Great conversation this month over on CATO regarding the role of the state and the locus of rights.
A sample . . .
I. Government did not “Create” Property Rights
Scholars such as Robert Ellickson, Harold Demsetz, Elinor Ostrom, and Hernando de Soto have documented how private property rights often emerge even in the absence of government enforcement.[1] The claim that such rights are necessarily “created” by the state is simply empirically false. The institution of private property long predates the existence of the modern state, or indeed states of any kind.[2]
Obviously, states do often enforce property rights, and that state enforcement is sometimes more efficient than private sector alternatives would be. But the mere fact that government enforces property rights does not give it the right to redistribute them in any way it sees fit.
The circumstance that the state enforces a right does not prove either that the right could not exist at all without the state or that its moral legitimacy flows solely from the state’s recognition.
Take the Clear Pill on Inflation
6 hours ago
An excellent rebuttal to the statist arguments of enforcement; the price of enforcement of property rights is the percentage that given to redistribution.
ReplyDeleteAt the heart of the disagreement or what Sowell calls the conflict of vision is the statist view of the state as the source of rights. Beginning from this perspective, the road leads to serfdom, the irony is that the statist firmly believes that they are ensuring some social purpose (justice) in reallocating rights or enforcing rights that they incorrectly perceive as originating in the state.
ReplyDelete