Public ownership of the external world and private ownership of self

Abstract

Liberal political philosophy defends great inequality of economic outcome on the basis that people own themselves and are entitled to establish private property in the external world by virture of that self-ownership. Welfare economics is discussed.Libertarianism defends great economic inequality on the basis that people own themselves and are entitled to establish private property in the external world by virtue of their self-ownership. Nonlibertarianism denies the premise of self-ownership to reach its egalitarian conclusion. An alternative to libertarianism assumes that people do have a degree of self-ownership in that they have certain rights to benefit by virtue of superior skill, but that productive assets in the external world should be publicly owned and not privately appropriable. A simple, 2-agent model is used to investigate the degree to which inequality in final outcomes is justified under this alternative. Somewhat surprisingly, the conclusion, when modeled on a large domain of possible economic environments, implies that resources must be allocated so that the welfare of the agents is equalized. If the domain of technologies is restricted to increasing returns to scale, other allocations are admissible, but the degree of inequality will be limited.