Reflections: Voltaire's Letters on England

In a previous posting, I quoted Voltaire's account of market based allocation of goods, which is said to overcome barriers of prejudice. Now, Hayek used an expression "the extended order" to designate the way markets were oriented towards bringing strangers, as it were, together for mutual benefit, where each party doesn't have any other incentive to "get to know" the other. The common denominator here is the right to property, or property rights. Each party is inclined to create desirable goods and services in context of the preferences of the other party involved in a given trade. In other words, private property creates incentives, which also have far ranging implications for the preservation of resources which are often described as having "intrinsic value," but actually pan out to be highly dependent on property owner preferred value acquired by means of market allocation.

The normative recommendation for such "values" are found in context of said party's use of the value as consisting in a broader end goal, i.e., efficacious living, or living well, which entails a recognition of the property rights of other parties, whereas human flourishing is dependent on exclusive use of those values in accordance with rational decision making. Thus, property rights are rendered as not only beneficial to social interaction and aggregate benefits, but more fundamentally required for individual success.