Ariadne's Thread on Property
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Speaker 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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