights to the society as a whole, including people who own virtually no private property, but who benefit from the greater economic efficiency that property rights create, which translates into a higher standard of living for the population at large. Despite a tendency to think of property rights as special privileges for the rich, many property rights are actually more valuable to people who are not rich—and such property rights have often been infringed or violated for the benefit of the rich.

…

Zoning boards, “open space” laws, historical preservation commissions and other organizations and devices have also been used to severely limit the sale of private property for use in ways not approved by those who wish to keep things the way they are in the communities where they live—often described as “our community,” though no one owns the whole community and each individual owns only that individual’s private property. Yet such verbal collectivization is more than just a figure of speech. Often it is a prelude to legal and political actions to negate private property rights and treat the whole community as if it were in fact collectively owned. By infringing or negating property rights, affluent and wealthy property owners are thus able to keep out people of average or low incomes and, at the same time, increase the value of their own property by ensuring its growing scarcity as population increases in the area.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
by Matthew Carmona , Tim Heath , Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc
Published 15 Feb 2010

Arguments were advanced that government was part of the problem and that the solution involved freeing market forces through deregulation and by rolling back the frontiers of the state. Influenced by the work of key public choice economists, the 1970s and 1980s saw neo-liberal arguments come to prominence and subsequently to political power. In general, as Dennis & Urry (2009: 141) observe, neo-liberalism asserts:‘… the power and importance of private entrepreneurship, private property rights, the freeing of markets and the freeing of trade. It involves deregulating private activities and companies, the privatisation of previously ‘state’ or ‘collective’ services, the undermining of the collective powers of workers and providing the conditions for the private sector to find ever new sources of profitable activity.’

…

Furthermore, within any particular community or society, there may not be consensus about what is higher design quality, nor about what makes a good place. Indeed, a primary task of stakeholder consultation and engagement is often to build consensus about what constitutes design quality (see Chapter 10 and Chapter 12). Based on restrictions of private property rights, systems of controlling design and development invariably arouse great passions and sometimes controversy. Those who perceive themselves to be most directly affected – designers and developers – often make the most strident case against such forms of control. As Walters (2007: 132–3) argues: ‘Many architects are guilty of knee-jerk reactions to design standards, preferring the “freedom” to produce poor buildings rather than be required to improve standards of design to meet mandated criteria.’

Free Ride
by Robert Levine
Published 25 Oct 2011

And in the United States at least, it’s hard to imagine Congress would pass a law to fund culture. (If you think Fox News hosts hate rap music now, wait until it’s supported by tax dollars!) “Americans distrust government,” Fisher says, “and these systems indicate government control over what are perceived as private property rights.” Fisher’s idea for government funding captured more imaginations in Europe, where he still speaks about it. Lincoff, who has worked on his single-right idea as a hobby for more than a decade, recently found an enthusiastic audience in Sweden and Finland. “In 1998, after I left ASCAP to go out on my own, people weren’t responding to this idea—they were laughing,” he remembers.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

By proposing for further examination that the first global civilian networks took shape thanks to capitalists behaving like socialists, not socialists behaving like capitalists, I understand the terms capitalism and socialism in the ordinary way. I define capitalism as the order of the market economy, where economic actors act independent of the state, private property rights are reasonably secure and dominate most enterprises, prices and trade are predominantly free, state subsidies are limited, and transactions mostly monetized. Socialism, by contrast, is an economic order of the command economy where the opposite can usually be expected, although with its instinct to communism operating according to the moral and political principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”26 The argument here depends not on collapsing that definitional divide but on revealing how that ordinary understanding falls short of describing mixed constellations of competitive and collaborative practices—public-private and state-market formations that belie and tweak our sense of these opposing economic orders.

The Permanent Portfolio
by Craig Rowland and J. M. Lawson
Published 27 Aug 2012

Rule #1 is that you should only do business in first-world countries. There is no advantage to putting your money in third-world financial institutions, but plenty of risk that your money may never be returned to you. Any locale with lots of corruption, an unstable government, or history of not protecting private property rights should be avoided. Rule #2 is that if you can't trace with certainty how an institution is regulated, insured, audited, and held accountable to its customers then you should avoid it. Any foreign jurisdiction you are considering should also have robust laws in place to deal with problems that financial institutions can encounter and provide methods of recovering assets if something goes wrong.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Marxist geographer David Harvey gives the following description of the neoliberal state that considers its political element in ways that the deliberately simplified IMF definition doesn’t: The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such [neoliberal] practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and function required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, healthcare, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture.59 Neoliberalism is also not an accident of history, but the result of a longstanding opposition to the post-war social democratic consensus which liberal economists such as Friedrich Hayek believed to be a stepping stone towards Soviet-style collectivism.60 Hayek may have had a well-known intellectual feud with Keynes but there was also no intention to limit the propagation of neoliberal ideas into the confines of academia.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 27 Sep 2011

