Hayek justified private property as instrumental, not as a natural right.

Evidence

While some scholars sympathetic to Hayek have celebrated the subtle and even mystical quality of these insights, others have condemned their implicit “agnotology” or reliance on a benighted and uneducated set of consumers and producers. What neither side has delved into, however, is the delicacy of the question of intellectual property within Hayek’s framework. If the economy is knowledge before it is property, then the question of how much of that knowledge should be made into property is of critical importance. Private property is not an end in itself. Hayek’s was not an argument based on natural law or Lockean just desert for labor spent. Private property was a means not an end—a means to coordinate dispersed knowledge in conjunction with contracts and the price mechanism. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 174

Categorization

• XREF: This overturns the usual caricature of Hayek’s property defense as Lockean deservism — connects to the reader’s project of fracturing the crude neoliberal stereotype. — connects to: Hayek grounded negative rights in utilitarian market efficiency, not natural law. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 411; Hayek makes private property, gender norms, and tradition supervenient over government — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 121; Hayek grounded the morals of the market in evolutionary selection, not natural rights. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 28
• DEFINE: Clarifies that Hayek’s property theory was epistemic, not natural-law based, which matters for distinguishing neoliberal intellectual varieties.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 174