PROPERTY HAIKU: Very nice response to Cass Sunstein and Oliver Wendell Holmes, from the Yale Free Press blog. I disagree with the anti-natural-rights conclusion (though I do think it’s the necessary conclusion for an atheist), but think Gene’s analysis of the Sunstein claim is right on.

Excerpt: “So the argument boils down to either believing in natural rights granted to us by God or not believing in natural rights. In the first case, we have the right to life. But we can then also claim a pre-legal right to property with pretty good justification from various moral and religious contexts (see for example the commandment against covetting another’s wife). In the second case, any concept of right is given to us by law since pre-moral man had no compulsion to either not steal or not kill. So, singling out property rights as something that is prior to law is itself because one does not believe in laissez-faire, not the other way around as Sunstein claims.”

more