The quickening connection of the nervous system of every human being to every other human being on Earth, via the Internet and other new communications technologies, is propelling us into a global social space and a new simultaneous field of time. The result is that access to vast global networks is becoming as important a value as private property rights were in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A generation growing up on the Internet is apparently unmindful of the classical economic theorists’ aversion to sharing creativity, knowledge and expertise, and even goods and services in open commons to advance the common good. The classical economists would regard such economic arrangements as inimical to human nature and doomed to fail for the simple reason that human beings are primarily selfish, competitive, and predatory, and would either take advantage of the goodwill and naïveté of their peers, and freeload on the contribution of others, or would go it alone with a far better payoff.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike
by Eugene W. Holland
Published 1 Jan 2009

The distribution of pieces on the Go board is like the distribution of animals in open pasture, who occupy the space with­ out any preassigned directions or partitions; indeed, one of the roots of nomos, nemo, means “to put out to pasture” (well before nomos became, in some Greek texts, a synonym for “custom” and, eventually, “law”59). This component of the concept of nomadism thus derives ultimately from open pastureland outside city walls and particularly from a nondirectional and nonpartitioned way of occupying such space, in contrast to the space of the city, with its walls, streets, private property rights, and laws. Far more often in Greek philosophy, nomos is opposed to physis. In this context, it refers to the domain of human culture as distinguished from that of nature. Thus, in a conceptual topography, the realm of nomos would lie somewhere between the unruly realm of nature or wilderness (physis), on one hand, and the enclosed and strictly regulated space of the city or the State (polis), on the other.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

In an era when nationalisation was practically synonymous with communism, and communism was cast as the devil incarnate, it is perhaps not surprising that the mainstream economic response was to argue for the privatisation of commons. Ostrom’s response to the ‘Tragedy’ was different. Heavily influenced by Hayek, she resisted the idea that states know best. But neither did she sympathise with the rush to assign private property rights. Instead she drew on her empirical work to suggest another alternative. In some circumstances, she insisted, there is no tragedy. Commons are owned by communities, often by people who live near each other and know each other well. Communities set up their own rules regarding access and create sanctions for those who violate them.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

When enterprise is the prerogative of the state, the entity that controls the law is identical with the entity that has the most powerful motive to evade it – a sufficient explanation, it seems to me, of the ecological catastrophe of socialist economies. Studies have shown that free economies, with private property rights and an enforceable rule of law, not only consume far less energy per comparable product than economies where private property is insecure or absent, but also are able to adapt far more rapidly to the demand for clean energy, and for the reduction of emissions.6 And while markets cannot solve all our environmental problems, and are indeed the cause of some of them, the alternatives are almost always worse.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

Free speech is another coalescing mantra, even though the “crisis of free speech” is a self-victimizing strawman, as left-wing academics are purged from campuses, Zionists routinely censor Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activities, corporate conglomerates control mainstream media, millions are disenfranchised from the political system, and private property rights trump the right to dissent. Further, intolerant speech without consequence is not an inalienable legal right. Aleksandar Hemon surmises, “The practice of fascism supersedes its ideas, which is why people affected and diminished by it are not all that interested in a marketplace of ideas in which fascists have prime purchasing power.”3 Of particular interest to us here is the dogma of racial citizenship, yet another unifying issue among the far right.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

It is against this second type of expropriation of the value that workers create for the owners of productive property (sometimes called “the means of production”) that the communists and anarchists railed. Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince who became an anarchist, argued that humanity’s progress toward a more advanced and harmonious state of collective living, where everyone could have their basic needs met, was impeded by the state’s violent protection of private property rights. If the dispossessed Wikipedians in my counterfactual example marched to Jimmy Wales’s home with pitchforks, it would be the local, taxpayer-funded police who would protect his private property. Similarly, it is taxpayer-funded courts and judges whose dedication to upholding the law often also uphold the property interests of economic elites.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence
by Robert Bryce
Published 16 Mar 2011

Federal and state authorities must be robust in their efforts to protect human health, in particular. But energy legislation should be guided by the answers to a few questions: (1) Will it increase supplies? (2) Will it lower 256 GUSHER OF LIES prices? And (3) does it protect human health, private property rights, and the environment? If the answers are all affirmative, the legislation deserves consideration. STOP OBSESSING OVER PRICES AND REDUCE THE NUMBER OF FUEL BLENDS Americans are obsessed by motor fuel prices. Over the past three or four years, there has been a barrage of stories on TV, in newspapers, and on the Internet about the rising cost of gasoline.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing
Published 6 May 2008

If they ask[ed] you about land use and property rights, they would walk away feeling very comfortable about what your position was about abortion and gun control, without you having to say what it is." No wonder the ranchers at the Southwest Landowner Conference saw a connection between the United Nations, private property rights, gay marriage, and party politics. They were connected. Over the past thirty years, the parties have cultivated more areas of disagreement, and people have allied themselves more tightly with their parties, either by changing parties or by changing their minds. As new issues have cropped up—the war in Iraq, telephone spying by the government, a Spanish version of the national anthem—Americans have divided neatly by party.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2010

Spencer is not smarter or more altruistic than his fishing colleagues around the world; he just has different incentives. Oddly, some environmental groups oppose these kinds of licensed quotas because they “privatize” a public resource. They also fear that the licenses will be bought up by large corporations, driving small fishermen out of business. So far, the evidence strongly suggests that creating private property rights—giving individual fishermen the right to a certain catch, including the option of selling that right—is the most effective tool in the face of collapsing commercial fisheries. A 2008 study of the world’s commercial fisheries published in Science found that individual transferable quotas can stop or even reverse the collapse of fishing stocks.

