The Marriage of Jeff Bezos in Venice

The vocal opposition of some locals to Jeff Bezos’s marriage in Venice, in line with the reaction against tourism, illustrates a few important points in economics and political philosophy. The Financial Times reports (“Jeff Bezos’s Wedding Draws Storm of Protest in Venice,” June 24, 2025):

“What is happening here is blatant arrogance,” said Marta Sottoriva, 34, a high school English teacher and activist. “He is exploiting the city in the same way that he has been exploiting workers worldwide to build his empire.” …

“Bezos’ wedding is a symbol of extreme wealth, privilege and a lot of things that are going wrong currently in the world” and taking place in “one of the world most climate vulnerable cities”, said Clara Thomson, a Greenpeace campaigner. …

“Venetians feel betrayed, neglected and forgotten,” said Tommaso Bortoluzzi, a municipal councillor with the opposition Democrat Party. “Many citizens feel they have lost the ability to live in their own city in a calm, serene, and traditional way, while Venice has become an open air museum.”

A sensible classical-liberal philosophy suggests many objections. It is not because you are living somewhere that you thereby acquire a right to forbid somebody within a X-mile radius to do something that you don’t like. A property right gives you the right to use your own property as you wish, not the property of others. Otherwise, the concept of property right would be useless to prevent conflict over resources and lifestyles: you would intervene in your neighbor’s life when he does something that you don’t like, even on his own or rented property; your neighbor would do the same against you.

Claiming a right to control a geographical place that is not yours is analogous to the claim that one has a right to one’s customers against competing suppliers. For example, domestic workers would have a right to the patronage of their domestic customers and could thus to forbid them, through tariffs or bans, to purchase from foreign (or non-local) suppliers. This sort of theory is either incoherent or authoritarian. Having a right to one’s customers implies that the latter do not have a right to choose their suppliers, just like having a right to one’s own Venice implies that other Venetians don’t have a right to their own Venice. Enforcing one’s right then implies controlling what other Venetians can import or export. (Remember that tourism is an export.)

On the contrary, a coherent and non-authoritarian conception of free exchange—the right to buy from, or sell to, whomever is capable and willing to sell to you or buy from you—underlies the right of Bezos to marry in Venice on some property rented from owners who are willing to welcome his party; the same for his right to buy pastries from a local (or foreign, for that matter) baker who is willing to sell them. In a free society, neither buying nor selling is forbidden (with some very limited exceptions such as buying stolen goods or the services of a killer-for-hire).

The claim of an expansive property right enforced (the “forced” says it all) by political authorities illustrates Anthony de Jasay’s argument on the adversary or discriminatory state. The state (or a related political authority) arbitrarily favors some citizens and harms others—the expansive right claimers against the local hospitality industry and other businesses. They want political authorities to discriminate against the local businesses that are happy to cater to this sort of event.

The locals who want to chase tourists away also raise a question about the mob’s power in anarchy. In a 2016 EconLog column, Anthony de Jasay seems to show some sympathy for the idea that a country—and why not a sub-country like Venice?—is an extension of the home of its inhabitants. It is perhaps only a short leap from this idea to the claim that a Venetian mob could chase tourists out of town. The impossibility or, at least the difficulty, of enforcing formal rights (“liberties” as de Jasay would say, as he clearly distinguished rights and liberties) in anarchy remains an unsolved problem. Mind you, it is not a solved problem under the state either.

In the case of the Bezos marriage as for tourism in general, it is interesting to note that “special interests”— commercial interests—were on the side of free exchange while a sort of mob expressed its opposition. Also on the size of Bezos was Venice’s long-time conservative mayor. Perhaps one can argue that, over the course of history, non-crony commercial interests have sided with liberty (on this, see William Salter and Andrew Young, The Medieval Constitution of Liberty; and, more generally, John Hicks’s A Theory of Economic History). I suppose that, in Venice, most residents were also happy with, or indifferent to, the Bezos party. At least, that would be true in a free society, where, in general, each individual (and private group) would mind his own business and engage in voluntary exchange that he deems to be in his interest as he defines it. This does not preclude the desirability or even the necessity of an ethical concern for the maintenance of a free society (see James Buchanan’s Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative).

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