Theme: Externalities

—“Have you written about the Coase theorem in respect to the propertarian theory of property? I searched your site & didn’t find anything related. Most discussions of externalities are at least tangentially prefaced with a description of the Coase theorem & its limitations. I’m interested in how you (or another propertarian) would approach the problem.”— 1) Hmmm… I think I see polity formation as the process of suppressing local rents, centralizing them to pay for local suppression of rents, and trading a small number of low cost rents that are predictable (taxation) for many high transaction cost rents that are not …. 2) …and the individuals in the polity capturing the differences as profits on decreased transaction costs, increased risk tolerance, and higher economic (monetary) velocity. (This follows my general method of analysis by via-negativa: we are always saving time via cooperation). 3) Coase’s theorem can be stated the same way: the differential rents (different allocations of property rights) are suppressed by competition across variable property allocations (normative property, and formal property rights) by international trade. … 4) So Coase expresses at the inter-polity scale, what I express at the intra-polity scale. But the phenomenon is the same: increasing the radius of cooperation will suppress rents(assymetries) through competition, whether internal or external. …. 5) … and we eventually converge on individual property rights with gains captured and redistributed as commons, just as we see by comparison the convergence on mathematics, and the convergence on scientific ‘grammar’ as a universal language. 6) Competition at ever increasing scales causes convergence on indifference in all ‘grammars’ (Methods) of cooperation from the conceptual to the verbal, to the material. (offset by war, group strategy etc.) 7) So in this sense my approach is broader than Coase, and where Coase incorrectly suggests cooperation reinforces seeking equilibrium, instead cooperation seeks convergence, competition seeks efficiency, and opportunity seeks disequilibrium, with shocks as discovery of limits. 8) That’s pretty heavy but I think it’s in your intellectual wheelhouse. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine