Duke economist Michael Munger had some comments about copyright and intellectual property (IP) and fraud, plagiarism, and related topics, in a recent AIER column, “Property in Words: Not Even Under Suspicion,” AIER (Jan. 14, 2024). He basically seems to be skeptical of the idea of copyright, based on his skepticism of words as property, but he never quite comes out and says so. In the end he comes out against dishonesty and plagiarism, but the analysis is somewhat all over the map and makes various misstatements about the nature of IP law and property rights.
In general, the IP topic and property rights in general is so rife with confusion that almost every analysis is always somewhat … off. In part, this is because people are confused due to Locke’s mistake of basing his property arguments on the labor theory of property,1 and in part because of confusion about how to separate or combine legal/normative/prescriptive and economic/factual/descriptive analysis. And any terms are used with somewhat different meanings, across domains of inquiry, that equivocation often creeps in.
I attempt to clarify many related issues in my writing, including my various analyses of IP (see You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property) and also in my recent book Legal Foundations of a Free Society (LFFS). Below I fisk Munger’s article, not to pick on him but to show how clearer thinking about the bases of property rights and clear definitions of terms as well as an understanding of the nature of IP rights and distinctions with other concepts (theft, plagiarism, fraud) can help one understand the issues at hand better. I’ll quote his text with my comments interspersed.
Who owns words? If words are mine, can they be yours, too? In a sense, language has to be “ours,” a shared resource that all can use.
What about ideas? Ideas are, after all, often expressed in words. But ideas are a particular sequence of words; an “idea” is a new sequence of words,
Ideas are not always a new sequence of words. Even an old sequence of words can represent an idea.
an expression that conveys, actually moves,
“actually”? “Moves”?
the thought of the creator to other people, in a way that can be understood by other people who did not conceive of the idea.
Not every idea that is communicated is “conceived” by the “creator”, and all ideas and knowledge is incremental.
Words can be acts of creation; as we are told in John 1:1 in the KJV, “In the beginning was the Word.”
Can words be property?
Well, as I have pointed out many times, the question is not: is X property. It is: what kinds of things can there be property rights in—and who is the owner? The problem with IP rights is not that inventions or novels “are not property.” It’s that it’s literally impossible to assign property rights to non-scarce resources and the attempt to do so simply reassigns property rights in already-owned resources from the current owner to someone else. It’s impossible because rights are enforceable, and force can only be applied to material objects, just like ghosts in TV shows can never grab on to real things in the real world. This is why IP rights are always disguised transfers of real rights to control real physical objects in the real world. They are nonconsensual negative easements.2
Can property be stolen if you still have what you started with?
Well, technically speaking it’s not “property” that is stolen, but the object that is owned, that someone has a property right in. As a noted expert on property rights theory explains:
Property is a word with high emotional overtones and so many meanings that it has defied attempts at accurate all-inclusive definition. The English word property derives from the Latin proprietas, a noun form of proprius, which means one’s own. In the United States, the word property is frequently used to denote indiscriminately either the objects of rights … or the rights that persons have with respect to things. Thus, lands, automobiles, and jewels are said to be property; and rights, such as ownership, servitudes, and leases, are likewise said to be property. This latent confusion between rights and their objects has its roots in texts of Roman law and is also encountered in other legal systems of the western world. Accurate analysis should reserve the use of the word property for the designation of rights that persons have with respect to things.3
This is why it’s important to use terminology precisely, to avoid confusion and even unintentional equivocation.
Property
Some argue that property is theft. Now, property is a combination of two rights: (a) the right to use a thing or an idea, and (b) the right to exclude others from such use.
It’s not clear why it’s relevant that some lefties are confused about the nature of property rights. Property is not theft, although some property rights granted by the state under positive law that are unjust do actually violate just or natural property rights, so in fact are similar to theft. Such as IP rights, which as already noted are nonconsensual negative easements which amount to takings of existing owners’ private property rights.
