So I guess you believe in private property of land after all. 
I do not consider it a right. I consider any concept of property extending beyond the body a claim. As far as I can tell one only has a natural right to control their own actions. The right to control ones actions is unalienable. It can not ever be taken away only impaired. No one but you can ever will your arm to move but someone else could cut off your arm impairing your ability to will it to move.
In order for any claim to have validity it has to be recognized by other people (aka society). Since we are talking land or other concepts of property that extend beyond the body we are in de facto collective fantasyland (aka society). Reality dictates whoever or whatever group of people can defend their vision of Disney Land sets the rules. Unless of course you can single handedly defend your claims from every single person on the planet.
I hold most people are generally good most of the time and the most good is achieved if people are left to their own devices. The opposite view is most people are generally not good most of the time and the most good is achieved if people are told what to do.
I am not a major fan of land ownership for some of the reasons you articulate. As a human being I should be able to freely travel the earth. But for me, the upside of land ownership is despite the fact borders are fiction, they only exist when voluntarily agreed to by more than one party.
The alternative to voluntarily agreed to borders in the market is equal land for all but all land is not equal. But let me address that… equal based on what measure? A human subjective standard based on the desire of coastline versus mountains, water versus coal, or measuring the productivity of land? How can you even measure the productivity of land objectivly? Are you going to assert money is an objective measure of the productivity of land?
In my view people voluntarily agreeing to recognize borders is decentralization and leaving people to their own devices. Enforcing a system of equal land is centralization and telling people what to do. Despite the inherent flaws or imperfections found in any vision of society I have a preference for the former and the allocation of scarce resources being voluntarily facilitated in the free market .
filc:
No, but it’s mother violated my right to exclusivity inside my home. The baby is entitled to the porch or the front yard or some other space that does not require exclusivity. And if I feel that I want to exercise my exclusivity right, I am free to place the child outside and send the mother the bill.
So I guess you believe in private property of land after all.
Why do you say that?
LFOD, I generally agree with your sentiments. But I do believe I have a right to keep people out of my home.
So we should abolish land based property rights, except when the land has your house on it? Can we grant that exception to my property as well?
Also what rationing mechanism will best distribute the scarce resource that is, land.
Then where does the right to exclusivity in your home come from? Or is that not a right?
I don’t think there are objective rights. It’s just a convention. And a useful one at that. Economic goods include land, and exclusive control of a good is essential to all economic goods. It’s the only way of dealing with the problem of scarcity. The price of not treating land as an exclusive economic good (tragedy of the commons et al.) is far higher than the price of doing so (the possibility of not being “free” under your definition in the distant distant future, assuming we don’t invent our way out of that problem).
No, we should abolish land as property including when my house is on it. You conflate ownership with use. I don’t claim to own the lot, but I am using the space. So get out of my house.
I support no rationing mechanism. I support the homesteading principal. If you improve land, you are entitled to use it exclusively. If land is raw, it is free to be claimed.
By what reasoning? Scarcity? Is that the only reason?
How do human beings get along on the planet earth sharing the same land?
Yes, that is the big question. Always has been the big question and probably always will be the big question. How should scare resources be allocated?
Decentralization leaving people to their own devices or coerced central planning?
If I prefer the former I must adopt land ownership as a preference because if there is no land ownership or no allocation of land in the free market then the allocation of land is centrally planned by wise overlords.
If someone has a good proposal to allocate scare resources that one ups the free market which 1) does not involve central planning or 2) is voluntary and does not use coercion, to make the concept of land ownership obselete… I am all ears…
This makes no sense. How do we decide who gets what for land.
- goods are scarce
- Time is scarce
- Goods must be occupied over time to create satisfaction
So yes this includes land.
So how do you divvy out land to the masses? How do we decide who uses what, and how much of that space do they get to use? Who decides when it’s use should change hands? Who decides when someone is using too much? Who decides if someone’s land is “idle”?
And after you’ve explained all of these problems, explain to me how your not just arguing for a semantical equivalent of property.
