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I do think that strong private
property rights in scarce resources can only
be justified if the owners also have
obligations to those who no longer have access
to those resources.
That obligation could be
translated into laws that require owners to do
certain things for the benefit of non-owners.
They might have to pay taxes that are used to
benefit non-owners.
On the other hand, the
difficulty of making private owners do
something to benefit non-owners could be
avoided by some sort of collective ownership
of important resources. For example, in many
countries valuable resources like oil are
controlled by the state. The profits, in
theory, can be used for the common good. In
Israel someone who owns land does not own
rights to oil under his land. The nation owns
those resources.
So we can have either
private ownership with obligations to
non-owners, or we could have collective
ownership and control.
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