Why have property rights?
Rich people like them of course.
They get to live in fine homes, drive nice cars, and enjoy all the material comforts
that property law secures.
Property rights aren’t just for the rich, however; they serve us all.
By marking out who can do what with each home, car, and other things, property rights help
us live together in peace and prosperity.
Property rights pervade our social world, encouraging productive labor and discouraging
waste.
We all benefit from property rights.
Indeed they prove especially valuable to those who own the least.
To see why, let’s take a drive down to the beach.
Want a good example of how things go wrong without property rights?
Consider a foreclosed home subject to a title dispute.
When it isn’t clear who owns something, nobody has an incentive to preserve and protect
it.
The result: neglect, ruin, and waste.
Property rights help us avoid conflicts over all sorts of resources, from houses to cars
to waves.
Basically, even the best break provides a certain number of rideable waves.
To make matters worse, each wave basically provides only one ride at a time.
Combine lots of surfers with just a few good waves, and a conflict over scarce resources
looms.
Property rights come to the rescue.
Surfers have adopted customs to help them share the waves.
Basically, the rider who takes off first near the breaking part of the wave has the exclusive
right to keep riding it.
But if that surfer falls or misses the wave or gets caught in the foam, the next surfer
can take over.
In this way surfers can share the waves without having them go to waste.
In effect, surfers respect property rights in waves.
Indeed if one surfer takes off on another surfer, the surfer in the right will yell,
my wave.
Harsher words or even physical blows might follow if the trespass continues.
Property rights in waves may not last long, but surfers take them very seriously.
Classical liberal scholars take property rights seriously too.
To find out why, let’s hit the books.
These days, happily, almost everyone understands that property rights encourage economic growth.
Classical liberal thinkers, however, have an especially profound appreciation of where
property rights come from and why they matter so much.
Classical liberals see property rights as more than simply privileges created by benevolent
and far-seeing politicians.
Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek placed the origin of property rights even
before history itself: “There can be no question now that the recognition of property
preceded the rise of even the most primitive cultures, and that certainly all that we call
civilization has grown up on the basis of that spontaneous order of actions which is
made possible by the delineation of protected domains of individuals or groups.”
We can hardly imagine life without property, which Hayek elsewhere described as “the
only solution men have yet discovered to the problem of reconciling individual freedom
with the absence of conflict.
Law, liberty, and property are an inseparable trinity.”
As legal scholar Randy Barnett described them, “Property rights are ‘natural’ insofar
as, given the nature of human beings and the world in which they live, they are essential
for persons living in society with others to pursue happiness, peace, and prosperity.”
Granted that property rights prove vital to human society, what should we do about inequalities
in wealth?
We cannot prevent such inequalities, as philosopher Robert Nozick explained, unless we can stomach
the state to “either continually interfere to stop people from transferring resources
as they wish to, or continually (or periodically) interfere to take from some persons resources
that others for some reason choose to transfer to them.”
To those who would redistribute wealth to achieve equality, Nozick wryly observed, “Liberty
upsets patterns.”
At any rate, we should support a diversity of wealth.
Those capable of supporting a luxury trade drive innovation.
That trickles down to the mass market.
And steadfast respect for property rights generates so much wealth that everyone benefits.
As Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises observed, “Even the poor man, who can call nothing
his own, lives incomparably better in our society than he would in one that would prove
incapable of producing even a fraction of what is produced in our own.”
From rich to poor, from oceanside to mountaintop, property rights help us live together in peace,
prosperity, and freedom.
We can all appreciate that.