Paper's abstract

Christian Mouly, Public Property, Private Property and Justice
The argument between state ownership and private ownership is ancient. However, a new phenomenon is the current shift from the criterion of efficiency to the criterion of justice.@In spite of the attractiveness of the state ownership as a mean to reach the mirage of social justice (in which logically it failed), practice and theory prove that private ownership provides a greater justice, based on its operating procedure (procedural sense of justice of a legal institution), although at the same time, because it is just, it does more to diminish human miseries, particularly for the most impoverished. This fact is now universally accepted. The comparison and reasons for this greater justice are provided by history (I), economics (II) and ethics (III), which lead to search for criteria to differentiate between private and state ownership (IV). The closed debate on the greater justice of private property could find an outlet in the application (and the justification) of the subsidiarity principle, embodied in the EC Treaty, leaving to the less efficient and less just state ownership few spheres, and for some of them only for a transitory period.

Key Words : public property, private, justice
t. 41, 1997 : p. 267-291