Pierre Bessard is Director of the Liberal Institute, a Swiss think tank located in Geneva and Zurich. This text has the merit to replace property rights in their historical, intellectual and moral dimensions. ” Property is the founding principle that protects freedom, the foundation of human value” and allows to reconcile conflicting interests and guarantee peace. Property is a natural right because it stems from human nature: as such it is morally based and legitimate before being legal. Property rights are often informal and in this case the mission of Government is to legalize it to allow him to produce all effects beneficial, namely turn dead capital in active instrument of financing collaterals , as advocated by Hernando De Soto.
Bessard states that legislative arbitrariness and the multiplication of laws and taxes lead to gradual destruction property rights and, more specifically, their transfer to governments that redistribute in the name of the social justice or environment to pressure groups (do gooders and/or crony corporationsOf course no society can survive in the absence of law, but enforceable only if respectable without violence or corruption. Bessard quotes Benjamin Constant: “without property the human species would be stationary in the most vulgar degree and the most savage of his existence.
Max Falque