You do know that you have to work in order to make soil fertile right? My grandpa worked to put compost on his soil for 30 years, and he has the best damn tomatoes I’ve ever had. Even if he let that land become over grown, he’d still own it just as much as you’d still own a house that you left behind on a vacation.
What about winter when the plants are gone and there’s snow everywhere? Are you then able to come along and build on the “unused” land. This version of “rights” are untenable, and would never be picked by the market.
This version of “rights” are untenable, and would never be picked by the market.
I just wanted to say as a fairly new person here how nice it is - to me at least! - to see things evaluated in this way: in terms of free markets. It’s such a more promising line of conversation than arguing about what is “right”. Discussions of right and wrong always rest on one’s assumptions, and assumptions are basically unarguable. At least a discussion about what would be picked up by the market is more of an empirical question, subject to experimentation and observation.
And fwiw, I agree with you about the original post: I don’t think this definition of property rights would gain much traction in the market. I certainly wouldn’t frequent an arbiter who defined property rights in this way (or hire a PDA that did so, however that works).
You raise a question and then act like the question is impossible to answer. Don’t be so hasty.
I could just say no, you can’t build on improvements. But I think this is a special case. Seasonal land use.
If you have a piece of land that is seasonally used. Why can’t you have exclusive rights to that land during that season and let it be free during the off-season? If that land has improvements on it (even during the off-season), any other users would not be permitted to destroy your improvements. So you couldn’t build a house in the off-season, but maybe you could play football, or do something else productive.
Never be picked up by the market? This is how the market worked before the advent of European-style property rights. Most Native Americans didn’t recognize such property rights. Isn’t their system closer to AnCap than ours?
Alternatives_Considered, I think it would be silly to have to contract with everyone in an area to secure land use/ownership. What about in a city with millions of inhabitants? Will you contract with all of them? At such a volume, wouldn’t it be hard to establish a true meeting of the minds?
I think it would be silly to have to contract with everyone in an area to secure land use/ownership. What about in a city with millions of inhabitants? Will you contract with all of them? At such a volume, wouldn’t it be hard to establish a true meeting of the minds?
But that’s exactly what your property currently is. It’s true that people don’t walk on your land or come into your house, but that’s not because they all know and understand the theory of property, it’s because they have chosen not to walk on to your land or come into your house. They have made that choice because the alternative choice was worth more than those choices; it’s worth more because A) most of them probably have no idea of who you are or never go near your house and basically have no interest in using your property, and B) because the cost of trying to use that property that you have is more than the gain they would get, costs coming in the form of both lost reciprocal agreements - they may try to use the stuff that you think of as your property - and direct counter action, e.g. self-defensive force.
If you mean it’s not tenable to individually sign millions of contracts, sure, but it’s clear that the market would develop more efficient mechanisms like group contracts limiting behavior in all the pair-wise relationships of the group.At such a volume, wouldn’t it be hard to establish a true meeting of the minds?
At such a volume, wouldn’t it be hard to establish a true meeting of the minds?
I’m not sure I follow: what meeting of the minds is necessary? The construction clearly doesn’t require unanimity; these are all pairwise contracts, at least in theory. Practically speaking there will be some consolidation of contracts into a few most likely, but in no way is only having only one required. That’s what statism, right? A monopoly on the “laws”? It’s in statism that there must be a “meeting of the minds”, or more importantly, one definition that everyone else must follow.
I guess the way I’d put it is: if laws and definitions like “property” are to be determined in a free market - so that by definition there are multiple definitions concurrently in use - then you can basically model the different laws and definitions as contracts. Thus, “property” would be defined by contract. I’m just rearranging things: instead of saying that there is a concept called “property” and that different contracts will have a different definition of property, I’m saying that at its core, property is really an emergent property of many (informal) contracts. It is not a fundamental building block; it is something we observe in the collective behavior of people. It isn’t that “property” was “invented” and it then changed people’s behavior; it’s that people’s behavior tended to self-organize into a consistent repeated pattern that we eventually called “property”. Whether explicit or implicit, people started “trading” a recognition that some stuff in the world is only going to be controlled by one person so that others would recognize their control over other stuff. This pattern occurred so many times, and with such mutual success, that it became familiar enough to recognize and name: “property”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeting_of_the_minds
Meeting of the minds (also referred to as mutual agreement, mutual assent or consensus ad idem) is a phrase in contract law used to describe the intentions of the parties forming the contract. In particular it refers to the situation where there is a common understanding in the formation of the contract. This condition or element is often considered a necessary requirement to the formation of a contract.
… The reasoning is that a party should not be held to a contract that they were not even aware existed.
This is essentially my objection. There would be no meeting of the minds in many of these “contracts”. You may already be aware of this, but I see this as a problem. Your model also gives newcomers many perks that normal residents don’t have.