by Anthony Gill

Who defines and enforces property rights?

If you are the average person, an undergraduate student, or even a mainstream economics professor, that answer is easy: the government. Look it up! Municipal and county governments determine the deeds to your property and various usage rights including wetland setbacks and easements. State governments create regulations that affect residential and commercial property and how businesses may go about their business. And the federal government controls patent and copyright protections, sets environmental policies, and enacts many other rules determining how one can use real estate and intangible assets.

Sometimes property rights are not well defined, particularly when some new “thing” arises from technological innovation. The explosion of the internet in the 1990s posed a challenge to the ownership of information. Artificial intelligence is doing something similar today. But even when such novel situations arise that require defining ownership and usage, we still reflexively defer to government as the primary (if not sole) source for defining property rights.

But what if I told you that there was a bigger and more amorphous entity that determines who owns and how we use all the stuff and junk in our daily lives? And what if I called that entity “civil society,” the spontaneous order of social norms, values, conventions, and rituals that coordinate human interaction without centralized direction? Would you want to know how that works?

If yes, allow me a rather trivial example to illustrate the importance that civil society plays in defining property rights.

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