By what reasoning? Scarcity? Is that the only reason?
Scarcity is the reasoning for ALL ownership.
There would still be a market for use rights. They can be bought and sold. You just wouldn’t be able to point to a bunch of trees and say that property is mine because the king gave me the deed.
You don’t have to divvy out the land. The first person that homesteads gets the rights. He can later sell his use right to someone else. If he abandons the place, it is free to be claimed by others. If there are disputes, they are arbitrated.
You can’t use too much. As much land as you can improve and maintain, you have use rights to.
Are you aware the justification used by colonials aquiring land from the Indians was home steading?
I guess I don’t see where the conflict with property lies?
Today I can’t walk into the woods, find a spot, and build a house there. This is because someone owns this area and has left it raw. With use rights I could build there because it was unused.
Lol, no I wasn’t. I don’t really think the principal of homesteading allows you to claim huge swaths of land. But I guess anything can be perverted.
How do you know it is unused? From what wood will you build your house if you destroy the wood harvesters used land?
If homesteading is the basis for owning a piece of land, any land that is raw and undeveloped is not owned. Therefore an undeveloped piece of land in the woods can be homesteaded by me. This uses the logic of homesteading and land as property.
If you only have exclusivity rights to land that you have improved, you can’t exclude me from the wooded piece of land because it isn’t improved. This uses the logic of homesteading and use-rights for land.
The only logic that precludes my use of undeveloped land is the logic of first claim property rights. You point to the wooded land on a map and say it is yours, so it is.
You never answered the question. How do you know the land is un-used?
I live in the Northwest, USA, and tree’s are one of the most valuable resources. You would effectively be demolishing thousands of dollars in natural resources, simply because you thought the land was idle, and chose to destroy someone’s crop.
Actually I think at the time the same argument was used. How can natives possibly claim this huge swath of land and prevent us from using it…
You should be delighted to enter into a world where productive factors have been brought into private ownership and hence can form the foundation of civilization and prosperity. Moaning about having been a few thousand years late to the ‘the great distribution’ is quite puerile. Imagine if today was day 1, before which no body owned anything. what a miserable world… Yes you can start your elaborate mansion construction anywhere you like but you will have to start hitting stones together to make a primitive axe…
For those of you that may want to read David Schmidtz on this issue:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4100977/schmidtz-The-Institution-of-Property
Philosophers are taught to say, in effect, that original appropriators got the good
stuff for free.We have to pay for ugly leftovers.But in truth, original appropriation
benefits latecomers far more than it benefits original appropriators.Original
appropriation is a cornucopia of wealth, but mainly for latecomers.The people who got
here first never dreamt of things we latecomers take for granted.The poorest among us
have life expectancies exceeding theirs by several decades.This is not political theory.It
is not economic rhetoric.It is fact.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4100977/schmidtz-The-Institution-of-Property
Philosophers are taught to say, in effect, that original appropriators got the good
stuff for free.We have to pay for ugly leftovers.But in truth, original appropriation
benefits latecomers far more than it benefits original appropriators.Original
appropriation is a cornucopia of wealth, but mainly for latecomers.The people who got
here first never dreamt of things we latecomers take for granted.The poorest among us
have life expectancies exceeding theirs by several decades.This is not political theory.It
is not economic rhetoric.It is fact.http://www.scribd.com/doc/4100977/schmidtz-The-Institution-of-Property
Philosophers are taught to say, in effect, that original appropriators got the good
stuff for free.We have to pay for ugly leftovers.But in truth, original appropriation
benefits latecomers far more than it benefits original appropriators.Original
appropriation is a cornucopia of wealth, but mainly for latecomers.The people who got
here first never dreamt of things we latecomers take for granted.The poorest among us
have life expectancies exceeding theirs by several decades.This is not political theory.It
is not economic rhetoric.It is fact.
It is only a crop is someone planted it. If this was the case it would be clear to anyone walking in the forest. If I did destroy someone’s crop inadvertently, I would be liable for that action. I find that unlikely. A crop of trees is obvious and would likely have postings not to trespass or destroy the trees.
