The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Isaac Kramnick, English Middle-class Radicalism In the Eighteenth Century
• I: I Social and Political Thought
• Community, Individuality, and Freedom
• Rousseau's Social Thought
• A Sociological History of Utilitarianism
• Spencer and Comte In American Labor Thought
• Bureaucracy In Weber & Kafka
• Bergson's Political Doctrines
• Oakeshott's Political Theory
• Oakeshott's Political Philosophy
• Undermocratic Liberal Republicans
• Wilkes and Radical Politics
• Late Liberal Imperialism
• Kant and Reason In Politics
• II: Education, Politics, and Values
• Schools and Political Socialization
• Schooling For Imperialism
• The Political Economy of Public Schooling
• Federal Education Policy
• The Problems of Federal Education
• William James As Individualist
• Existential and Phenomenological Education
• Early Federal Educational Policy
• Education, Labor Markets, & Controlled Youth
• Government Control of Universities
• III: Economic Thought and Values
• Business and Legal History
• Schumpeter's Economic Theories
• Menger and Entrepreneurship
• Saint-simonian Economic Ideas
• The Free Market & the Third World
• Democratic Capitalism, Justice, & Religion
• Property, Law, and Economics
• The Economic Analysis of Law Vs. Values
• IV: Foreign Policy and Ideology
• The Attractiveness of War
• Walzer On International Morality
• Eduard Bernstein and Imperialism
• Roosevelt Vs. His War Critics
• American Preconceptions of Japan
• The Marshall Plan and Russia
• V: Self-knowledge, Autonomy, and Liberty
• The Self In Political Thought
• Autonomy, Self, and Will Power
• Self-knowledge: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel
• The Egoist As a “psychopath”
• The History of Social Psychology
• Psychology, Self, and Society
• Free Will, Responsibility, and Motivation
• Free Will, Purpose, and Responsibility
• Political “groupthink” and Reality
• Personal Freedom and Autonomy
• Research Fields
• Economics
• Education
• History
• Philosophy
• Political Philosophy
• Psychology
• Sociology

Property, Law, and Economics

Marc R. Tool and Andre Brun

• California State University at Sacramento and the Institut National de la Recherch Agronomique, Orleans, France

These two reviews of A. Allan Schmid's book are generally complementary. Schmid identifies the way institutions shape interactions through property rights. Property rights create the opportunities, costs, and constraints of transactions and economic distributions. Schmid combines the positive analysis of such institutions with a normative analysis. He criticizes the predominant Pareto efficiency criterion and other criteria for welfare economics as being disguised value judgments. He also believes that economist's contributions ought to be limited to providing information about the source and consequences of conflicts over interests. This role of the economist is not, however, value free, since it assumes informed choices are better than uninformed choices.

The two reviewers' criticism is that Schmid fails to provide a convincing value criterion for economic analysis, given that he has criticized welfare economists for their disguised value judgments. Furthermore, Schmid does not discuss the fact that institutional “constraints” depend in part on people's perceptions concerning whether they are indeed constraints or liberating devices.