>High transaction costs. There are good reasons to think that transaction costs would be prohibitively high. Contrary to property rights, specific privacy and association rights are likely to be difficult (and therefore costly) to enforce and monitor. Suppose you are willing to trade you’re right to hold some kind of speech against the right of a group of persons in your neighborhood to wear some kind of clothes. You’ve first to agree on what exactly counts as the kind of speech concerned, as well as the kind of clothes. This may be difficult when people do not hold the same perceptions. Moreover, it will be obviously costly to monitor the respect of rights has they have been traded.
This seems more like a problem with certain end points, rather than with using bargaining to get there.
I disagree that non-alienability of rights is somehow a cost, as if having the right to sell/transfer something, makes that thing worth less. The market works the other way, where a restriction in the right to transfer reduces that thing’s value.
Somehow this is understood as a limitation of rights, when it is clearly only an expansion of rights. What wasn’t before monetizable becomes monetizable at the option of the holder. And this mirrors the market better, reflecting the fact that governance rights are routinely traded in the market (people have different values and arrangements for non-voting shares and voting shares in corporations, for example)
And such a right of transfer (whether voting or otherwise) would make a truly fair distribution easier to achieve, as rather than the government creating a one-size fits all approach for rights, rights can be allocated (at least partially) by revealed preference, maximizing the aggregate value of rights for its holders.
As for the other issues related to coordination and externalities, those should be for the government to prove in fact specific cases of rights, rather than claimed in the abstract. I’m overall skeptical of how inefficient a market in rights actually is. Especially when many rights are routinely traded on the market.
>High transaction costs. There are good reasons to think that transaction costs would be prohibitively high. Contrary to property rights, specific privacy and association rights are likely to be difficult (and therefore costly) to enforce and monitor. Suppose you are willing to trade you’re right to hold some kind of speech against the right of a group of persons in your neighborhood to wear some kind of clothes. You’ve first to agree on what exactly counts as the kind of speech concerned, as well as the kind of clothes. This may be difficult when people do not hold the same perceptions. Moreover, it will be obviously costly to monitor the respect of rights has they have been traded.
This seems more like a problem with certain end points, rather than with using bargaining to get there.
I disagree that non-alienability of rights is somehow a cost, as if having the right to sell/transfer something, makes that thing worth less. The market works the other way, where a restriction in the right to transfer reduces that thing’s value.
For instance I argue that in the context of votes, citizens should have the right to sell their vote back to the government here https://open.substack.com/pub/neonomos/p/let-the-government-buy-your-vote?r=1pded0&utm_medium=ios
Somehow this is understood as a limitation of rights, when it is clearly only an expansion of rights. What wasn’t before monetizable becomes monetizable at the option of the holder. And this mirrors the market better, reflecting the fact that governance rights are routinely traded in the market (people have different values and arrangements for non-voting shares and voting shares in corporations, for example)
And such a right of transfer (whether voting or otherwise) would make a truly fair distribution easier to achieve, as rather than the government creating a one-size fits all approach for rights, rights can be allocated (at least partially) by revealed preference, maximizing the aggregate value of rights for its holders.
As for the other issues related to coordination and externalities, those should be for the government to prove in fact specific cases of rights, rather than claimed in the abstract. I’m overall skeptical of how inefficient a market in rights actually is. Especially when many rights are routinely traded on the market.