In any case, property rights are not the right to use or exclude use of an idea. Ideas cannot be owned in any sense. And property rights are not even the right to use an actually owned, scarce resource (though this is, admittedly, how positive law sometimes characterizes it). Instead, a property right is merely the right to exclude others from using a given “thing” i.e. scarce resource i.e. rivalrous or conflictable thing. This is why if I own a gun, it gives me the right to prevent you from using it, but I don’t have a general “right to use” it since some uses would violate your property rights. Understanding this point helps one to see the fallacy of the argument here: I say that IP rights are unjust because they “take” or limit my rights to use my property as I see fit; the response is: well all property rights are limited by other property rights; after all my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins, har har! But if you appreciate that property rights are only a right to exclude and in fact this means that my property rights limit others’ actions not their property rights, then you can see that property rights are never limited by other property rights. Property rights limits what actions others take: they may not use your owned resource (your body; your car) without your consent.4 Note that this limitation on their actions has nothing to do with their property rights; if someone shoots an innocent me, they are using my body without my consent, and this has nothing to do with their ownership status of the gun they use; it might be stolen, for example. All that matters is that they used efficacious means to invade the borders of my owned resource.5
If you believe you have a right to use something, but I use force to exclude you from exercising that right, that actually does sound a lot like theft.
Suppose that there is a large piece of land, and we all graze our cattle on it. One day, as you bring your cattle out to eat grass, you see that all the pieces of land have been “enclosed,” or fenced off. There are armed guards standing along the fence lines. You have no place to graze your cattle, and they starve. Is that theft?
It could be. A nuanced view of property rights includes partial property rights or easements, and even collective ownership, say, by a community of people owing a right of way or easement path.6 But the fact that some statist, positive law property assignments violate moral or natural property rights, what we might call justified or libertarian property rights, does not mean property rights are theft, as long as they are defined and allocated and protected in accordance with the core private law and libertarian principles of original appropriation and contractual title transfer.7
The usual story to justify such enclosure and exclusion has something to do with original acquisition.
But if the path or field or forest was already being used by someone else, the later person who encloses it was not the original appropriator.
The first party to claim the right to use, and to exclude others, must have done so through legal and legitimate means. The Lockean account involves “combining labor” with the land, provided that there is “as much and as good” available to which others can combine their labor. Karl Marx (rightly, to my mind) mocks this idea; Robert Nozick made a valiant effort to revive and defend it.
And modern, principled libertarians reject the Lockean “proviso.”8
My “two favorite Davids” — Hume and Schmidtz — propose a much more sensible justification for the right to exclude. The private right to exclude the “first appropriators” (see also Narveson) benefits society. Perhaps surprisingly, conferring a right to exclude benefits those who come later, even though there is no longer “as much and as good.” The Lockean proviso, in other words, is sufficient but is by no means necessary.
Sufficient for what? The point is there is no justification for limiting the right to appropriate by the proviso. So it’s unclear what sufficient but necessary even means here.
Private property, far from being theft, solves the tragedy of the commons and is the answer to many externality problems, as has been pointed out by scholars ranging from Hardin to Coase to Demsetz.
Private property rights are a solution to the problem of scarcity (rivalry), i.e. conflict.
That’s all for physical property, such as real estate, tools, cars: things. What about words, and ideas?
Real estate, cars, are not physical “property”; they are simply rivalrous things over which there can be owners, that is, in which the owners can have property rights. Words and ideas are simply information that guide action. Action employs the scarce (rivalrous) means of action, but is guided by knowledge, information, ideas. Thus every successful action has two ingredients: available means, to use to achieve ends; and knowledge that the actor uses to choose the ends and the means and to therefore guide his action. There is a possibility of conflict over the scarce means, thus the emergence of property rights to solve this social interaction problem. Not so with knowledge or information.9
There is a big incentive problem lurking behind that apparently innocent question. Land already exists (although more can sometimes be made, as with the Netherlands or Hong Kong).
This is also a bit confused. In a sense an as-yet unappropriated resource is not a good; it does not really exist. The actor by appropriating an unappreciated resource brings it into “existence” as a good, in the same way that the character of goods as private or public, consumer or capital goods, depends on the subjective evaluation by an actor.10
But no one owns other things — cars, cell phones, steak — until someone creates them.
