> The institution of private property, including private ownership of the basic means of production Property is never really wholly private or wholly public.

> The institution of private property, including private ownership of the basic means of production Property is never really wholly private or wholly public. Deeds, titles, freeholds, leaseholds, etc all generally come with some form of public obligations to a sovereign. And in a republic the sovereign is a general government which uses its authority on behalf of the people as a whole to maximize their happiness. > A doctrinaire laissez-faire mentality that is reflexively hostile to all governmental economic intervention Laissez-faire was originally a progressive ideology advocated by the French physiocrats which opposed the internal tariffs and private privileges which the king, nobility, and church enjoyed under the Ancien Régime. Part of laissez-faire was the idea that governments should collect a large direct tax on landed property and raise 100% of tax revenues from the most privileged classes of society. These capitalism vs socialism debates are never really worth having. There's many types of capitalism and really only a subset of what is commonly referred to as capital has a material basis. These debates always oversimplify things, under-estimate the degree to which western economies are central planned by private banks, and ignore the problem of fictitious capital.