I don’t see how that follows, sorry.
Maybe I’m not sure what you mean by “homestead all of a creek’s flow”. Can you elaborate on that?
By that reasoning, animals can’t be owned, because they’re constantly exchanging atoms with the surrounding environment.
And what if not all of the people who live alongside the river don’t want to be a part of this “adhocorg”? What then?
Then they’ve de facto formed an ad hoc organization of one member and can deal with the other ad hocs via arbitration or agreement rather than participating in talks and agreements up-front. In practice I’d expect there to be local ad hocs and larger regional ad hoc all cooperating together, so it changes nothing. Should people feel for instance that a larger ad hoc wasn’t serving them they’d be free to form a competing ad hoc and draw members. What’s impossible is gaining monopoly control via ad hoc–which is the one thing governement always tries to do in such situations, and what results in government-failure.
Just as the old question of what would happen if the streets were all privately owned, what if one member decided to have people drive on the left instead, and make red-go and green-stop? Well, it simply wouldn’t happen. In such cases, such as when the railroads were all privately owned, the various companies got together, ad hoc fasion, and worked out standards.
Thus, with the river example, the various owners would organize via ad hocs and work out standards of use so that everyone’s rights are protected and the resource itself is maintained. And the resulting organization would likley be far more effective than something like the EPA could ever be.
If A homesteads a flow of 1 million gallons of water from creek C a year,
If the total flow rate of creek C is 1 million gallons of water a year,
If I build on the drainage basin (or whatever it is called) that previously feed the creek with rain runoff,
Then after I build my house, if I collect the rain water from my own roof, I will reduce the flow rate of the creek to a level that is below A’s water claim. Therefore, I have caused A harm.
So now I must pay damages to A in order to collect rainwater that falls on MY ROOF!
And this situation is pretty much unavoidable since virtually the entire earth drains rainwater into streams and rivers, and it is impossible to know if people downstream have a prior claim on flow.
The oppose is not true. It is readily apparent that people upstream are using flow, because the water they are using will never come downstream.
And no, by my reasoning you can own an animal, but you cannot own the breath of air that it has not yet taken. You can only own the breath that is currently inside its body. You can only homestead matter, atom by atom. You can’t lay claim to X number of free atoms in the atmosphere without identifying them. That is nonsense. The same goes for laying claim to indeterminate molecules of water in a river. How can you claim something that you can’t even identify?
Rainwater that falls on your roof isn’t part of the creek yet.
It could be considered A homesteaded water in the creek in relative terms (100% of the creek) rather than in absolute terms (1 million gallons) and then you two wouldn’t be in conflict.
In fact homesteading the flow of a river in absolute terms seems silly, because when there is going to be a dry year what is the miller going to do? Sue God for providing 20% less water than in a normal year?
“Rainwater that falls on your roof isn’t part of the creek yet.”
It would be a tributary.
“It could be considered A homesteaded water in the creek in relative terms (100% of the creek) rather than in absolute terms (1 million gallons) and then you two wouldn’t be in conflict.”
That is certainly less problematic. Then I could go upstream and divert water from tributaries before it enters the creek.
Perhaps we could say that you homestead roughly the supply of water you need to operate something that you built? Eg a water mill, irrigation cannals, or a hydroelectric power plant. Intuitively it seems highly unfair for A to build a mill and for B to then re-route the river leaving the water mill out of function. Shouldn’t B at least leave sufficient water in the old river route to continue to power A’s mill?
On the other hand if it’s just people throwing tubes into the river and pumping water out with portable petrol pumps for some ad hoc irrigation, then perhaps a different rule should apply? It seems kind of bitchy of such people downstream to begin to complain when the folks upstream save up for pumps and start doing the same leaving less water than they had been used to for those bellow. It’d be kinda like if you had migratory animals, which were hunted only at their winter destination, and then when the folks in their summer destination started hunting them as well, and the people from their winter destinations would be all like you can’t do that, these are just our animals, when actually they ain’t in their hunting grounds.
That’s a hell of an understatement.
A more realistic assessment would be that the homestead principle of law cannot be made into an abstract objective theory for everything.
The absurdity of the discussion here and in similar topics should make it clear enough.
Sorry guys.
That doesn’t mean it’s a “wrong principle”, though. It’s a very useful rule of thumb in occasions that are somewhat familiar.
It’s just not as powerful as you guys want it to be.
When things aren’t clearly and objectively defined and such definitions commonly accepted ex ante, who arrived first isn’t a very good criterion for lawful decision. Something else needs to be invoked, or new criteria need to be created.
And things are not always objectively defined ex ante.
For instance, the “rights to use a water stream” in your problem.
thats not “more realistic” as much as it is “also true”
“A more realistic assessment would be that the homestead principle of law cannot be made into an abstract objective theory for everything.”
I don’t agree. Homesteading is THE method for gaining ownership of unowned things.
