In Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest, he presents a list of institutional arrangements that turned a bunch of ignorant, “malodorous” Europeans into the world’s dominant culture in the space of a couple of centuries. One of those institutional arrangements was property rights. That is, when something is yours it’s yours, not the king’s or the clergy’s or the local lord’s. A contract, once agreed to, is sacred before the law and is enforced by the powers-that-be.

This institution hasn’t always been perfectly respected, of course, but in the West’s more successful capitalist democracies it has been solid enough to allow citizens to work, save, create and innovate, reasonably secure in the knowledge that they’ll get to keep most of what they earn and all that they save.

The centrality of property rights is why Cyprus is sending shock waves through the global financial system.

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