The State, Property Rights, and the Middle Class: Empirical Support for an Aristotelian Observation

For decades, economists argued that property rights emerge when commodities become scarce enough to ‘merit’ property rights for their protection and trade. More current scholarship, however, finds no historical support and no theoretical merit in this argument. Our research defends the competing argument that property rights emerge when governments grant and protect them to self sustain. Scarcity (or expectations of future scarcity) may be a necessary condition, but only government intervention is sufficient for the protection of property rights. In
this paper, we revisit the Aristotelian observation that the well being of states depends on the extent to which their constitutions protect the welfare -- i.e. the property rights -- of their middle class. Here, we test whether the welfare of the middle class correlates with the sustainability, consolidation, and prosperity of the state; our empirical analysis indicates that it does.