An economist and journalist, Anatone Kaletsky wrote for The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Times of London before joining Reuters in 2012. He is also author of Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis. Here, he discusses the biological basis for property rights, owning the unownable and the growing need to limit copyright protection.

Is ownership a moral, or an economic issue?

Well, it's both. Certainly there are very strongly economic justifications, weaker moral ones, as well as important political, civil, and biological justifications. The moral part of the entitlement to own property in the abstract 'good' or 'evil' sense is the weakest justification for property rights. The economic justifications for property rights are that they give people incentives to work and to improve the world. An even stronger justification is biological, though – there is clearly an evolved tendency for human beings to want to compete; to expand their power, domain and ability to control the world. The ownership of property is an intrinsic part of that.