Property Rights and Entrepreneurial Judgment

Alchian began his seminar by reading a paragraph. It was a paragraph about property, and he asked if anyone in the group could identify it. I was the only one; I recognized immediately that that was from Mises’ Human Action. As he developed that first lecture—which became I think one of the most important economic articles of the twentieth century, “Economics of Property Rights”—it was like a light bulb went off in my head, it was incredible. All of a sudden, everything that I had done intellectually for thirteen years came together, with this one idea of Alchian’s about the real nature of property rights and the Misesian notion of people making choices.