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
by Mark Hertsgaard
Published 15 Jan 2011

As sensible as this approach sounds in theory, the prevailing social context has made it very difficult to put into practice. The Netherlands can implement retreat-with-compensation largely because the nation's laws, values, and history support the idea. But retreat-with-compensation is a much harder sell in the United States, especially in the conservative South, where individualism is treasured, private property rights are sacred, and government is despised except when it is subsidizing oil and gas production. For example, retreat-with-compensation is all but incomprehensible to the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Corps—amazingly—remains in charge of post-Katrina rebuilding. I say amazingly because, well, Katrina is hardly the first stain on the Corps' reputation.

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia
by Steve Coll
Published 29 Mar 2009

Akbar population growth Pound, Ezra poverty: in Bangladesh; BCCI and; caste system and; communism and; development programs and; economic reform and; in India ; in Nepal; in Pakistan; in Sri Lanka Prabhakaran, Villaphallai Prakash, Om Prashad, Ram Pratap, Anita Premadasa, Ranasinghe: assassination of ; and death squads Price Waterhouse private property rights privatization public-sector employment Punjab, India; counterinsurgency campaign in ; Pakistan and; Rajiv Gandhi and; separatist guerrilla movement in ; Sikh assassins in Quayle, Dan Quayle, Marilyn Qutubuddin Aibak racism Rahman, Abdul railroads Rajasthan, India Rajgopal, P.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

Neoliberalism encourages us to think that everything we want and need must be found with a price tag attached. 13 Neoliberalism didn’t just happen; it was a set of choices made by the winning side in a series of struggles. The victors remade the state to subject everything to competition; to enforce private property rights; and to protect the right of individuals to accumulate. Public services were sold off to private profiteers. Citizens became customers. Freedom was there, the neoliberals argued, you just had to purchase it. 14 Neoliberalism was born in Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratic socialist Salvador Allende and, with the advice of American economists, reorganized the economy by force.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

Gill further notes most developing nations that have followed the “Washington Consensus” policy prescription have raised living standards, increased education levels for girls and women, and held free elections, while most developing nations that cling to central economic control remain impoverished, backward, and under the thumbs of thugs and despots. Put together in the 1980s by an international team of economists, the Washington Consensus recommends that developing nations switch to free economies without central control, avoid debt, deregulate, create enforceable private property rights, liberalize trade going out and capital coming in, and have low marginal tax rates that they actually implement. (Troubled nations such as Greece post high tax rates, then allow the affluent to bribe their way out of taxes.) Some analysts scorn the Washington Consensus, which stands as the reverse of the prescription of absolute central planning—ministries and subsidies as far as the eye can see.

Case for Mars
by Robert Zubrin
Published 27 Jun 2011

Two things, though, made these distant lands valuable and salable. For one, at least a few people believed that the land would be exploitable someday, and a juridical arrangement existed in the form of British Crown land patents that allowed trans-Appalachian land to be privately owned. In fact, if a mechanism were put in place that could enforce private property rights on Mars, land there could probably be bought and sold now. Such a mechanism would not need to employ enforcers on the surface of Mars (no space patrol required). Instead, the patent or property registry of a sufficiently powerful nation, such as the United States, would be entirely adequate.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin
Published 30 Apr 2019

What made it salable were two things: (1) at least a few people believed that it would be exploitable someday; and (2) a juridical arrangement existed in the form of British Crown land patents, which allowed trans-Appalachian land to be privately owned. Thus, if a mechanism were put in place that could enforce private property rights in space, mining claims probably could be bought and sold now. Such a mechanism would not need to employ enforcers (e.g., space police) patrolling the asteroid belt; the patent or property registry of a sufficiently powerful nation, such as the United States, would be entirely adequate. For example, if the United States chose to grant a mining patent to a private group that surveyed an asteroid (or any other piece of extraterrestrial real estate) to some specified degree of fidelity, such claims would be tradable today on the basis of their future speculative worth, and probably could be used to privately finance robotic mining survey probes in the near future.

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History
by Casey Michel
Published 23 Nov 2021

All of a sudden, the postcommunist states opened to the West—and the communist apparatchiks were replaced by rapacious oligarchs, all of whom watched their net worth explode, mirroring the elite wealth gathering in other postcolonial regions. And it didn’t take long for officials and industrial leaders in the U.S. to suddenly realize how they could profit from that transition. The marriage of American private property rights and American financial secrecy provisions presented an advantage that the tropical, sand-strewn islands couldn’t compete with. “It is not Panama or the British Virgin Islands or Switzerland that is now the best place in the world to [launder] assets,” one Swiss lawyer enmeshed in the offshore world recently said.

Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage
by Jeff Guinn
Published 24 Jan 2023

The New York Times reported that these allegations included confiscating citizens’ guns, arresting President Obama’s political foes and placing them in concentration camps, and Obama subsequently suspending the Constitution and remaining in office indefinitely. Texas governor Greg Abbott promptly ordered the state’s National Guard to shadow all Army activities within the Texas borders so Texans could feel certain that “their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.” The Times article concluded, “The specter of Waco has not faded.” * * * The focus of American militias altered after Donald Trump succeeded Obama in the White House. Dissidents still were prepared to use threats of violence, or, sometimes, violence itself, but now its foes were different.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

‘Some crises spread hysteria; some clear the mind and focus attention,’ the leader opens. ‘This one has done both.’ Markets are not always self-correcting, the editorial argues. Unregulated markets may reduce, not improve, social efficiency, but these are indictments of capitalists, not capitalism. The main features of the liberal market economy – private property rights, smart but even-handed and arm’s-length regulation and democratic politics – are uncontested. But, we conclude, keeping financial markets global while making them safe requires much tighter cooperation between countries, including China, on financial regulation, global macroeconomics and monetary policy.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
by Robert Bryce
Published 26 Apr 2011

PAUL GETTY, one of the world’s first billionaires, once declared that “the meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.”1 Getty—who made his first million dollars in the Oklahoma oil fields—was on to something. Although dozens of economists have written about the critical role that private-property rights play in building wealth in developing countries (among the more notable: Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto), few, if any, have considered the importance of private ownership of mineral rights.2 And fewer still have written about America’s anomalous status as the only country on the planet that allows individuals, rather than the state or the crown, to own the minerals beneath their feet.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

Specifically, history shows that the capitalist system has experienced big swings in the balance between politics and economics, between the power of government and the power of the market, between one-man one-vote and one-dollar one-vote. These swings can be illustrated by two ideologically opposite examples. Until the late nineteenth century, the idea of a progressive income tax was widely considered to be incompatible with the basic principles of capitalism and private property rights. In the United States, income tax was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1895 and could not be levied by the federal government until the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, in 1913. At that point, a top tax rate of 7 percent was applied to incomes above $500,000 (roughly $10 million in today’s money).

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
by William Easterly
Published 1 Mar 2006

Ohero’s sons, who blamed their uncle Ogwok Nyayal, who blamed Alloyce Ohero, who, if he had been alive, would have blamed Ocholla Ogweng. Here was a deal with nothing for everyone. What looks like opportunistic behavior could be the mingling of private property with traditional values, which place obligations to kin above those to strangers or banks. By imposing land titling on such complex social customs, “private property rights” may actually increase the insecurity of land tenure rather than decrease it. Perhaps chastened by these experiences, formal land law in Kenya is now moving back toward recognizing customary rights. The government is allowing the paper titles to lapse.47 Reformers who want to increase the security of property rights have to search for what works in each locality.

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap
by Graham Allison
Published 29 May 2017

In his book Civilization, Niall Ferguson identifies six “killer apps”—ideas and institutions that drove the extraordinary divergence in prosperity between the West and the rest of the world after 1500. These are competition, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society, and work ethic.8 While noting China’s great reconvergence with the West since 1970, Niall wonders if China can sustain its progress without killer app number three: secure private property rights. I worry that the American work ethic has lapsed into mediocrity, while its consumer society has become decadent. If the leaders in each society grasped the seriousness of the problems it faced on the home front and gave them the priority they deserved, officials would discover that devising a way to “share the twenty-first century in Asia” was not their most serious challenge.

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 1 Jan 2002

When the first of them, the Earl of Cornwallis, arrived in India (fresh from defeat in America), he took immediate steps to change the ethos of company administration, increasing salaries and reducing perquisites in a deliberate inversion of ‘the old principles of Leadenhall Street economy’. This marked the beginning of what would become an institution celebrated for its sea-green incorruptibility – the Indian Civil Service. In place of the arbitrary taxation of the Hastings era, Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement of 1793 introduced English-style private property rights in land and fixed landowners’ tax obligations in perpetuity; the effect of this was to reduce peasants to mere tenants and strengthen the position of a rising Bengali gentry. The Governor-General’s new palace built in Calcutta by Cornwallis’s successor, Richard, Earl of Mornington (later Marquess Wellesley) – brother of the future Duke of Wellington – was a telling symbol of what the British in India aspired to in the years after Warren Hastings.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

By one means or another, people who had for generations freely grazed their herds, collected firewood, and hunted on the lands around them could no longer do so.11 These lands had been a commons, the property of all and of none. Forever after, they became property. If property is robbery, then a legal system dedicated to the protection of private property rights is a system that perpetuates a crime. By making property sacrosanct we validate the original theft. This should not be too surprising if the laws were made by the thieves themselves to legitimize their ill-gotten gains. Such was indeed the case: in Rome and elsewhere, it was the rich and powerful who both seized the land and made the laws.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Jan 2011

