I have had occasion to think about the relationship between property rights and barriers to entry lately, and was reminded of the following line which I thought well worth posting on its own:
“Even the operation of an unregulated market system presupposes the general recognition of property rights, but the problem of defining ownership is precisely that of creating properly scaled legal barriers to entry.”
Harold Demsetz, Barriers to Entry (72 AER 47 (1982).