This buys into the libertarian or Lockean creationism confusion. Actually human actors do not ever create anything; they simply manipulate existing matter; they rearrange it; all human production is simply transformation of existing resources into more-valuable configurations. This is the economic side of things. As for ownership: the “new” thing that one “produces” is simply a transformed input factor; the owner is whoever owned the input factor, unless some contract specifies otherwise. I don’t own a car or cell phone because I “create” it; that is, if I transform input factors into a car or cell phone, I “produce it” by rearranging input factors, then I don’t necessarily own the rearranged output product simply because I labored on it. To hold this is the Marxian labor theory of value (showing how corrupting is Locke’s labor theory of property). If I’m a worker on Henry Ford’s assembly line making cars, I don’t own the cars I produce because I don’t own the input factors and my employment contract doesn’t give me ownership of the cars I “produce” but only of some specified monetary salary. So creation is not a source of ownership. Not at all. It is neither necessary (Henry Ford owns the cars, even though he didn’t “create” them) nor sufficient (the workers don’t own them).
It is true that labor plays a role in homesteading or original appropriation, as does knowledge and intellect; the actor roving about the world who already owns his body and has knowledge uses his body to manipulate the resources around him to transform or emborder the unowned resource, thereby establishing an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable, link between he and the resource. This is all true, but the mistake Locke made, and that everyone keeps repeating, is that this implies that the actor owns his labor, and that this is the reason he owns what he “mixes his labor” with. This is the central fallacy of our time. One cannot own labor anymore than one can own one’s actions; this is nonsense. The reason mixing your labor with an unowned thing gives you ownership of it is not that you owned your labor but because by your action you establish an objective link or connection with the resource. You are its first user or owner, and if there are to be property rights, then there has to be a prior-later distinction, and there has to be a right to use the resource first. By a regression-style analysis, this means that there must be a right to use an unowned resource (only an owner could object to this; but per assumption, it is ownerless) and that the first owner has a better claim than any latecomer unless he transfers it consensually by contract. The point is that even here, the homesteader of an unowned resource never owns his labor and his ownership does not rest on “creation.” If he chooses to transform his homesteaded resources into more-valuable configurations, using his labor, his actions, his intellect, his mental creativity, his imagination, his desires, his will, his knowledge, he owns the output product not because he produced it but because he already owned the matter. What his act of production or creation has done is create wealth but not new property rights. By the same token if he hires someone by contract as an employee to help him reshape his material into a more-valuable arrangement (thereby creating wealth) then the owner depends on the contract, but is presumably the original owner of the input factors not the laborers or workers or employees who were simply paid a fee to engage in certain motions.
Why would someone go to the toil and trouble of creating things that don’t yet exist? They are motivated by the promise of reward.
Well property rights are a matter of justice: of giving to each person his due; and his due depends on what his rights, his property rights, are. The nature of property rights is to allocate ownership or control rights to naturally contestable or conflictable things; the obvious purpose is to reduce interpersonal conflict. Once this is done and property rights are widely respected in society, then more productive use may be made by owners leading to increase in peace and prosperity. This also leads to other beneficial outcomes like reduction in the tragedy of the commons, better incentives to more efficiently use resources, but this is not the purpose of property rights. Their purpose is to do justice by identifying and protecting property rights, which are to be allocated in accordance with original appropriation (homesteading) and contractual title transfer. It has nothing to do with “creation” or with “avoiding the tragedy of the commons” or “creating the right incentives.”
And simply as a matter of empirical fact, it’s not true that people come up with useful new ideas because of some promise of reward. In fact people figure things out as a necessary step of making a product work better or to satisfy consumer needs or to outcompete a competitor—or for other reasons like the desire to innovate. See Intellectual Property’s Great Fallacy.
Is there “as much and as good” still out there, ready to be created? The claim is much more plausible when it comes to ideas because you can always try to think of something, either just because it’s interesting, or because there is a social reward.
The reward could be psychic, of course, as when parents make meals or toys for their children. But to operate at scale, and to get people to make things for other people whom they neither know nor care much about, we require incentives in the form of payment. The reason I made this hard, sharp metal ax head was the anticipation of being paid for it. If you assert that my exclusive claim to “own” the ax head is theft, you might be able to obtain that ax head. But I won’t make any more ax heads, and society loses an important benefit because I can make ax heads more cheaply than others can. Division of labor requires the prospective right to exclude: If I make it, it is mine, and it is not yours unless you buy and I agree to sell.
Words
Ideas, and knowledge, seem different from ax heads.
You don’t say. Axe heads are material resources that have an original owner or someone who owns it via contract; and they serve as scarce, or conflictable, means of action: that is, they can be employed by an actor to causally intervene in the course of events: to cause something to happen. But this action is always guided by knowledge. The axe is a conflictable resource and is ownable. Knowledge is not.