How exactly did the Dutch win the trust of the financial system? Firstly, they were sticklers about repaying their loans on time and in full, making the extension of credit less risky for lenders. Secondly, their country’s judicial system enjoyed independence and protected private rights – in particular private property rights. Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property. Instead, it flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property. Imagine that you are the son of a solid family of German financiers. Your father sees an opportunity to expand the business by opening branches in major European cities.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
by Bethany Moreton
Published 15 May 2009

In the 1970s and 1980s, in contrast, sigÂ�nifiÂ�cant numbers of Americans transferred their loyalty to different solutions: privatization, deregulation, shrinking social provisions, proliferating fiÂ�nanÂ�cial speculation, job and tax cuts, and the general recasting of notions like the public sphere and the common good as fundamentally suspect. Many sources contributed to the late-twentieth-century prestige of neoliberalism, or the belief that individual entrepreneurship, vigorous private property rights, and minimal barriers to trade best provide for personal freedom and well-being.2 The economists who coined the term in the years around World War II blended the free-market enthusiasm of some nineteenth-century political economists with Adam Smith’s classic image: the invisible hand of the market that mysteriously guided the most venal human concerns into the collective good.

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream
by R. Christopher Whalen
Published 7 Dec 2010

Higgs also finds that the negative impact of FDR’s New Deal on the American economy delayed the start of the recovery in the U.S. economy to almost 1950 and the Korean War mobilization: “In 1945 the death of Roosevelt and the succession of Harry S Truman and his administration completed the shift from a political regime investors perceived as full of uncertainty to one in which they felt much more confident about the security of their private property rights . . . Only in 1946 and the following years did private investment reach and remain at levels consistent with a prosperous and growing economy,” he concludes.7 WWII was called truly “the New Dealers War.” During the conflict, Washington ran the private economy with a heavy hand. Rationing and shortages were the shared experience of a generation of Americans.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

Hume argued that property is a human convention born out of common interest that leads each man “in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility.”10 In other words, the laws of property are codes that human beings agree to follow because it is in their common interest. Hume made it plain that he was sympathetic to the notion that what a man makes out of nature is his own. He argued, however, that private property rights should be encouraged not because they were based in natural rights but because they were “useful habits” and that property should be freely exchanged in the marketplace because it was “so beneficial to human society.”11 By contending that the general welfare of society, defined as the pursuit of pleasure over pain, was the basis of all property arrangements, the utilitarians could justify championing both the private property of the laborer and the property rights embedded in capital, arguing that both forms of property advanced the general welfare and are therefore useful.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
by Jennifer Burns
Published 18 Oct 2009

Goldwater’s vote was based on principles he had held for years. A firm supporter of state’s rights, he was alarmed at the expansive powers granted the federal government under the act. Following the analysis of his friends William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, he also believed the act was unconstitutional because it infringed on private property rights. In the scrum of electoral politics such distinctions were academic. Goldwater’s vote went down as a vote for segregation. Rand understood his action differently because she shared his individualistic perspective on rights and his belief that private property was sacrosanct. Unlike Goldwater, Rand was unimpressed with the doctrine of state’s rights, which “pertains to the division of power between local and national authorities. . . .

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
by Michael Huemer
Published 29 Oct 2012

Most will answer no to both questions. Majority will alone does not generate an entitlement to coerce the minority, nor does it generate an obligation of compliance on the part of the minority. More precisely, majority will alone does not provide sufficient backing for a proposal to override an individual’s private property rights (your right to your money in this example) or right not to be subjected to harmful coercion. This sort of example places a dialectical burden on defenders of democratic authority, a burden of identifying some special circumstances that apply to the government that account for why, in the case of government, majority support provides adequate justification for coercion, even though it does not suffice for other agents. 4.2 Deliberative democracy and legitimacy 4.2.1 The idea of deliberative democracy Recent democratic theorists have emphasized the value of decision-making procedures in a democratic society.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 1 Jan 2004

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided,” he writes, that we denigrate all forms of being for the simple sense of having.103 All human senses, including knowing, thinking, feeling, loving—in short, all of life—is corrupted by private property. Marx makes clear, however, that he does not want to go back to any kind of primitive communal ownership. He focuses rather on the contradiction in the logic of capital that points toward a new future resolution. On the one hand, as we have seen, capitalist private property rights are based on the individual labor of the producer, but on the other hand capital continually introduces more collective and collaborative forms of production: the wealth produced collectively by the workers becomes the private property of the capitalist. This contradiction becomes increasingly extreme in the realm of immaterial labor and immaterial property.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

It could not innovate and it could not allocate resources efficiently. In the wake of its collapse conservatives, capitalist propagandists and free-marketeers argued that its failure was one of planning, bureaucracy and one-party authoritarianism. The conclusion was that non-communist Russia simply had to privatise socialised assets, create private property rights and let free-market forces do the rest. Following that path has resulted in a complete fiasco, with Russia dominated by a class of super-rich oligarchs and a largely dysfunctional economy. The country needed Enlightenment institutions as well as the rule of law, trustworthy accounts, a free press, competition rules – little of which had attracted the same attention.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
by Jared Diamond
Published 6 May 2019

