Right sorry. I minced words. You have a claim to your labor.
There’s a significant difference between the phrases “to own” or “to have a claim to” but not in the context of this discussion.You can’t own labor anymore than you can own the color blue. You own your own body and can come to own external things by way of appropriation.
Unlike human bodies, however, external objects are not parts of one’s identity, are not directly controlled by one’s will, and — significantly — they are initially unowned.[18] Here, the libertarian realizes that the relevant objective link is appropriation — the transformation or embordering of a previously unowned resource, Lockean homesteading, the first use or possession of the thing.[19] Under this approach, the first (prior) user of a previously unowned thing has a prima facie better claim than a second (later) claimant, solely by virtue of his being earlier.
Why is appropriation the relevant link for determination of ownership? First, keep in mind that the question with respect to such scarce resources is: who is the resource’s owner? Recall that ownership is the right to control, use, or possess,[20] while possession is actual control — “the factual authority that a person exercises over a corporeal thing.”[21] The question is not who has physical possession; it is who has ownership.
Thus, asking who is the owner of a resource presupposes a distinction between ownership and possession — between the right to control, and actual control. And the answer has to take into account the nature of previously unowned things — namely, that they must at some point become owned by a first owner.
Creation by itself is not sufficient for ownership. I might pay you to utilize the body (which you own) to carve a statue out of my block of marble, with my hammer and chisel, but your gain is only what I’ve agreed to pay you for laboring with my capital goods. I came to own the hunk of marble by mining it myself or paying another laborer (with money or goods I had also come to own prior), before paying you to work on my thing. You have a claim to access my tools and hunk of marble, but only insomuch as I’ve agreed to let you work with them, and only for the purpose stated in our agreement, to carve me a statue.
The difference between “having a claim to” and (full) “ownership” becomes more important to understand when we get into easement rights and complex problems such as homesteading oceans. Here though, its simply not important and you own your labor only in the context of your body being part of the physical world.
But if you take a farmer, who has only used his labor to grow crops, he does not have the right to bar others from making use of the land insofar as it does not inhibit his ability to grow crops.
You might argue that the farmer has homesteaded peace of mind, etc, so I don’t think you can blast rock music while he’s farming it. But at night there’s no reason you couldn’t.
How could you walk through my field without affecting my crops or the surrounding land at all*?* You really can’t. Considering such hypothetical cases of “insignificant trespass” do yield worthwhile theory (the via negativa of jurisprudence which I will explain another time), but I don’t think that this is a valid defense of trespass.
First, the trespasser is going to run into trouble in practice because how can you assume that a farmer only owns a field for the purpose of getting crops? What if he likes to do witchcraft or just take leisurely strolls through his row of corn in the dark? What if someone had been crossing his field to pick his apple trees or had recently robbed his goat? There’s myriad reasons for the farmer to be frightened by or unsure of the intentions of trespassers.
Read page 14/82 I cited above comparing Reinach and Rothbard on trespass. I’m going to, like Block, side with Rothbard’s as superior between the two differing theories. Rothbard says:
[If a man] comes upon land that in any way bears the mark of a former human use, it is his responsibility to assume that the land is owned by someone. Any intrusion upon his land, without further inquiry, must be done at the risk of the newcomer being an aggressor. It is of course possible that the previously owned land has been abandoned; but the newcomer must not assume blithely that land which has obviously been transformed by man is no longer owned by anyone. He must take steps to find out.
The appearance of a house or a field before you on your journey is something objectively and intersubjectively ascertainable by any rational being as bearing the mark of having been homesteaded, or as Block says:
must of empirical necessity have been created and thus homesteaded by someone.
An interesting post on homesteading and its history.
There’s some problems with Locke’s doctrine, which libertarians have sorted out, hence the term Neo-Lockean. I’ll grant, arguendo, that Callahan’s following interpretations of the motives of people dead for a few centuries is valid, but that in no way makes it representative of an ex post facto judgment on the legitimacy of such actions by libertarian law.
But the 17th-century English landowning class had a problem. They had been busy robbing both the English peasant and the American Indian of their land. To their credit, they couldn’t admit openly to themselves that they had been doing so. While the Athenians could just say to the Melians that it was natural for the powerful to dominate the weak, or the Israelites could simply claim a land as God’s chosen people, these options were not open to 17th-century English Christians. They needed a good justification for their theft. And Locke’s homesteading doctrine is formulated very precisely to give them one: only when a man “tills, plants, improves, cultivates” some piece of land does he actually gain ownership of it. So, there you go! Just because some English peasants had grazed a pasture for a thousand years, or some “naked savages” had hunted it for five thousand years, that land wasn’t really theirs, because they hadn’t done with it what a member of the landed gentry would, which was to enclose it and farm it (or at least the part not reserved for the folly and the decorative fish pond).
Setting out animals to graze a pasture is a completely legitimate use of land which would constitute homesteading, so the landed gentry unjustly disseised the peasants. On Indians see page cccxxxviii of Block’s book on roads. Indians who lived nomadically may have not had valid claims to ownership of the whole area they ever roamed, but the sytematic murder and displacement out west was surely over the line.
I don’t really participate in objective ethics. I feel strongly about self ownership though, which is why I’m interested in the homesteading principle. My interpretation also allows for a much smoother utilitarian permutation of individual property rights, since its less strict than the orthodox view.