Still, the two are related: The ax head is made of hard, sharp metal. The understanding of how to mine, refine, smelt, and then shape hard metal is the accretion, over centuries, of the cumulative application of ideas and trial-and-error experimentation. “We” (the collective memory of society, or at least the part that specializes in metallurgy) keep the good practices and discard the bad practices. That capital stock of knowledge is tremendously valuable.
This is true (see discussion of the importance of ideas and the “fund of experience” in LFFS, ch. 15 & 18), but the axe head and knowledge are not really related. They play distinct roles in human action. Human action is always the use by a human, of his corporeal body, to manipulate physical things in the world (means) to causally intervene to try to achieve ends; and the action is always guided by the actors’ knowledge: his choice of what ends to pursue, his choice of what means can suffice to achieve his ends. The means and knowledge are completely distinct and play distinct roles in successful human action. All successful human action requires the actor have access to both causally efficacious means, and to knowledge as to what ends to pursue and what means to employ. Both ingredients are essential, but they are distinct, just as the actor himself is conceptually and existentially distinct from the means employed, the action taken, the knowledge consulted.
A crucial distinction exists between ideas and physical goods, however. If I have an ax head, my ability to exclude you from using it is necessary for me to be able to use it: We can’t both use it, at least not at the same time. (Hence, the growth of the importance of the sharing economy!)
But if I know how to make ax heads, and I teach you, then we both know how to make ax heads.
And here the author touches on the crucial issue.
Your “property” has increased by the value of the human capital of the knowledge you have gained, but my property has not been diminished.
The reason he has to put scare-quotes on the word “property” here should indicate something is awry with this analysis. Axe heads are not “property” as noted above; but someone can have a property right in an axe head. If I own a useful axe-head I am wealthier since it is useful to me. If I know how to use an axe more efficiently this is also useful to me but it is not “property.”
In fact, if I write down the words that embody the accumulated ideas and knowledge that constitute “How to make ax heads in 10 steps; you won’t believe #7!” then people all over the world can now make ax heads, without reducing my ability to make ax heads even a little bit. Ax heads are “private goods,” but the knowledge of how to make an ax head is a “public good.”
The problem is that an idea that doesn’t exist (yet) has no value.
In a sense, nothing “has value”—not even an axe head. Value is not an intrinsic quality inside a thing; it is not a substance. This is part of the problem with the Marxian labor theory of value and its cousin or uncle or parent, the Lockean labor theory of value: characterizing value as some ownable thing. Again: this is why it’s imprecise to say that if you know how to make an axe you have more “property”; value cannot be owned. See on this Hoppe. For the same reason that property rights only apply to conflictable, scarce, rivalrous resources or means of action, but not to knowledge that guides action.
That’s why the value of the “first appropriation” — creation — of an idea is even more important than the first appropriation of a piece of land that has been developed.
It’s not more important. They are equally important. All successful action requires both available means as well as knowledge to guide action. No successful action is conceivable without both; without a moving, corporeal, physical body, and a mind that guides it. For the same reason that Ayn Rand spurned attempts to make us choose one side or the other: the material or the spiritual. As she said, men are not ghosts, we need physical things; but we are not mere animals, we have a spiritual or mental side too. An idea with no means to employ to implement is useless; a resource is useless unless one has a mind guided by knowledge of how to use it.
The argument that “first appropriation” is a justification for recognition of “ownership” is more powerful, if anything, for ideas than for physical property.
This is what is argued by some confused libertarians, such as Tibor Machan, who says that if you can own a log cabin you “create” then the argument is even stronger for intellectual constructs like poems where the creator is truly the sole creator.11 But this argument is full of holes. First, no one is the creator of an idea ex nihilo—an invention, a poem, a novel, a song—because all such intellectual creation or innovation is always incremental. Second, it presupposes that creation is the source of ownership of the log cabin, and “therefore” it should apply to other “valuable” or “useful” “things” that you “create”. But creation is not the source of ownership of the log cabin. It’s homesteading and contract. Creation or production is the source of your increase in wealth: when you take raw input materials or factors that you already own (either by homesteading (which is not an act of creation) or by contractual purchase from a previous owner (again: not an act of creation) then you use your labor and effort and intellect to transform it into a log cabin, you have increased your wealth. But you didn’t create new property rights; you don’t own the new log cabin because you created it; rather, you own it because you already owned it before you rearranged it. Your act of creation made you wealthier; so it created wealth; but you can’t own wealth anymore than you own value or others’ subjective appraisals.12
Suppose I’m trying to break up big pieces of wood to make a fire. The invention of the idea of a piece of sharp metal on a stick that provides leverage when swung to acquire angular momentum is extremely valuable. But even if I have that idea, I need the practical knowledge of how to make the hard, sharp metal.
