Part 1: Marxism <http://robertvienneau.blogspot.com/2006/05/against-reification-of-property-rights_19.html>
Part 2: Institutionalism and legal realism <http://robertvienneau.blogspot.com/2006/05/against-reification-of-property-rights_20.html>
Part 3: Austrian economics <http://robertvienneau.blogspot.com/2006/05/against-reification-of-property-rights_21.html>
The posts are a couple of years old, but lucid and succinct. They are worth recirculating, especially for:
"Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations - the relations of bourgeois production - are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions
of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural, and as such, eternal."
-- Karl Marx
and:
"[T]he systems advocated by professed upholders of _laissez-faire_ are in reality permeated with coercive restrictions of individual freedom, and with restrictions, moreover, out of conformity with any formula of 'equal opportunity' or of 'preserving the equal rights of others'. Some sort of coercive restriction of individuals, it is believed, is absolutely unavoidable ... Since coercive restrictions are bound to affect the distribution of income and the direction of economic activities, and are bound to affect the economic interests of persons living in foreign parts, statemen cannot avoid interfering with economic matters, both in domestic and in foreign affairs....
"What is the government doing when it 'protects a property right'? Passively, it is abstaining from interference with the owner when he deals with the thing owned; actively, it is forcing the non-owner to desist from handling it, unless the owner consents... The non-owner is forbidden to handle the owner's property even where his handling of it involves no violence or force whatever. Any lawyer could [tell] that the right of property is much more extensive than the mere right to protection against forcible dispossession. In protecting property the government is doing something quite apart from merely keeping the peace. It is exerting coercion wherever that is necessary to protect each owner, not merely from violence, but also from peaceful infringement of his sole right to enjoy the thing owned."
-- Robert Lee Hale, "Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State"
Shane