Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 24 of Peter Boettke’s and Rosolino Candela’s 2025 book, The Historical Path to Liberty and Human Progress [link added]:

Exchangeability of property rights not only allows individuals to make trades that both parties believe will make them better off. When rights over private property are transferable, it also provides an institutional framework within which a system of money prices emerges. The emergence of money prices provides the information to calculate the relative scarcity of different resources, such that “prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people” by communicating the dispersed and particular knowledge of millions of individuals (Hayek 1945). People are able to observe prices and determine whether they value the property they have more than the money they could receive for it. Changes in price signals drive the movements in the demand and supply for different goods and services. These price changes provide the information to entrepreneurs as to what products are most urgently demanded and what inputs can be combined to most cheaply produce them.

DBx: Yes.

It follows that by restricting the exchangeability of property rights, protectionism reduces the amount of economic information that people convey to each other.