All civilizations have up to now been based on private ownership of the means of production. In the past civilization and private ownership have been linked together. If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

Every living thing—whether it’d be a single cell, or a collection of them like a human, or a collection of humans like a community or a company—is in a constant cycle of production and consumption-use. Production and consumption, and all action, is just a transformation or relocation of “matter into more advantageous shapes,” guided by information. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk said,

To “produce”: what does this mean? It has been so often said by economists that the creation of goods is not the bringing into existence of materials that hitherto have not existed—is not “creation” in the true sense of the word, but only a fashioning of imperishable matter into more advantageous shapes…

These cycles of production and consumption use information that leads to profitability. In other words, more production of wealth than consumption allows life to continue to continue and grow.

The information that coordinates the modern global socioeconomic order, or what the great founder of the Austrian School of economics, Carl Menger, and British philosopher Herbert Spencer, both referred to as the “The Social Organism,” emerges and spreads via “economic competition,” which itself emerges from the tradition of private property….

Thus, from private property emerges: 1) the economic competition that discovers and spreads superior information and order; 2) the freedom to live and order our lives as we wish since no one else can coerce-reorder our property without our consent; and, 3) the “rational economic calculation” that allows us to best ensure that our plans are profitable and thus wealth-maximizing and life-increasing. Mises said, “The continued existence of society depends upon private property.”