Perhaps the Nobel Prizes for Peace and Economics should go to the same person, because war and poverty both result from disagreements over scarce resources. People don't disagree much about abundant resources. No one has died of rampant suffocation or invaded another country for better oxygen, because we all have access to it. But once governments pollute so much that their own people can't breathe, they must migrate, sometimes through force, or stay and die.

Time is always a scarce resource, and people will always disagree about how to allocate it. And the basis of both a good economic system (the purpose of economics being, in the words of '92 Nobel laureate in economics Gary Becker, "to alleviate poverty") and the basis of a good political system (the purpose of law being, in the words of 19th century French economist and statesman Frederick Bastiat, "to organize the individual right to self-defense") is how to deal with disagreement.

The root of peace is ancient, dating back to the Hebrew Shalom. Peace is about health, wealth, safety and joy. It's a utopia where people don't disagree. But if they don't disagree, it's fragile. Introduce one mischievous kid and dystopia follows.

In the real world, people do disagree. But over the ages, our species has stumbled onto an amazing and simple method for resolving disputes: the idea of property. What's mine is mine. The corollary is just as important: what's yours is not mine.

Animals understand property too, of course, and ruthlessly protect their nests and homes. Property, ownership and self-defense are not just elements of good politics and good economics, they are the whole shebang: If politics or economics tries to do "more" than simply punish those who steal, trespass or murder, it will have to redistribute, or take property by force from one to give to another. It's a dispute the government must decide. Enter lobbyists and special interest groups, pork and corruption.

Property can be transferred, of course. Voluntarily. And that is the secret our species has stumbled upon: free trade. You give me something I want in exchange for something you want.

The twist that free trade makes is to allow just about any disagreement to become an agreement. You think you ought to have my land? Without free trade, we must fight, and one of us will end up poor. With free trade, you can offer me something in exchange, and we are both better off.

Ironically, the democratic process of voting to allocate resources does the opposite: it turns just about any agreement into a disagreement. You think you ought to have my land, and you don't want to pay my price? Well, with enough votes government can wrest it away from me by force. Is it any surprise the top 1 percent of wage earners pay nearly half of the total tax? Ninety-nine percent of people wouldn't have it any other way.

The Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to President Barack Obama for his internationalism, the ultimate goal being a single world democratic government where we could all vote on how resources are allocated. In other words, he was awarded a prize for peace for promoting a process that would foster unresolvable new disputes.

The one for economics was split between Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson, who did the exact opposite: Ostrom demonstrated that voluntary user associations can dispel economic and political boogiemen like the tragedy of the commons and the prisoner's dilemma, and Williamson developed a theory where private firms can provide conflict resolution.

In other words, the economics prize went to people who formalized yet another way that people can peaceably resolve disagreements without resorting to force, while the peace prize went to a president actively engaged in multiple escalating wars who wants more government involvement to resolve arbitrary disputes, thus ensuring that there will be more disputes in the future.

It is likely that Ostrom and Williamson's advances will result in more peace, the same way free trade promotes peace. But Obama's internationalism means we will have more and more disputes, each of which can be resolved by fewer and fewer elected people living farther and farther away.

Obama's vision is, in principle, a particular, though probably bad, theory of economics: Let's let a couple people decide how to allocate all the resources of our planet. It's just socialism, communism, fascism, statism, internationalism, environmentalism or whatever you want to call it.

But the only lasting peace it provides is on a tombstone, when we can finally rest in it.