 Many of the alleged market-advantages accrue only if private property is distributed in certain ways. Monopolistic control of the main factors of production by a few individuals or corporations can play havoc with market efficiency; and it can also lead to such great concentrations of private power as to offset any argument for property based on freedom, dissent or democracy. Distributive equity may be crucial also for non-consequentialist arguments. The idea that property-owning promotes virtue is, as we have seen, as old as Aristotle; and even today it is used by civic republicans as an argument against economic collectivism. According to this argument, if most economic resources are owned in common or controlled collectively for everyone’s benefit, there is no guarantee that citizen’s conditions of life will be such as to promote republican virtue. In a communist or collectivist society, citizens may behave either as passive beneficiaries of the state or irresponsible participants in a tragedy of the commons. If a generation or two grow up with that character then the integrity of the whole society is in danger. These arguments are interesting, but it is worth noting how sensitive they are to the distribution of property (Waldron 1986, pp. 323–42). As T.H. Green observed, a person who owns nothing in a capitalist society ‘might as well, in respect of the ethical purposes which the possession of property should serve, be denied rights of property altogether’ (Green 1941 [1895], p. 219).