"Coase insisted that government should largely limit itself to defining and enforcing property rights."

"[Ronald] Coase showed that as long as property rights are clear and secure, and people can bargain freely with each other, nonphysical resources (such as the electromagnetic spectrum) will eventually be owned by those people and businesses that use these resources most productively from society's perspective....
    "Suppose [for example, that bureaucrats] award a part of the spectrum to a station that insists on broadcasting insect noises. That station is unlikely to be the one that uses that part of the spectrum most productively from the public's point of view. Another station that has plans to use that part of the spectrum in ways more useful to the public — say, by broadcasting pop music — will offer to purchase the insect station's property right in the spectrum. And the insect station will voluntarily sell because the pop-music station will attach a higher value to owning that part of the spectrum than will the insect station....
    "An upshot of Coase's insight is that command-and-control regulations are almost always harmful, or at least suboptimal. Such regulations dictate in detail how firms should behave and deny them the flexibility to find better ways to achieve the same desired outcomes. If each steel producer, say, is told that it must install pollution scrubbers on its factory's smokestacks, every steel producer is barred from using less costly ways to reduce pollution.
    "Coase insisted that government should largely limit itself to defining and enforcing property rights. Bargaining in markets — bargaining to buy, to sell and to use such rights as individuals on the spot judge best — will almost always generate better outcomes than will top-down diktats."

~ Don Boudreaux, from his op-ed 'Property Rights' Importance'