No. A link is welcome if you have one.
Clayton -
Oppenheimer’s Theory:
The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically
Clayton, either I communicated poorly or you misread my post. Did you actually think I was arguing for welfare? The problem of the “$10 wasted on the free-riding boyfriend sitting at home playing Wii is $10 that could have gone to another family in genuine hardship” is exactly the point I was trying to make. I also wasn’t saying anything about whether the lumberjack would appeal to charity for children when trying to justify his actions in court.
@tunk: My bad, I thought you were trying to say the interests of innocent children must be weighed against the interests of the homesteader of the island.
Clayton -
tunk, your reasoning is correct. I argue that there is no ability to avoid some kind of Socialism with homesteading. See this post: https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/socialism-of-homesteading/21917
“In a free market society no one cares how you use your property. But with regards to homesteading soddenly this becomes an issue, because an unhomesteaded property is like public property, it is limited and has potentially many claimants. That’s why there is a sort of socialism when it comes to the allocated of unhomesteaded resource.”
I just want to point out that this is currently a problem with a government. I can point you towards several documentaries that cover this very same scenario. In fact i recently watched one that showed how native Americans in Canada are trying to prevent a millennium old forest from being destroyed. So clearly government does not realy help in this sort of scenario.
Suppose I live on an island and use the trees there for fire to warm myself. But then comes a lumberjack to the island and cuts all the trees on the island. I didn’t homestead all the trees on the island, yet my ability to warm myself as night has disappeared. This can significantly hurt my health. There is a contradiction here. On one hand it seems that the homesteading principle doesn’t give me any legal standing here. On the other hand I’m pretty sure most people in such situation would not recognize the cut trees as property of the lumberjack. It doesn’t seem just.
What do you think?
I think this scenario is missing some important information. Did you just sit idle while the lumberjack cut every last tree on the island? Did you do anything to protect or express your ownership of the trees, such as marking them with some sort of symbol or fencing them off? If not then I dont know how you could claim they were yours after the fact or that the lumberjack was in the wrong by cutting them.
The point is that just thinking to yourself that you own something is not enough. Nor is simply planting a flag on something and declaring it is yours for all eternity. You must actively express and protect your claim. In a sense this is mixing your labor with the property. It is your responsibility as property owner to assert your ownership, if you abandon that responsibility then you abandon ownership.
In your example it sounds as though you sat idlely by, claimed no ownership over any of the trees and let him cut them all down. Dont see how you could be upset when there was no firewood.