OK let me try to simplify my position: Homesteading is not possible in the current roads because they are already owned by somebody (in whole or in parts by many). Who? The people whose lands were taken to built the road.
The “legitimate owners” response was to someone who claimed homesteading was still possible and that it was being done daily (by taxpayers and users). My intention here was to say that even if homesteading was possible (it isn’t), there would appear this new problem of defining who ones what and to what extent. Simply a second counter-argument.
you simply acknowledge that there are legitimate owners but there is a practical problem of determining who precisely they are. How is this principally different from other cases of disputed ownership ?
We can assume that taxes are paying right now for the use of the roads. It seems unlikely that the gov is giving something for free, or at the best price.
So that an entrapped person, who now isn’t paying taxes to support the roads because roads are privatized, will be able to pay whatever fee the new road owner charges. The road owner, being a serious businesman presumably, is more interested in havign a satisfied customer than a bad reputation.
Another idea is that tickets for road use would probably be sold on the internet. The entrapee could have someone from the big city buy a two way ticket for him.
Another possibility is that when roads are divvied and privatized, those who need access to it will have the right to match any offer for roads immediately near their farm or whatever. Thus the entrapee could demand no one use his little plot of road if he has to pay too much for use of the rest of the road.
It’s no different, but how does this play any role in here? The question is: Does the government have the right to sell something that doesn’t belong to it?
Guessing that your home country is India, it must have been the case that land was held in feudal tenure as was the case in Europe, meaning that the lord building the roads had the right to build them, being on his land.
First, I thank you for bringing attention to the main point in question.
Absolutely true.
Not sure about this. Not everyone will be able to pay “whatever fee,” especially if that person has been paying taxes for the road his entire life and now finds himself trapped into more “taxes” (he has to pay for the road) when the privatization is supposed to relieve him of this. I’m not sure the “reputation” argument flies here, either. The owner will make sure the money he makes from these entrapped people compensates for the bad advertisement they generate. Besides, we usually abandon products/services when they dissatisfy us. Others’ opinions only come into question when we want to try something new. In this sense, those people who use that road continuously will not bother to “punish” the owner in an act of generosity for the entrapped at the expense of their comfort.
Yes, but here we’re talking about an illegal, illicit act. The entrapped can always jump in somebody else’s car (whose registration plate will not indicate it’s him), walk on foot the other side until he reaches a road where the asked fee is acceptable, or simply trespass. Obviously, the entrapped person will not die from his “entrapment”, this was never in question.
This one is a very interesting (potential) solution. I have never come to think of it.
Well then the entrapment problem is nothing more than the absurd claim to the unlimited right to travel at the expense of others simply because one bought property in their community. By this standard, any attempt by the community to enforce property rights on the roads will be an act of entrapment. Entrapment is nothing more than the exercise of property rights.
You can have property and entrapment, or you can have communism. There is no third way.
Government’s self-professed role as an arbitrator of this kind does not make it legitimate in any way to solve these disputes, I believe we all agree on this. We want the government away from this role. But the damage has been done, and with the original owners missing, we are in a deadlock. This simply shows again that getting rid off the government has a time dimension also. The quicker we do it, the more damage we will contain and the longer it exists, the more distortions will it create concerning rights of ownership.
We can’t be accountable for the chaos the government caused in the past. It has destroyed and redistributed a lot of property, and this cannot be undone.
What matters is reversing the most recent property rights violation.
It’s not India, it’s Kosovo (recently declared independence from Serbia). At a time when the main roads were built, presumably after WWI, the density of the population, the underdeveloped rural nature of the country, as well as the anarchist anti-governmental mentality that Albanians had at that time meant that an overwhelming majority was privately owned by many people. When the Serbian government (which had Kosovo under occupation at that time) decided to built roads for their own uses, they used eminent domain to forcibly take land from many owners. So there.
I never raised the question on the level of principles, whether the private road owner has the right to do it or not. I fully recognize that he does. I never said the private road owner should be forced to give way for the entrapped, or that he does not have the right to demand any fee as he pleases for the use of his property.
I was merely pointing out an externality of the privatization which can have a very negative effect on some individuals, and was seeking solutions to this (I know the free market has them).
Sure, and it’s not a problem when the people who lose out are the ones that lived off others. In this case, all that has happened with privatization is that the parasitical cord has been cut and that’s good. But to have “innocent” people suffer from privatization is a thorn in my eye, and that’s the drive behind me seeking solution for this problem.
Maybe I should have used the more formal names. At the time of WWI, Serbia was within a federate called the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs which later become the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1928. The kingdom was disrupted during WWII and re-emerged after the war as a group of 7 socialist federal units. This was until the 1990s when the wars broke out and the unions were disbanded into the states that we know today.