Here the author seems to be trying to make a distinction between invention and innovation, much as some other commentators do on this topic (see, e.g., Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works) but this distinction is vague and pointless.
And even just the insight required to understand how to attach the metal firmly to the stick is extremely valuable.
Yes. Sigh. Knowledge is valuable. It’s essential to human progress and indeed to all successful human action. So are available resources. And the more accumulated human knowledge we have, especially of the technical recipe variety, the richer we are because the human fund of experience grows larger with every generation. This is in fact why patent law is so evil: it distorts and retards the development and spread and adoption of new technical knowledge, and thus impoverishes the human race.
Since that knowledge — the idea itself and the implementation — are public goods,
First, there are no public goods. See on this Hoppe, cited above. Second, even if there were public goods, knowledge would not be public goods.
it might make sense to “privatize” those valuable assets. Perhaps I can get a patent, or right to license my good idea. I can “own” the words in the book I write, because the words (or rather the particular sequences of words) are “copyrighted.” I can use those words and you cannot, at least not in exactly that same pattern and sequence, without my permission.
This is not really how IP law works. Copyright prohibits not only literal copying (“exactly the same pattern”), but also “substantially similar” patterns, and, even worse, “derivative works” such as the sequel to a novel even though the sequel is not the “same pattern” at all. And this “exactly the same pattern” idea certainly does not apply to patent law, which protects an “invention” as described and claimed in a long, tedious one-sentence description of a sequence of inter-related “elements”.
To be fair, you can use the ideas that the words communicate, just not the actual words in that sequence, in a book that you claim to be “your” work. You can’t just copy the words I wrote, taking Michael Munger’s Guide to Awesome Axe Heads, and then publishing it as your book, Claudine Gay’s Guide to Awesome Axe Heads.
This is not really how IP law works. First, you cannot just “use the idea” “but not the actual words.” Again, see the comment above about derivative works. If I write a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, it doesn’t “use the actual words” (whatever this means) but it would still be prohibited by copyright. Second, this implies that copyright is aimed at stopping plagiarism: “taking” someone’s book and just “slapping your name on it”. Copyright has nothing to do with plagiarism or fraud (and fraud and plagiarism have nothing to do with each other, either). Copyright prohibits me from copying and selling Michael Munger’s Guide to Awesome Axe Heads even if I keep his name on it!
(sound of record scratching…) Wait. What?
Okay, that was an abrupt shift. But it’s clearly where I was headed when I started talking about property in words. Academics produce published work which convey ideas. We claim the ideas in those publications as our property, at least in the sense that the “first appropriator” of the idea expects to be identified as the source or originator of that idea. Ideas are the value that we are being paid (and pampered, honestly) to produce.
Of course it’s a funny kind of property, because we want other people to use our words;
As an aside: former AIER honcho Jeff Tucker recently made this ironic point in a column:
Consider the copyright case alone. The New York Times claims to own its words and sentences and is furious that ChatGPT takes it verbatim, allowing people to gain access to ideas without having paid for them. If this is true, The NYT should have a major beef with the whole of corporate media and academia too, since it long ago set out to be the standard-bearer of approved thought and conventional wisdom. AI is merely amplifying. (( Jeffrey A. Tucker, “A Clue as to Why AI Is so Dumb,” Epoch Times (Dec. 28, 2023). ))
But let’s continue on:
In fact, one way academics are judged is the number of “Google Scholar” citations that our work attracts. Claudine Gay, the (now ex-)President of Harvard University, has more than 3,000 citations in Google Scholar, a creditable number for someone who has been, for some time, an administrator. That means that thousands of papers have cited work that Dr. Gay (whom, if it matters, I know slightly, and whom I respect as a scholar)
Uhh. Well at least her “research” doesn’t sound as amateur as that of “Dr.” Jill Biden. But … come on. This is a bizarre ass-kiss of Gay. Why would you “respect as a scholar” someone who writes about irrelevant race-gender pseudoscientific nonsense, something everyone knows is totally BS. Why? And then a few paragraphs later, turn on her, as in:
A number of people, people who honestly should know better, have tendentiously argued that the plagiarism of President Gay was no big deal, and in fact far too common to be a cause for dismissal. (Some, bizarrely, have even argued that it was irrelevant.)
