Bryan Caplan

Posts About

• 

  Intellectual Property and Institutional Efficiency: The Limits of the Demsetz Story

  Harold Demsetz (1967) in his classic paper “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” makes the case that property rights arise endogenously when the cost of the commons problem begins to exceed the cost of exclusion, and illustrates with the case of Native American tribes and land rights. Once buffalo become . . .

• 

  Nozick and Fractional Reserve Banking

  Rothbardian critics of fractional reserve banking (FRB) tend to use natural-rights-esque arguments, even when not explicitly invoking natural rights. That is, they take for granted not only the perspicuity of some definition of property, but also the obviousness of its application to any situation. Hülsmann, for example, argues that, “on . . .