Libertarians stress self-ownership and property rights, but one variant position, held by Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, limits property rights. In their view, which they derived from the nineteenth-century economist and social reformer Henry George, you own only the value your labor adds to the resources you appropriate. You do not own unworked land and other resources, because your labor has not made them. It is the entire community, taken as a group of individuals, which owns these resources.

[In this introduction to his essay “Control or Economic Law,” Böhm-Bawerk examines how the reality of the “mixed economy” means we must be able to understand the interplay between market action and the countless efforts to distort the market through state legislation and social action.  Ultimately, we find it is folly to think that economic laws can be overcome by government “control.”]  

The news from Italy has started to sound like good incipits for a dystopian fantasy novel or like a déjà vu recalling the Soviet Union. A couple of weeks ago, a new decree of the Draghi government established yet more rules restricting the lives of people who have not been injected with the latest vaccine booster and who therefore cannot show the latest version of the Green Pass.