property rights

The property rights crowd just can’t seem to comprehend that ownership rights are not absolute. Property doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but in a social, ecological context. The latest installment of this long-running drama is the controversy between private landowners in Gunnison, Colorado, and river-rafting outfitters that take people down the river.

The question at hand: Are the rafters violating the private property rights of landowners when they float down the river?

Historically, under the public trust doctrine of most state’s laws, the water in river and lakes belongs to everyone, and can be accessed through public rights of way. However, as the New York Times reported on April 16, it seems that they are some ambiguities about the scope of private landowner rights in Colorado. The water belongs to the public, but the river and lake beds and banks belong to the people who own the adjacent land.

The pantheon of property law generally honors the great virtues of private ownership — while making the case that the public benefits from such arrangements.

Unfortunately, the benefits to the public are often more nominal than real. Drug makers frequently use their patents to extract exorbitant prices for life-saving drug compounds. Tech companies claim exclusive rights to common “business methods” and mathematical algorithms embedded in software. The record and film industries have expanded their copyright monopolies in numerous ways at the expense of the public domain and fair use rights.

As practiced, in short, property law tends to expand private prerogatives and suppress public benefits. Its priorities — to turn ownership into money — often trump those of democracy, community, free expression and life outside of the marketplace.

Property law is not exactly a riveting subject, and law professors are not usually good storytellers. But in his new book The Gridlock Economy, Michael Heller, a professor at Columbia Law School, has written one of the most intelligent and accessible critiques of how overly broad property rights can be harmful not only to the commons, but to the market.

If you care to learn why cell phone service is so bad in the United States, why breakthrough medical treatments cannot be taken to market, and how holdouts can stymie valuable real estate development, The Gridlock Economy helps locate a core problem: the fragmentation of individual property rights and the paralysis that results. Though economists like to tout property rights as a wonder-cure for virtually everything that ails us, Heller explains how all sorts of innovation and market growth is killed in the cradle simply because there are too many rights-holders with too many divergent concerns.