You raise an interesting point in your first paragraph. However, no man is an island and this is especially true for players in a market economy. Improvements i

You raise an interesting point in your first paragraph. However, no man is an island and this is especially true for players in a market economy. Improvements in efficiency at the societal level benefit you at the individual level, and conversely, the opportunity cost of foregoing such improvements harms you as well. Theoretically, one could wait 10 years to maybe get a higher payout (if such a thing weren’t already reflected in the current market price). However, I can’t think of a real-world example where doing so would offset the opportunity cost of lost efficiency during the intervening years. > At its extreme, the most efficient allocation of ownership rights would lead to the government selling off all the oxygen in the country, and you having to pay some rentier, just so that you could breathe. Optimizing for situations like this is a fringe, highly ideological position. You find this bizarre because oxygen (at atmospheric concentrations) is not (currently) a scarce resource on Earth, so it makes no sense to assign property rights over it. In situations where oxygen becomes a scarce resource, like space stations or planetary colonies, you can bet there will be a market for oxygen. That is, unless technology makes it feasible to produce in such abundance that the price goes to zero. There’s already a market for pure oxygen needed for industrial uses, so there’s nothing verboten about oxygen being priced. In that sense, it’s just a resource like any other.