Property is only another name for decentralized creation of knowledge

Abstract

Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl argue in a recent paper that a private property regime is incompatible with allocative efficiency insofar as it allows owners to ask for monopoly prices to potential buyers. In order to remedy this defect without penalizing investment efficiency, they propose to implement a Harberger tax. In this paper we show that the Harberger tax is a mechanism that penalizes the informational investment necessary to reach efficient estimates of the fundamental value of assets and, therefore, a mechanism that move us away from both investment efficiency and allocative efficiency.