The result has been that, since the 1990 change of government, the Chilean economy has grown at an impressive rate, and that Chile leads the rest of Latin America economically. Average incomes in Chile were only 19% of U.S. averages in 1975; that proportion had risen to 44% by the year 2000, while average incomes in the rest of Latin America were dropping over that same time. Inflation rates in Chile are low, the rule of law is strong, private property rights are well protected, and the pervasive corruption with which I had to deal during my 1967 visit has decreased. A consequence (and also a partial cause) of this improved economic climate was a doubling of foreign investment that took place quickly in Chile during the first seven years of the return of democracy.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance
by Simon Fairlie
Published 14 Jun 2010

Hardin’s paper described how individual ‘rational’ graziers sharing a common pasture would inevitably overstock the common with their own cattle in order to derive more private gain at public expense. In the same way, the fishery economists argued, the common resource of the oceans was overstocked with fishing boats: there were ‘too many vessels chasing too few fish’.16 Their answer was the same as that advocated by Hardin for pastures (and for everything else): the introduction of private property rights. On land this took the form of enclosure with fences; in fisheries, since fish cannot easily be fenced,17 it took the form of metaphorical enclosure through licences, or more frequently quotas – preferably tradable quotas, because their accumulation by powerful actors leads to ‘fewer boats’ (though bigger ones).18 The economists were, of course, supported by these increasingly corporate vessel owners who stood to profit from making the global fishing fleet leaner, meaner and greedier.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

These governments established priorities and pointed out the direction for private enterprise. The Soviets had a command economy in which almost all enterprises were owned by the state. Central planners set production goals with little attention paid to market signals. Because Europeans had come to prize the private property rights they had wrested from monarchs long ago, many Russians resisted the appropriation of their property, so political repression had accompanied the Soviets’ economic restructuring. After the war, Soviet planners announced new economic goals that made control even tighter. The Soviet government was determined never again to be exposed to a horrendous invasion like that of Hitler’s, so they created a buffer zone comprising the countries of Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and Bulgaria.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

In a 2005 article titled “The Rise of Europe,” the development experts Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson set out to explain this continental boom and found that the answer was a combination of geography and a readiness to exploit it.3 Between 1500 and 1850, they argued, the boom in Europe was driven mainly by nations with two key advantages: port cities on major Atlantic trade routes, and monarchies that respected private property rights and granted merchants the most latitude to exploit growing trade channels. Thus the economies that led the sixteenth-century boom in Europe were Britain and the Netherlands, driven by early respect for property rights and the thriving Atlantic ports of London and Amsterdam. In recent years it became fashionable to argue that location no longer matters, because the Internet makes it possible to provide services from anywhere.

The Economic Weapon
by Nicholas Mulder
Published 15 Mar 2021

See also Turkey pacific blockade: in the 19th century, 17–18 British planners and, 145, 221 of China (1938–1945), 252 in Geneva Protocol 136, 139 of Greece (1916–1917), 49 of Hamburg, 122 League of Nations and, 160, 166 legality of, 18, 145 of Venezuela (1902–1903), 69 Pangalos, Theodoros, 8, 152, 152–154, 212, 352n112 Pankhurst, Christabel, 60, 98–99 Paraguay: Chaco War and, 193–195, 368n79 League of Nations Article 16 and, 85 Paris Declaration (1856), 16, 34 Paris Economic Conference (1916), 59, 70 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 3, 21, 28, 57, 78–82, 85, 90, 100–101, 112, 122, 131, 159, 169, 285, 289 Pašić, Nikola, 124, 125 Paul (prince regent of Yugoslavia), 274 Paul-Boncour, Joseph, 142 Peace Ballot (1935), 200–201 Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 282 Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), 138–139, 147, 220 Petrolia (Albanian oil town), 238–240 Phillimore, Lord, 82 Phillips, William, 216 Pila, Fernand, 77–78, 323n118 Poincaré, Raymond, 126, 127 Poland: British security guarantee to, 262 Convention on Financial Assistance and, 159–161, 357n47 German occupation of, 249, 263 Polish-Soviet War (1920), 106 sanctions against Germany and, 189, 199 Polanyi, Karl, 17, 201 Polish-Soviet War (1920), 106 Politis, Nikolaos, 134, 137 Polk, Frank, 93 Pollock, Frederick, 130 Porter, Stephen, 168 Portugal: blacklisting of firms in, 310n62 blockade policies and, 44 neutrality of, 266–267 sanctions against Japan and, 278 Potter, Pitman, 179 preclusive purchasing, 43 private property rights, 4, 7, 17, 20–21, 37, 56, 59, 76–77, 146, 157–158 public opinion: on Corfu crisis, 130 influenced by sanctions, 73, 78, 119, 138 on Italo-Ethiopian War, 218 on Japan’s militarism, 254 in neutral countries, 171 rationing system for blockade, 41–43 raw materials: autarky and, 58–59, 227, 229–233 British control over, 375n25 as economic weapon, 66–68, 67 t globalization of trade and, 21–22, 28–29 League of Nations and, 79 minerals production, 207–209, 208 t sanctions against Germany and, 56–57, 197–198, 243, 245–247 sanctions against Italy and, 236–237 sanctions against Japan and, 250, 255–257, 269, 282–283 substitution effect and, 397n176.

