Peter Boettke writes:

"Alchian and Allen fought against that trend of macro first, but it was not
a successful text in terms of wide-scale adoption in the 1960s. But it did
become a standard reference text for a generation of the
counter-revolutionaries to the Neo-Keynesian synthesis --- property rights,
public choice, new economic history, etc."

	I don't think it took Alchian and Allen to elevate "property rights"
to sanctity in our profession.

	From 1950 onwards I was heavily engaged in studying the role of
institutions in helping or hindering the economical allocation of water in
California, the territory of Alchian and Allen.  I was struck then by the
repeated protestations of my seniors and contemporaries that they would
never breathe a hint that various private tenures to water, precarious
though they were and are in law and fact, are anything but sacred and above
question or examination. 

	Actually, legally, they are not property at all, but privileges to
use the public domain, subject to conditions and to cancellation, just like
your driver's license.  But my contemporary students, many of them professed
Marxists, were just plain TERRIFIED to question their sanctity.

	Likewise, in 1959-62 or so I served on the "Air Conservation
Commission" of the AAAS. Barry Commoner, a socialist, was head of the AAAS
at that time, and you'd think he would not pick a reactionary lot. Joe
McCarthy was history by then and his nemesis, Robert Welch, had become a
movie star for his troubles ("Anatomy of a Murder", if you've forgotten,
with George C. Scott, Lee Remick, James Stewart, Ben Gazzara and others).
Our Chair, James Dixon, asked for ideas we could all accept as postulates,
so I said "Air is common property". You'd think I had just disgraced myself
on the Persian rugs, my colleagues were aghast! (They were mostly natural
scientists, who pleased to call themselves "hard" scientists, reducing me to
a lower level.)

	"Macro" perhaps was a little world of its own, but I am not aware
that any academic failed to tug the forelock and bend the knee before
"sacred" property rights, holy beyond question. If others know of cases,
please advise!

Mason Gaffney