ȃȀǿ Partʺʺ: Politics and Philosophyruin through a “tragedy of the commons” (as HardinȀȈȅȇ/ȀȈȅȈcalled it).
A commons is tragic precisely when things are economically scarce and
leaving “enough and as good” for everyone just is not possible. By avoiding
the tragedy, private property gives even people other than the initial appro-
priators more and better opportunities to prosper from specialization,
trade, the prudent administration of resources, and the accumulation of
wealth.
Beyond his own distinctive contributions, Kirzner well understands
other strands in the justification of private property and profit. Pure
profit, or the lure of it, helps mobilize entrepreneurial alertness, includ-
ing alertness to potential wants of consumers, and helps transfer control
over resources out of relatively less into relatively more competent hands.
Kirzner knows about decentralized decisionmaking, the use of scattered
knowledge, and the productivity of a capitalist system. But he does not
dwell on these familiar themes because he wants to answer criticisms of
capitalism made on moral grounds.
ŏōşőş śŒ ŝšőşŠŕśŚōŎŘő őŚŠŕŠŘőřőŚŠ
Defense of the capitalist system does not extend to whatever occurs within
it. Kirzner would contend (I am confident) that transfer-seeking through
government, even when done by entrepreneurs, is not capitalism. Business
alertness does not justify just anything (ȀȈȇȈ, p.ȀȆȆ). We may moralize
against traders who exploit the impossibility of sharply delineating the
legal from the illegal, or even the moral from the immoral. No system can
make legal, moral, and actual behaviors fully coincide. Part of the rationale
of ethics is that it can deal, flexibly, with innumerable individual cases that
could not be foreseen in detail and for which detailed rules could not be
laid out in advance.
Kirzner is uneasy at the imaginary case of one of several travelers in
a desert who races ahead to appropriate a waterhole so he can charge the
others an exorbitant price for water (ȀȈȆȈ, pp.ȁȁȁ–ȁȁȂ). He seems less
uneasy, though, than I would expect. Racing ahead implies already exist-
ing knowledge about the waterhole and its importance. Instead of making
a creative discovery, the racer seizes a hold on his fellows by blocking them
from an opportunity.
More fundamentally, economic rivalry and market transactions are
not appropriate to all human relations. Not all behavior conforming to
the logic and ethics of the capitalist system is ethically acceptable for that