Right, but who knows how property is best configured to serve society. Given the market's profit loss system aligns the interests of private investors with the interests of society, private investors do. Not only do they have the right incentives, they have the local knowledge about a particular segment of the economy, that big picture politicians have no hope of acquiring when creating their clumsy plans.

A spending plan that's imposed with a stroke of a pen, and that recklessly interferes with hundreds of millions of people, and forces them into economic relationships with people based on crude categorisations, like income levels, and simplistic formulas, like those that determine eligibility for government assistance programs, is no substitute for the intelligently formed personal relationships and market transactions that spontaneously emerge when property and contracting rights are respected and protected. The latter is based on the unique knowledge of hundreds of millions of people, that is aware of local conditions and opportunities for optimisation.

As for slaveowners, what they have in common with socialists is a belief that they have a right to forcibly confine those who refuse to surrender their rights to them.