When explaining last week the economic force of property with regard to the 1993 Nobel, I insinuated in passing that ownership is being seriously threatened due to 1) the exaggerated and disproportionate growth of the State and 2) the macroeconomic tendencies to dissect the components of individual properties (estates in severalty) to add them later separately with the object of creating models of economic analysis of growth and development controllable by the state apparatus. It is as well to continue studying these ideas in depth that are in tune with the Austrian School of Economy.

All expansion of state control has a coercive component that eliminates the individual as a thinking being and with his intrinsic and own value, making him a mere instrument in the attainment of another's goals. By virtue of the rights of free and exclusive disposition, a person pursues their own objectives using the means that their personal knowledge indicates, being based on data that can never be modelled to the will of others. The tendencies that defend social rationalism - Socialists as well as the engineers of the economy - tend to overlook the fundamental significance of private property and they put the whole emphasis of their policies on aggregate macroeconomics, on the financial trends of the national economy, losing the meaning of a creative unit inseparable from the patrimonies. With these performances the appearance in the market of prices in accordance with authentic economic values is overshadowed. Prices are no longer the manifestation of subjective preferences of the different economic agents, but constructions planned with rationalism imposed from above and therefore the foundations, on which the whole simple mechanism of the market leans, crack.

The respect and strengthening of private property are so constituent of an economic order of freedom and voluntary cooperation that the cracking of this institution is at the root of the feared inflationary processes according to Röpke. The weakening of property also produces a weakening of money, a loss of its purchasing power. The solidity and endurance of that acquired and insured, of property, gives way to the fragile, elusive and insecure of the inflationist situation. Everything is guided towards the fugitive current instant without thinking of future generations. The possibilities of forming an appropriate and sufficient property diminish and people feel more and more interested in a current of revenues guaranteed by the Welfare State, by the Providence State.

In spite of the scientific voices that warn us about this danger, we live in a society in which this right begins to be a right delegated by that guardian power that is the State. Instead of a delegation of private property being that of the State it appears to be the other way around: that private property is a delegation of the state one. Even in international exchange it is tended to reason in terms of that baptized and criticized by Von Mises " Volkswirtschaft " word by which we understand the complex that all the economic activities of a sovereign nation form, as long as the ruler directs and controls them. This tendency to think in terms of America, France, Spain... in international exchange, overlooks the fact that it is a certain French person that buys from or sells to another Spanish one and it is not " France " and " Spain " that are really trading.

The aggregation of variables, a constant problem in economic literature, overlooks and distorts the understanding among the different components of wealth, breaking its inseparable unit. An electronic microscope in a bricklayer's hands is worth a lot less than the same microscope in the hands of an investigator in biological sciences. A hectare of land in a farmer's hands is worth much more than in the sole hands of a lawyer. If we add their monetary prices we do not understand and we fall into a monumental confusion. When adding we make abstraction of the property, to which wealth belongs what we add, and we disable the effective valuation of those groups.

Von Mises said: "Managers, capitalists, landowners, workers or consumers of economic theory are not real and living beings like those that populate the world and appear in history. They constitute, on the contrary, mere personifications of the different functions that are appreciated in the market." This functional rupture of the performance unit and the tendency to dissect the unit of wealth into several components is the cause of numerous errors in the development of pure political economy and fundamentally in its concretion in the applied economy. That which is complimentary is inseparable from economic wealth. If it breaks, it is impaired.

One is not able to dissect any resource from the rest of the goods with those that can be supplemented more easily because of belonging to the same wealth. Property transmits integrative unity to all the goods on which that right of free disposition is exercised. That whole varied range of resources that configure the unrepeatable originality of each wealth, becomes unified because of its orientation towards the same goals marked by the proprietor. Any material and palpable good becomes, because of belonging to a certain wealth, besides the place and time, an unmistakable good, not exactly replaceable by another. Supposedly identical goods are converted into completely different ones for valuation effects because of their inclusion in one or another wealth. A good has different values depending on who the buyer and seller are, since they represent patrimonial groups to supplement different ones. If the terms of buyer and seller were turned around the exchange would not exist. The homogeneity of goods occurs only by abstraction of property. The economic value, that has a definitive reference to the real and concrete, cannot make abstraction from the property to which the valued object belongs. The whole economic calculation originates from this reality.

It is as well to make an effort to try to redirect the macroeconomic obsessions of our politicians and of many of my economist colleagues towards wisdom.

Joseph John Franch Meneu
Gaceta de los Negocios, Wednesday November 3rd, 1993