Hedge Fund Market Wizards
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 24 Apr 2012

Specifically, South Korea had complied with all the terms of the emergency IMF loan, including austerity measures, and had overhauled securities laws and regulation to a level that was on par with the U.S. South Korea already had a deep cultural respect for the rule of law, with lots of precedent for enforcing private property rights. Despite all of these positive characteristics, Korean equities traded at an increasing discount to the rest of Asia. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether there was a good explanation for this apparent anomaly. Our model is to always find experts in the domain, river guides so to speak.

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi
Published 28 Dec 2017

However, while “the Labor Charter of 1927 admitted the right of private property in principle, [it] reserved to the State the power to intervene, manage, or operate property when its own interests required” (see Steiner, 1938, p. 91). The new Italian constitution makes no reference to the role of the market and to the importance of protecting private property rights. Inevitably, the principles expressed in it have had an important impact on Italian policies and developments. They have guided the decisions of the Italian governments, of parliament, of the judiciary, and of the public administration toward giving strong rights to workers and questionable rights to property owners.

The Making of Global Capitalism
by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
Published 8 Oct 2012

Howe Institute Policy Study 44, Ottawa: Renouf, 2006. p. 10. 15 Ian Robinson, North American Free Trade as if Democracy Mattered, Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 1993, p. 2. Stephen Clarkson and Stepan Wood would later put the point this way: “NAFTA provides by far the most extensive protection of private property rights in Canada. Its rights for foreign investors are unprecedented in Canadian law and inconsistent with the treatment of private property in the Canadian constitution, which gives no protection against the taking of private property.” A Perilous Imbalance: The Globalization of Canadian Law and Governance, Vancouver: UBC Press: 2010, p. 77. 16 Robinson, North American Free Trade, p. 20. 17 Gus Van Harten and Martin Loughlin, “Investment Treaty Arbitration as a Species of Global Administrative Law,” European Journal of International Law 17: 1 (2006), p. 149. 18 As we saw in Chapter 1, after the Civil War the US Supreme Court went beyond the commonly accepted “takings” rule in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution (which dealt with the confiscation of land for public use purposes) to require compensation in situations where the use of taxation or regulatory powers might lower expected profits or the market value of private property and corporate assets.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

Under anything less than a hypothetical and practically unattainable perfect market in communications infrastructure services, users of a proprietary infrastructure will face a less-than-perfect menu of influence exactions that they must accept before they can communicate using owned infrastructure. 300 Adopting a regulatory framework under which all physical means of communication are based on private property rights in the infrastructure will therefore create a cost for users, in terms of autonomy. This cost is the autonomy deficit of exclusive reliance on proprietary models. If ownership of infrastructure is concentrated, or if owners can benefit from exerting political, personal, cultural, or social influence over others who seek access to their infrastructure, they will impose conditions on use of the infrastructure that will satisfy their will to exert influence.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by Anne C. Heller
Published 27 Oct 2009

With George Reisman playing a chain-smoking, thickly accented Rand, Ralph Raico as a pompous Branden, and young historian Ron Hamowy imitating a beleaguered rank-and-file follower named Tina, they blended reasoned demands for lecture fees by Raico with satirical quotes from Francisco’s money speech in Atlas Shrugged. They taped their hijinks on a reel-to-reel recorder, and when Branden found out about it he demanded the tape. “After all,” Rothbard claimed he said, “you wouldn’t mock God.” The libertarian refused, citing private-property rights and thinking, Who’s God here, buster? You, Rand, or both? The beginning of the end of Rothbard’s relationship with Rand came when Branden accused him of plagiarizing John Galt’s speech, as well as key parts of Barbara Branden’s NYU master’s thesis on free will, in a paper he had prepared for the summer 1958 Sea Island symposium.

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe
by Mark Mazower
Published 4 Nov 2021

In a previously quiet Ottoman backwater that had been left in ruins by the fighting – Athens – a new capital arose with wide boulevards, hotels, a parliament, a university and a palace. Across the new kingdom, an older, largely agrarian way of life came under the spell of a society run by banks, newspapers, clocks and private property rights. And just as the gap between Syros’s new Orthodox port and the older Catholic town on the hill gradually narrowed, so the country’s numerous distinctive local and regional cultures gave way to a larger sense of national belonging. This transformation of a society, a polity and an economy was the product of a peasant uprising that turned into a revolution and created a nation.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Published 23 Sep 2019

Confucius similarly observed that “the gentleman understands rightness, whereas the petty person understands profit.” Merchants and industrialists were treated pretty much the same way as they were under the imperial state, and were only allowed to become members of the party in 2001. It was not until 2007 that a law governing private property rights was passed that made their assets more secure. Growth Under Moral Leadership Things changed after Mao’s death in 1976. A bitter power struggle at the top of the Communist Party concluded with Deng Xiaoping’s dominance over the party and the state in 1978. Deng initiated a radical transformation of the economy, preparing the ground for the subsequent massive boom of the Chinese economy.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

