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Talking with Bart Wilson about The Property Species

I recently talked with Chapman Law professor Bart Wilson about his new book, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind, for a podcast sponsored by the Federalist Society. I also reviewed the book here, and expressed some qualms about it. I delve into some of my differences with Wilson and explore some of his really important insights about private property in the podcast, which you can listen to here.

Discussing state-level antitrust enforcement with the Alliance on Antitrust

I joined Ashley Baker of the Alliance on Antitrust and Paul Watkins of Patomak General Parnters to discuss an aspect of antitrust law that is too little understood: state antitrust laws and state-level antitrust enforcement of federal laws. Usually, conversations about antitrust focus on federal laws such as the Sherman Act or the Robinson-Patman Act, and overlook state antitrust statutes such as California's Cartwright Act, Unfair Practices Act, and Unfair Competition Law. In this conversation we cover that and also talk about what the future holds, particularly as Republican political leaders appear increasingly willing to use antitrust laws to retaliate against tech companies that exercised their First Amendment rights to oppose the Republican Party.

The existentialism of The Last Policeman trilogy

In the latest episode of Andrew Heaton’s podcast Alienating the Audience, I joined Andrew to talk about one of my favorite science fiction novels, Ben Winters’ pre-apocalyptic The Last Policeman, and its sequels, Countdown City and World of Trouble. The novels’ premise is: an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth and is going to destroy us all—nothing we can do about it—and a policeman is trying to solve a murder before it happens. The philosophical questions—such as Why?—are all hovering (literally!) over the reader’s head. 

Listen here or here

Mentioned in the podcast:

Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

Tom Godwin’s classic short story “The Cold Equations.”

The Cabin in The Woods, a film by Joss Whedon.

Croesus’ interview with Solon from Herodotus’ Histories.

Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man.

More on existentialism here.

Private property's roots in human nature

In the latest issue of The Objective Standard, I have a review of Bart Wilson's The Property Species, which offers an important new look at the institution of private property and its roots in human nature. Although I have some disagreements with Wilson's approach, he offers some really important insights into the institution of private property. Here's an excerpt:

Wilson examines property as a moral practice involving a cognitive—one might even say, imaginative—process. It’s imaginative in the sense that property consists not merely of asserting control over things to the exclusion of one’s rivals—something all animals do to some degree—but, in the distinct case of humans, of a sense of personal identification with the objects one owns. Human beings, as Wilson puts it, “pour [them]selves into” their belongings “and assimilate them as part of [their] own existence.” This is a psychological phenomenon, hinted at in the language of pre-20th century lawyers and philosophers who spoke of people having “property in things,” instead of “property rights.” This also differentiates the human institution of property from the mere territorial instincts of other animals—a distinction revealed by another unique aspect of the human practice of property, namely, that human beings are “the only species to teach their progeny how not to acquire things.” “Mine” is commonplace in the animal kingdom, but “not mine” is almost exclusively human.

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