People could also publicize a log of land that is being grown on. I could check for such a log if I want to reduce my risk.
I think you have valid concerns.
The only way I find around them is to go back and think hard about what property actually is, not from a theoretical Platonic-cave standpoint, but from a realistic functional perspective. Once I do that, the contradictions you are running into start to fade away.
What is “property”? As I have argued elsewhere, functionally it is simply a “contract” between the “owner” and everyone else (who might be interested in using that property) that the owner gets to decide the disposition of that property.
That’s probably underwhelming to you, but I find it a much better framework. Since property is no longer a philosophical construct but rather a contractually-defined construct, it does not have to conform to some perfect philosophical definition whose application at various extremes starts to run into contradictions. Property simply is those things that people will negotiate to give clear control to another.
Some of the contradictions/corner cases that make more sense in this framework:
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Things that are difficult to even define control of just aren’t going to be found in these kinds of contracts, e.g. “air” is going to be difficult to define as property.
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“Intellectual property” will only exist if there’s a case to be made for selling this to the people who will have to recognize that property. This will make sense sometimes when someone directly sells, say, an invention to others with a contractual clause that says that they will not copy it. This will be “IP”, but only to those who have contractually agreed to that. If someone else finds one laying on a bench, they have signed no such contract, and there will be no “IP” with respect to them. [Consequently, IP really won’t have much teeth.]
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Mixing labor with land: while this won’t be a “principle”, in practice things will probably quite often work out more or less that way. If you have been working a piece of land and you’ve built a house there and crops, and I’ve been doing the same on an adjoining plot of land, it is simply in our mutual interest to agree to leave the other person’s house/crops alone in exchange for having the same restriction in reverse. The economic calculation is simple: I’ve put a ton of effort into my house and land and it means far more to me than retaining the “right” to attack your land and crops does. I’m deeply invested in my house and crops, and it may be the case that my life or death depends on them, in which case, I will fight to the death to protect them. Given that, it just isn’t worth it for you to aggress against my land and crops given that you’re doing ok with yours and that you don’t have as much to gain as I do, and with our agreement, you can reduce the resources you spend preparing a defense against a possible attack by me.
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Claiming ridiculous swaths of land: on the flipside, if you and I are neighbors as in the example above, and you not only want me to agree to not agress against your home and crops, but the entire western half of the north american continent because you are “claiming” it as your own, that’s not a contract I’m going to sign (or honor). It’s not in my self-interest. I know you haven’t done anything with that land, so there’s no reason to think that you’ll defend it any more than I would. Your invocation of some obscure rule about “first claim” that you read on a blog somewhere has no binding over me; the only things that are binding are bilateral agreements, not unilateral claims (and force, of course).
It’s all just a matter of looking at it as an economic calculation, rather than a philosophical one. Let’s say that you have a large swath of land that is mostly unused. You just like to own it because you don’t want anyone else on it. You bought the land really cheap, because it was unused, so no one wanted it (or you “homesteaded it”, it doesn’t really matter). Now let’s say something happens where other people would like to use that land, say, the population explodes and now people want to live there. If we look at it as a philosophic question, then we can only conclude: tough shit. The guy that owns the land first still owns it, and if he wants to keep it unoccupied, then all those people have no place to live. But if we look at it economically and in terms of contracts, it makes more sense: his “property” was simply a contract with other people around him to not use that land. It wasn’t a contract with everybody. If things have changed that there are now a lot more people that want to use that land, then dude is going to need to negotaite some more contracts. Most likely he is either going to pay these new people to honor his contracts, or he is going to negotiate some piece of property for them in return for them honoring his remaining property. Or of course he is just going to hire some muscle to keep them off of his land, but that may very well cost more than just paying them to honor his land. In a scenario where this land is completely undeveloped and out in the middle of nowhere, the cost of hiring muscle to protect those borders is going to be enormous, way more than it can possibly be worth to him (he’s going to pay security guards to live in the middle of some remote forest?). The result will be what makes most collective sense: the dude who is selfishy claiming a bunch of land for himself but not using it is either going to end up paying more for that as the demand goes up or is going to release that land to others for whom the benefit/cost ratio of fighting for that land is higher than it is for him.
