Private Property

Private ownership of the means of production is the only way to ensure a workable system of human cooperation and division of labor.

— Thomas DiLorenzo; How Capitalism Saved America

Private property also provides powerful incentives for wise stewardship of property. Property owners who do not take good care of their property bear the full cost of their actions when their property—that is, their wealth—depreciates in value. The opposite is also true: those who take care of and improve their property reap the rewards when their property value goes up. This is why private homes are so much better maintained than government housing projects, for example, or why private lakes and streams are carefully maintained while government-owned ones are often overfished and overused, or why private forests that are harvested are often replanted with trees that mature in twenty-five years while public forests are not.

— Thomas DiLorenzo; How Capitalism Saved America

And because they create the ability to profit from one's own productive endeavors, property rights are the keystone of modern capitalism and of civilization itself. (That’s why Marx and Engels wrote in big capital letters in The Communist Manifesto that a prerequisite for socialism was abolition of private property.)

— Thomas DiLorenzo; How Capitalism Saved America

It is no coincidence, then, that capitalism grew from the fifteenth century onward after the creation of commercial law and commercial law courts designed to enforce and protect property rights.

— Thomas DiLorenzo; How Capitalism Saved America

When it comes down to it, what are being traded in a capitalist economy are property rights -- the ownership rights in goods and services. Trade and exchange will be minimal without reasonably secure property rights. And it is these trades and exchanges (supply and demand) that determine free-market prices. Prices in a capitalistic economy reflect the relative scarcity of a good or service as well as the amount and intensity of consumer demand. Free-market prices are the only viable means of a rational economic calculation. If a good or service becomes in shorter supply, for whatever reason, its price will rise, all other things being equal. The higher price will give consumers the proper incentive to do what is needed whenever anything becomes scarcer: conserve, or cut back on consumption. At the same time, the higher price gives producers an incentive to supply more to the market (since it is more profitable to do so), while others are given financial incentives to create and market substitutes for the higher-priced item.

— Thomas DiLorenzo; How Capitalism Saved America