The Tribune’s John Kass, a prominent defender of the “dibs” system which allows drivers to reserve a parking space on a public street with old furniture after digging their cars out of a heavy snow, cites some real intellectual ammunition in a recent column.

Apparently, everyone’s favorite libertarian legal theorist, Richard Epstein, wrote an essay about parking in 2000 and compared the “dibs” system to copyright and patent law, a kind of limited-time-only property right. Not bad.

He told Kass, “Dibs is an evolutionary system, and there is a Hayekian theory on this, which is that these spontaneous organizations ought to be presumptively respected, unless you can figure out some reason why it is that you ought to overrule them. And dibs is, of course, one of the wonderful illustrations of how that can actually work.”

Here’s what I wrote about the snow removal mess back in 2000 on the Free-Market.Net main forum.