Private Property

The issue of whether non-scarce things like thoughts or labor are ownable has arisen in recent debates—see, e.g.,

As interviewed on CBC’s CKVU and on “WestCoast,” December 4-5, 1989

Globalization is the process of bringing the entire world into the system of division of labor and thus into the system of social cooperation…

Without a market for blood, people will die. Do we really want to sacrifice more lives in service to the god of socialist economic management?

In the eyes of the parties who style themselves progressive and leftist the main vice of capitalism is the inequality of incomes and wealth.

It is private property and market prices or the law of the jungle, and no amount of fashionable cynicism about the market or romantic delusions about how nice life would be without it can obscure this fundamental choice.

Paradoxical as it might first seem, the more liberal a state is internally, the more likely it will engage in outward aggression. Internal liberalism makes a society richer; a richer society to extract from makes the state richer, and a richer state makes for more and more successful expansionist wars

But it should be clear that what distinguishes libertarianism from all competing political theories is its scrupulous adherence — informed by sound, i.e., Austrian, economics — to the idea that property rights in scarce resources must be assigned to the person with the best, objective link to the resource in question; and that, in the case of bodies, the link is the natural connection to and relationship between the occupant and the body, while for all other resources, the objective link is first use.

In sum, protection and security contracts would come into existence. Furthermore, as a result of the continual cooperation of various insurers and arbitrators, a tendency toward the unification of property and contract law and the harmonization of the rules of procedure, evidence, and conflict resolution would be set in motion.

So we all like the Norwood decision (