Human Rights as Property Rights

In these days, when we are all becoming more concerned about the way we are using up our natural resources, polluting our environment, and destroying the ecological balance of nature, it still seems to some that there is an insuperable difficulty in doing anything effective about it. The difficulty is that any effective action about it seems to contradict one of the central concepts, and to undermine one of the basic institutions, on which all the advanced Western or liberal democratic societies are based: the concept and institution of individual property.

This contradiction, of course, will have to be resolved, or compromised or patched up or papered over, by our politicians. That is what we elect politicians to do.

But c...