… is from John Cochrane’s September 3rd, 2020, blog post, “On looting” (which is a riff on Graeme Wood’s must-read assessment of what is obviously one of the most lunatic books ever published):
Our society and our prosperous economy are built on the bedrock of private property and the rule of law which defends that property. That may not be pretty or fulfill a college sophomore’s utopia, but the hard lesson of a thousand years is that only private property provides the incentive for people to maintain that property — farms, houses, factories, stores — and to put in the immense effort to provide commodities of value to their fellow humans.


Our society and our prosperous economy are built on the bedrock of private property and the rule of law which defends that property. That may not be pretty or fulfill a college sophomore’s utopia, but the hard lesson of a thousand years is that only private property provides the incentive for people to maintain that property — farms, houses, factories, stores — and to put in the immense effort to provide commodities of value to their fellow humans.