I honestly can’t tell if he is just playing both sides of the aisle here, or what. Are you defending her, or or attacking her based on a confused understanding of plagiarism and IP?
claims as “hers.” It is important to parse that carefully: The ideas are “ours” because the work was published and put into the public arena to be considered and argued about. But the words are the intellectual property of Dr. Gay.
Not if you understand that there can be no property rights in information.
Anyone who used those words verbatim without citing her work, specifically, as the source, and identifying exactly which words were being used, and how, would be guilty of theft.
Well, no, they would be liable for copyright infringement. This is not “theft.” Even the Supreme Court recognizes this: “interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: ‘[…] an infringer of the copyright.’” Dowling v. United States (1985).
The magnitude of the offense of the theft — using the words of another without reference or acknowledgment — is perhaps debatable, in a forum other than academics. If we learn that a Silicon Valley CEO “wrote” a book, when that book was actually created by a ghostwriter under contract, no one would bat an eye.
Well I think it’s a bit shady and lowbrow, but hey, if it’s disclosed, to each his own.
The CEO bought those words,
No, He did not “buy” words since words cannot be owned. What Munger means is that economically there was an exchange: a service for payment of money; but legally, there was only one title transfer: the money was transferred, on condition that a service be performed. (I explain all this in detail in ch. 9 of LFFS.)
and the right to call those words her own, and the ghostwriter voluntarily accepted that full transfer of ownership and its implied anonymity.
But that transaction would not “be okay” in academics. Claiming authorship of an article or book that one did not write is dishonest, even if you paid the ghostwriter. It is likewise dishonest, and actually worse, to claim authorship of the words of another author, without a contract, without permission, and without acknowledgment. We have a name for this latter type of theft: plagiarism.
Plagiarism is not theft. Hell, even copyright infringement is not theft (see above), and plagiarism does not in any way imply copyright infringement. If I included a Shakespeare sonnet as my own it would be plagiarism, but it would not be copyright infringement (as it’s public domain), it would not be “theft,” and it would not even be fraud, as dishonesty and cheating do not equate to fraud, which requires more (see LFFS, ch. 5, Part IV.F, on fraud.)
It is tempting to think that plagiarism, using the words of others without acknowledgment, is in the eye of the beholder. Words, after all, are ours, not mine.
Actually, words are no one’s since they are simply not ownable things.
- See KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory. [↩]
- See Part IV.B in “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in LFFS. [↩]
- Quoted in LFFS, ch. 2, Appendix I; some emphases added. [↩]
- See discussion of this in LFFS, e.g. ch. 2, appendix I. See also ch. 15, n.62 and Part IV.H et pass; and Kinsella, “The Non-Aggression Principle as a Limit on Action, Not on Property Rights,” StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 22, 2010) and idem, “IP and Aggression as Limits on Property Rights: How They Differ,” StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 22, 2010).” [↩]
- On this point, see ch. 8 of LFFS. [↩]
- See, on this, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Of Common, Public, and Private Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization,” ch. 5 in The Great Fiction. See also my post Robin Hood, Magna Carta, and the Forest Charter. [↩]
- On this, see Kinsella, Aggression and Property Rights Plank in the Libertarian Party Platform and LFFS, ch. 2 et pass. [↩]
- See LFFS, ch. 20 et pass.; Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, p. 410; Michael Makovi, “The ‘Self-Defeating Morality’ of the Lockean Proviso,” Homo Oeconomicus 32, no. 2 (2015): 235–74. [↩]
- For elaboration on this point, see LFFS, pp. ch. 15, Part IV.E, p. 490, et pass. [↩]
- See LFFS, ch. 22, Part IV.A. [↩]
- See references and discussion in Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant. [↩]
- See LFFS, ch. 15, Part IV.C. [↩]
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