“Medieval peasants, like poor people now or anywhere, were close to the edge, and they had to be really careful not to fall over it,” said McCloskey. There had been flickers of progress in England and the rest of the world, but the flame always blew out. The Enlightenment found a magic elixir to keep it burning. Between the introduction of private property rights protecting their upside gains and the social safety net protecting their downside, suddenly those peasants could “have a go”—McCloskey’s term, a Britishism for taking a chance on a better life. Initially, of course, this was an opportunity afforded only to free (i.e., white) men, but gradually the franchise expanded; Britain abolished slavery in 1833, women incrementally gained property rights, and society grudgingly became more tolerant toward LGBTQ people and others who might once have been marginalized but now have a chance to have a go.[*3] Since 1776, the world has never been the same.

Cadillac Desert
by Marc Reisner
Published 1 Jan 1986

While Powell knew that his plan for settling the American West would be considered revolutionary, he saw a precedent. After all, what was the difference between a cooperative irrigation district and a New England barn-raising? One was informal, the other organized and legalized, but otherwise they were the same thing. Communal pasturelands might be a gross affront to America’s preoccupation with private property rights, but they were common in Europe. In the East, where inland navigation was as important as irrigation was in the West, you already had a strong federal presence in the Corps of Engineers. If anything was revolutionary, it was trying to graft English common law and the principles and habits of wet-zone agriculture onto a desert landscape.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by Sven Beckert
Published 2 Dec 2014

After all, cotton exports expanded on the strength of British trade networks and the institutions in which they were embedded—from a strong navy creating and protecting market access to bills of lading allowing for the transfer of capital over large distances. This state was capable of forging and protecting global markets, policing its borders, regulating industry, creating and then enforcing private property rights in land, enforcing contracts over large geographical distances, forging fiscal tools to tax populations, and building a social, economic, and legal environment that made the mobilization of labor through wage payments possible. As one perceptive French observer argued in the early nineteenth century, “England has only arrived at the summit of prosperity by persisting for centuries in the system of protection and prohibition.”37 Indeed, in the end, it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, impressive and important as they were.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Published 18 Oct 2021

Such procedures were often labour-intensive, and regulated by indigenous laws governing who could access groves, swamps, root beds, grasslands and fishing grounds, and who was entitled to exploit what species at any given time of year. In parts of Australia, these indigenous techniques of land management were such that, according to one recent study, we should stop speaking of ‘foraging’ altogether, and refer instead to a different sort of farming.38 Such societies might not have recognized private property rights in the same sense as Roman Law or English Common Law, but it’s absurd to argue they had no property rights at all. They simply had different conceptions of property. This is true, incidentally, even of people like the Hadza or !Kung; and, as we will see, many other foraging peoples actually had extraordinarily complex and sophisticated conceptions of ownership.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

Such conditions characterize scores of societies, from ancient Israel to the Roman Republic, Song China, and Tokugawa Japan, none of which experienced a Great Enrichment.4 Alfred Reckendree has pointed out that just such conditions characterized Weimar Germany, which failed for lack of ethics.5 In a recent history with a wider scope than England, France, and the USA, the volume’s editor Larry Neal nonetheless offers a definition of “capitalism” as (1) private property rights, (2) contracts enforceable by third parties, (3) markets with responsive prices, and (4) supportive governments.6 He does not appear to realize that the first three conditions have applied to every human society. They can be found in pre-Columbian Mayan marketplaces and Aboriginal trade gatherings.

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
by Gareth Stedman Jones
Published 24 Aug 2016

The crisis of the wine growers continued in the 1830s and 1840s to the point where their misery could only be compared with that of the internationally notorious contemporary case of the Silesian weavers.33 The other mainstay of the region was the forest, and during the first half of the nineteenth century there was a rising demand for wood, especially from the iron forges of the Eifel and coopers in the wine trade. Poor upland peasants benefited from this demand by selling the wood they collected from the forest floor. But the consolidation of private property rights during the period of Napoleonic rule and its confirmation by the Provincial Estates in the 1820s and 1830s threatened peasant livelihood by contesting the right to collect dead wood. Village resistance took the form of ‘wood theft’ mainly carried out by women and children. The rising numbers sentenced for wood theft by property-owning juries was one of the issues highlighted in an article by Karl Marx in the Rheinische Zeitung of 1842.

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan
by Lynne B. Sagalyn
Published 8 Sep 2016

If Silverstein was, in the image he put forth for the public, a private steward of the $4.55 billion of insurance payouts whose sole purpose was to “rebuild and honor,” how should he be held accountable for that stewardship in the absence of investigative reporting? Was it enough that the towers just get built, that is, for the ends to justify the means, with little public scrutiny? In this gray area of private property rights imbued with a clear and compelling public interest, a protocol for accountability from private-sector beneficiaries of the public’s largess was missing. Where, for example, was the counterbalance to Silverstein’s argument that the insurance payout dollars represented his partnership’s private equity contribution to rebuilding, a rebuilding made possible by an undergirding of massive public investment?