Note that this bears some resemblance to the obnoxious threads rettoper has been starting about the “benefits” of initiation of force in an AnCap society, but because of my formualtion of property, it is not an argument that “force is good”. If “property” is only seen as contracts, rather than something floating up in the aether that us mortals have pulled from Plato’s cave, then it is not aggression for someone to start using some piece of land that someone else once claimed as theirs; the aggression was the original claim that it was theirs in the first place (well, strictly speaking, it would be any attempt to forcefully defend that claim), since that it is a unilateral action. Unilateral actions that presume to bind others’ actions are by definition initiation of force (well, again, it’s the actual attempted enforcement of those unilateral claims really). I cannot mow your lawn, knock on your door, and charge you $100, because you never agreed to that in the first place. If I then try to extract that from you, I am agressing. Likewise, I cannot yell “dibs on North America” and then require you to honor that no matter what my philosophical reasoning unless you have agreed ahead of time that that is the way we will decide “ownership” between us. And even then, that contract would only be binding on us: for our pairwise relationship, you may honor my ownership of North America, but that’s not binding on anyone else (and not surprisingly, they are unlikely to see it in their interest to jump in on that “ownership” contract).
So I know a lot of AnCaps have tried to derive original property ownership by homesteading, but I think it’s important to note that that only works as long as it, well, works. There’s nothing philosophically special about it. It is the case that in many practical situations, more or less that same standard will be something that a lot of people will be willing to honor, but that doesn’t give it a special platonic significance. Practially speaking, if you “homestead” something modest compared to the current scarcity of the thing you’re homesteading, you’ll probably be ok. If you get greedy, you’re just going to get a lot of squatters etc, and you can wave philosophical texts in front of their faces all day but in the end it will cost you more to get rid of them than to just reach a “property” agreement with them.
[I know there’s a weirdness that comes up when thinking about it this way: I said above that the more people that wanted someone’s land, the more it would cost the owner to retain that land. And yet, in our world, the more that people want your land, the more you get, not pay. The important thing to realize is that when you are selling property, you aren’t selling the property, you are selling the contracts that define that property. In my example above, when you and I agreed to a contract to honor each other’s land, if we were forward thinking we’d include the contractual right to sell our participation in the contract. Then, when someone approached me and said they liked my land, I could offer to sell them the contract I have with you. This is attractive to them for the same reason the contract was attractive to me in the first place: it’s nice to know you don’t have to devote as many resources to defense. This clearly shows that the value of “property” increases the more interweaved and interlinked various property contracts are. At one extreme, if I claim a piece of land as mine but have zero contracrts, I have nothing to sell; on the other extreme, if I have a contract effectively with everyone else in the world and I want to sell that, that is a maximally valuable contract. It’s basically a derivation of the value of “the rule of law” from an economic perspective. It also shows the difficulty of situations like: “didn’t europeans steal north america from the native americans since it was their property?” Well: who had a contract with the native americans about that contract? They more or less had contracts amongst each other (tribe to tribe, say), but were they to see europeans landing and rush up and point guns at them and say “this is our property, you are aggressing against it”, they are the ones initiating force. The Europeans have no property agreements with them; there is no contract between these people. Of course, the thing you’d like to have seen was something mutually beneficial and common sense, e.g. we’ll recognize X, Y and Z as your property if you’ll recognize A, B and C as ours. And westerners did all sorts of things in connection with native americans that were horrible. But I don’t see the argument that “landing on north america and trying to live there” was one of them, not to the extent that they did so on land that wasn’t already heavily in use. And to some extent, in the big picture, if Europe was much more densely populated than North America, then at some overall societal level, it made sense that north America get more densely populated, just as it made sense above that the guy with a huge piece of unused land eventually starts losing control of some of that land because of a population increase.