Private Property Rights, Economic Freedom, and Professor Coase: A Critique of Friedman, McCloskey, Medema, and Zorn
Author(s)
Block, Walter
Abstract
Private property rights are the basic building blocks of economic freedom. They are a necessary condition for a free society. Property rights have many enemies–socialists, environmentalists, feminists, communitarians, Marxists, specialists in black “studies,” literary “studies,” queer “studies,” multiculturalists, sociologists, etc. These philosophies, although staunchly opposed to private property, have at least the virtue, from the point of view of the defenders of laissez faire, of being open and honest about their opposition and can therefore be criticized in a straightforward manner. That is, there is no question in anyone’s mind, proponents or opponents of economic freedom alike, where scholarship emanating from these quarters stands on the issue of laissez faire capitalism. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for Ronald Coase and the large literature of “Law and Economics” engendered in his name. For while this free market oriented Nobel Prize winner is widely interpreted as a defender of markets, I shall argue that he should be considered one of the most rigorous critics of property rights, and because of this misconception, Coase is a major threat to economic freedom.
