About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

5 Cato J. 295 (1985-1986)
Life in the Gulag: A Property Rights Perspective

handle is hein.journals/catoj5 and id is 297 raw text is: LIFE IN THE GULAG: A PROPERTY RIGHTS PERSPECTIVE Gary M. Anderson and Robert D. Tollison No, it isn't done especially to torture people. A sentenced prisoner is a laboring soldier of socialism, so why should he be tortured? They need him for construction work. -Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Introduction One of the most interesting applications of modern economic the- ory has been to the analysis of slavery. This work began in the pathbreaking article by Conrad and Meyer (1958), and was extended and revised by Fogel and Engerman (1974). This analysis, including a growing body of further extensions and critiques, focuses on the case of slavery in the antebellum South. In this paper we show that the analysis of slavery based on the economic theory of property rights can be extended beyond the antebellum South to a more recent institutional phenomena-the large-scale use of political prisoners as forced labor in modern social- ist states. These cases are amenable to a straightforward application of modern property rights theory, which offers a rational explanation for key differences between these examples of forced labor and slav- ery in the antebellum South. The Plantation One of the key insights of the modern economic literature on slavery is the importance of a highly developed, efficient capital Cato journal, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 1985). Copyright @ Cato Institute. All rights reserved. Gary Anderson is a graduate student in economics at the Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, and Robert Tollison is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Study of Public Choice. The authors are grateful to Lee Alston and James Dorn for comments on an earlier version of this paper. The usual caveat applies. 295

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most