Some above comments are trying to use homesteding to claim ownership of far away, uncontrolled matter. That is not a flaw in homesteading, that is a flaw in the user’s application of homesteading.
You have no right to free stuff. You have no right to water falling into your lap. Peroid. Your can only homestead the right to manipulate water AFTER it comes under your control. If you have a factory that needs water, by all means build it next to a stream. But if the stream runs dry due to an act or God or man, you are just out of luck. You have not homesteaded a right to the oxygen in the air and the hydrogen in my gas tank that will one-day combine to form water and rain onto land you have never used, controlled, or improved.
In practice, homesteading was augmented with the claim. People respected other’s claims so that their claim would also be respected. Because it takes time to actually clear and seed 5,000 acres, and you wouldn’t want someone to clear the other half of your land before you got to it. It’s a recipe for conflict.
The claim bridges the time gap between intention and actuality, and thus is a necessary part of homesteading in practice.
To effect the claim, people would register a claim at central areas, like a post-office, so that others would know where their claim began and ended.
so if you and I are passengers on a cruise ship, and it sinks, and we both end up on the same deserted island and find one single bottle of water. I beat you to the water and homestead it by drinking some. According to homestead principles, you have no right to any of my water. Does this sound like a good system to you?
You might be able to construct an example that would show the absurdity of the universal application of the homesteading principle, but that isn’t it. Yes that sounds like a fine system. And I am pretty sure that is what would happen anyway. You pick up a rock, it is yours. You pick up a bottle of water, it is yours. Pretty simple.
Say you find a large abandoned water tower on this island. Can you drink from it and claim the whole tower? No, you don’t control it. It is not placed in it’s current location because you willed it. You cannot move it. Therefore it is unowned. Only the water you drink becomes your property once you exert your control over it. Might you be able to rightfully claim a pipe or spigot or some minor hardware, sure. But you cannot own the greater tower itself or the main water volume that rests on its inner surface because they are beyond your ability to control.
On the other hand, if you are able to exert your control over rainwater and guide it into the water tower for storage, then you have demonstrated your ability to control both the full volume of water and the full operation of the tower itself (the ability to both empty and fill the reservoir with a degree of will). The tower is, for all intents and purposes, land. As others have written, you mix your labor with it, you improve it, you homestead it. But more precisely, you control it.
somehow I think you would feel differently if that really happened and I “homesteaded” all the water on the island with one sip, and you died from dehydration. I can tell you right now that if our positions were reversed I would not recognize your claim to the entire bottle of water, and neither would I attempt to claim all the water. This is because the purpose of coherent property rights is to deal with scarcity in a manner that prevents conflict. But now that I know that you wouldnt have a problem, maybe I could take all the water and avoid conflict. Hmmmmmm
youre unaware that I have experience working with foundations and subfoundations. I move the entire tower six inches closer to the ground, I have mixed my labor with it and therefore homesteaded it. No one else has any water. Good system?
there are multiple ways to control the tower, I dont have to demonstrate capacity to refill the reservoir. I could simply restrict access to the tower or its contents. I could paint it and build a fence around it. Lets say you homesteaded the spigot but not the contents of the reservoir, and I homesteaded the contents by mixing potassium cyanide with it. Now I own the contents, you cant even open your spigot without aggressing against me by spilling some of my insecticide.
Indeed. The homestead principle relies on the concept of “use,” but the trouble is that “use” has an incredible variety of meanings depending on what’s being used. There are as many forms of “use” as there are types of things. This multitude of different concepts cannot, at least as far as I can see, be reduced to a single, formal principle. That is, there’s no formal principle whose application will universally yield what we intuitively determine on an ad hoc basis to be the right answer. Homesteading law, within the very loose confines of the “first use” principle, will have to develop organically.
I knew you would come around eventually.
Huh, me?
In other words, we’re back to square one, right?
How would that be measured?
Again, how would that be measured?
Aside from the issue of measurement, which I think is an essential part of your hypothetical context (and which you’re ignoring), I think another issue is whether A will notice any difference between the time before you started collecting rainwater and afterward. On the other hand, by your reasoning, you building a house at all could be said to interfere with the 1,000,000 gallons/year flow rate that A has allegedly homesteaded.
How is that impossible to know?
Well, those specific water molecules may come downstream eventually, but not at the same points in time that they presumably would’ve come had they not been diverted.
Do you believe that the atoms in an animal never change? If so, then you’re mistaken. As I’ve already pointed out, they do change. Since by your reasoning, owning something means owning the atoms that make it up, that means that any atoms the animal loses are still owned by the person who owns the animal. So by your reasoning, anyone interfering with those atoms is necessarily harming the owner.
I, for one, don’t think the concept of ownership necessarily or even usually extends down to specific atoms.
That’s what I subscribe to. Homesteading is bound by initial use.
How is pumping water out with a portable pump any different from re-routing (part of) the river? If A’s mill isn’t able to run anymore because B started pumping water out of the river upstream from A, I’d say that B’s interfering with A’s previously homesteaded water flow.