What does it mean to say that a person is entitled to own what he has produced? Israel Kirzner answers the question by way of explaning the function of entrepreneurship. It is well-known, he writes, that economic literature suffers from insufficient attention paid to the entrepreneurial role, so that we find few careful attempts to define precisely wherein this role consists. In the more sophisticated discussions of entrepreneurship, a fairly sharp distinction has emerged between the factors of production on the one hand, and entrepreneurship on the other. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/3845/producer-entrepreneur-and-the-right-to-property/
Producer, Entrepreneur, and the Right to Property
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I appreciated this article by the scholarly Israel Kirzner. By 1973, he had already seen the importance of the entrepreneur, while most economists disregarded or minimized its role. Yet the originator or a process, and the decisions made, are central to production. Here, Kirzner takes a top-down view of ownership from a man’s higher faculties, rather than a bottom-up view from the factors of production (which are under the control of the entrepreneur).
Yet, although this has great significance for the issue of ownership of property, I wish to address something broader. Often, with regard to a nation, or a would-be nation, the issue arises as to who it belongs to. A bottom-up analysis leads to a majority vote, for this captures most of the participants. A top-down approach views instead the guiding culture that brought it about, even if most of the populace do not share that culture. To place this view in its most pejorative form, a land would belong to the slave-owners, and not to the slaves. To give it a sounder form, it was mainly American culture that guided the development of our country, and less the multitude of contibutory subcultures.
I am not sure how this article translates into the ownership of a nation. However, it should be clear that the issue is not simply a matter of majority vote. (Perhaps, at the very least, one should receive a number of votes in proportion to the taxes he pays.)
While I can appreciate that Kirzner has emphasized the entrepreneur’s role, I’m not sure that this essay did very much to clarify the situation.
First of all, as he (and Mises) says, “entrepreneur” is an analytical, idealized role. All humans involved in the production are, to some extent, being entrepreneurial. Thus, unless we can somehow quantify the entreprenurial component involved in production, this helps us not at all in deciding how much the entrepreneur deserves or owns of the product.
Secondly, all this talk about entrepreneur and creativity simply strikes me as being intellectual activity (intellectual “property”, if you will) about recognizing available resources and factors of production, and deciding how to best employ them. While the ‘brains’ are obviously necessary to organize and direct these resources, it still takes actual, physical labor to implement the plans.
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