I do not intend to disprove that this happens. It has happened for hundreds of years and it happens today. And I do not intend for you to downgrade the importance of things like this happening. But I’d ask you to consider two questions.

1. What is ultimately responsible for preserving the mahogany forests? If capitalists profit from selling mahogany panels and sceptors and chairs and tables, would we expect them ipso facto to plunder them and leave them for permanent dead? There are, of course, larger eco-system concerns, such as the impacts of intrusion into even well-managed forests on other animal and plant habitat and soil erosion. You might reasonably ask who is responsible for maintaining these eco-systems and why they are threatened in some places and not others.
2. If we eliminated capitalism, what happens when an apparatchik desires to have mahogany in his office?

There can be no such thing as “human rights” without a corresponding right to property. Indeed, a property right is a particular form of human right. This has to be true. Consider the basic human right of “free speech.” We all think we know that it means Wintercow can say whatever he likes, wherever he likes, so long as he does not libel someone in doing so (although some folks even argue that libel is morally appropriate!). But what does this right actually mean? Am I a floating wraith in space? Not at all. To say that I have the right to “free speech” is nothing more than to say that if I have peacefully acquired the means to create speech, then and only then is my right to say whatever I want guaranteed. But no one has to provide me a microphone, a podium, a website, book, pen or paper. I am free to speak so long as I can acquire those things and to deliver such speech to people who voluntarily agree to hear it.

Similarly, to invoke a right to anything implies that humans have obligations with respect to that right. To say that there is a human right to speak freely means that others in society are obligated to provide you with the means to do so. Now, that obligation insofar as I see it, only extends to respecting your ability to speak conditional on you obtaining the property upon which to do it. But I have met very few people who seriously argue that as a member of the human community, wintercow has an obligation to provide pens and paper to every other person, and also to guarantee that every human read what others write. And so long as no such obligation is generally accepted as required, then there can be no right to free speech. If governments want to legislate such positive rights, I suppose that is fine to do – but then let’s not call them rights. And then let’s remember that in legislating your “right” to speak freely, then they are also mandating that someone provide you with the resources to do it. It’s no different in health care or any other positive “right” that is typically invoked.

Which brings us to the Marxists and their relatives. A fundamental proposition of Marxism is the abolition of private property. But if it is true that property rights are a particular form of human rights, and that no one in a collective nirvana can or ought to have private property, then it follows that the fundamental ethic and idea of Marxism is an explicit and direct violation of human rights. That’s not exactly the bill of goods the left sells us now is it?

That uncomfortable position is eerily similar to this one.

The typical argument for mandating such things is that without the “nudge” markets would not make the choice to use green tech because they would not receive all of its benefits or would bear too many of the costs. As sugar on top of this cookie, green jobs advocates also remind us that such mandates are good because they also will spur the creation of jobs for roofers, insulators, electricians and the like.

This is, of course, absurd for two reasons. First, if I mandated that all buildings be retrofitted with laser-etched images of Wintercow, that too would create many, many jobs for artists, masons, laser manufacturers, and so forth. Second, such an argument assumes that owners of property do not really want to take advantage of income increasing activities. It is just really hard to understand how that view prevails when every rotten caricature of landlords and private property owners is precisely the opposite – that they are so insanely obsessed with money and the bottom line in every aspect of their lives, including in terms of how much rent they extract from their witless tenants, all they do is figure out how to squeeze out a few more bucks for themselves.

In economic terms, aside from the consistency problem above, here are two problems with such a view.

1. If retro-fitting is valuable, why would owners NOT make investments if they had positive returns? In a market, when property rights are reasonably secure, any value improving activity to a piece of property will be capitalized immediately into the value of the asset. Given that fact one cannot subsequently argue that private agents are too “short-sighted” to do such a thing. Even short-sighted owners would experience gains immediately upon completing the renovations.
2. This second problem is self-inflicted – and kind of hilarious in a sad and sick kind of a way. The property tax structure in most cities would punish property owners for making just these energy efficient, value enhancing, environmentally friendly upgrades to their properties. If spending $100k to insulate my office building ends up adding $150,000 of value to my building, the tax assessors will quickly raise the assessment of the building, and we would see our annual property tax bill increase. Ignore whether this is just or unjust and focus on the incentives. Every dollar I spend to upgrade my property will end up costing me some amount in higher taxes – taxes which, I would note, rarely go down, and certainly are with you over the entire life of the property. This might also explain the strange phenomena I notice when checking out old homes – old decaying siding and roofs, worn out yards, … and beautiful master bathrooms and kitchens.

My wife and I had a company come out here to help us figure out what it would cost to replace doors, windows, install more insulation, etc. and if it would have made economic sense to do all of that we would have done it in a heartbeat. But it didn’t make sense, particularly as natural gas prices have remained low and we expect them to stay that way for a while.

BTW: for my loyal Pennsylvania readers, the tax problem I mention is being dealt with in some Pennsylvania communities which have adopted a “tw0-rate” property tax system, loosely modeled on the Land Economics of Henry George. It puts a high tax rate on the value of the land (the true source of rents, or so the Georgists argue) and then put a low or nonexistent tax on improvements to land. I believe Harrisburg has had some success with this. It’s certainly not going to change the world, but it would be nice to see some struggling municipalities give it a shot.

On Tuesday, clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) said it would offer “substantial payment” to MTV’s The Jersey Shore’s cast members to stop wearing the brand on air.

Hilarious.

Robin Hanson expresses skepticism about IP laws:

Similarly, the kinds of innovation activities and intellectual property rights that make sense depend on available institutions and technologies. I’m happy to admit that today intellectual property (IP) is not obviously a good idea. Such property can create large “anti-commons” transaction and enforcement costs that greatly raise the cost of combining old ideas into valuable new ideas. Such costs often outweigh the social benefits of the incentives to create IP, in order to sell it. Today, it is often better to rely on other social incentives to innovate, incentives that don’t require such expensive support.

Brad DeLong read Robin’s post, and summarized the argument as follows:

Robin Hanson appears to think that people have the right to send killer robots off to hunt down people who use their ideas without paying.

Me? I think this is an example of how thinking too much about property rights can madden the mind.

That’s basically it (plus some quotations.)  Then it hit me.  That’s why we can’t have a better press corps!  Too many reporters are sloppy, biased, prone to mischaracterize one’s argument.

PS.  I originally left a much nicer version of this comment at DeLong’s blog, but he deleted it.  Big mistake Brad.  I have my own blog, which is much more widely read than your comment section.

Funny, because I have just piled up several back issues of Paul Samuelson’s legendary economics text (the one that DeLong and virtually every economist just older than me learned from) and in it (I’ll get the exact reference later on) Samuelson totally dismisses the idea that property rights even matter, indeed going so far as to calling them part of “capitalist ideology.”