That’s true, but the state also claims title to vast areas of virgin land. If they were to pass that title on to somebody else, the title would be illegitimate. The same applies to a person who “owns” a 1200-acre ranch, but only 600 of those acres were ever used. In that case, their title to the unused 600 acres would be illegitimate. Thus the test of seeing whether proof of prior development can be seen.
I’m not paying for unowned land. I’m paying for land that once belonged to someone else. So let us assume this: That the land in question is free from any theft all the way back to the beginning of time itself. The person who previously owned it is the original settler of the land. He found it, he farmed it, and now he’s too old and has chosen to sell it and move to the suburbs. I buy the land and he hands me a title to it. That is my land because I paid for it. No one else can claim that land because it now belongs to me. Why is this a difficult concept for you? It doesn’t matter if it is land, cars, boats, or large steaming piles of shit. If the LEGITIMATE OWNER sells it to someone title transfer to the buyer and they are now the new owners.
Not entirely. Ownership also comes from someone who legitimately owns a piece of property whether it is one acre or one million selling it to someone else and transferring title. Whether you use the land or not has no bearing on anything. If I buy land and I chose not to use it that is my land, plain and simple and anyone found squatting on my land will be asked to leave and those who do not will find about an ounce and a half of 00 buckshot in their backside.
Yeah, you can claim a part of Mars if you move there and build a house. On that I agree. But you can also sell that little part of Mars you have so claimed to me and now that makes it mine. Homesteading only applies to land that no one else has claimed. Once its is claimed you can sell it all day long. Now, can you go to Mars and claim the entire planet as your very own? No, of course not. But if you go to Mars and somehow figure out how to make grass grow, fence in 500 acres and move 300 head of cattle on it to graze that acreage then yeah, that 500 acres of Mars is yours and you are free to sell all or part of it to anyone you wish. And you are free to stop raising cattle on it whenever you want. And whoever buys it can simply leave it as it is, maybe plant some trees and let nature take its course. 500 acres was homesteaded, 500 acres was sold which means 500 acres belongs to whoever you sold it to and no one has the right to take any portion of that land away. Period.
If a person comes to me and says, “Hey, I see you got 990 acres of unused land. You wanna sell 10 acres of it?” I can either say yes or no. If I sell them 10 acres of land then we have just completed a totally free and uncoerced transaction that has benefited both of us. I sold some land I wasn’t using and this guy now has land to start a small farm on.
Or I could say no but I’d be willing to lease him the land at $100 per acre per month. He is free to say yes or no. If he says no we go our merry way and he finds some other piece of property. If he says yes then we have just completed a completely free and uncoerced exchange that benefits us both. He gets to use 10 acres of land to start his little farm and I get to earn an extra $1,000 per month. Or he could say, “Sure mister, I’d like to do that but I’d really like to own that land.” So we work out a deal where he can rent the land at $100 per acre per month but also put up an additional $3,000 for an option to buy the land in two years time at a pre-agreed upon price with the $3,000 being taken off the final purchase price with a possible rent credit of $50 per month also being applied to the end price when he decides to exercise his option.
In both cases we both are satisfied with the results, no one was coerced and the exchanged was completely free and voluntary.
What you propose is theft of privately owned land and nothing more. And I have a right to protect my land with my 12 gauge if I have to.
Perhaps I have 1,000 acres of land and do have future plans for it. Maybe I want to build a theme park on it but I am currently working on raising the capital for it which could take another two years to raise and another three years before we break ground. Does that mean, under your “it’s mine because you aren’t using it right now” theft model make my claim any less legitimate? It’s not being used now but I have plans to develop that whole 1,000 acres in the next five years. Now what am I suppose to do if you show up and squat on MY land? “Gee thanks mister! I’m so glad you showed up to steal my land! For the life of me I didn’t know what I was going to do with all of this acreage. I was just praying for someone to come along and take it off my hands even though I just spent $3 million last year to buy it.” More than likely I’ll shoot you and bury you somewhere on the back 40.
Non-use doesn’t mean non-ownership.
It doesn’t matter what I’m doing or not doing with it. It’s my land which I bought and I’m free to do whatever the hell I want with it, which includes nothing if I so desire.
Oh, I guess that means if I go on three month vacation you can throw up a tent in my backyard and stack a claim on it too huh? So a guy that once farmed 50 acres of land turns 75 and says “hell, I can’t do this anymore” and stops farming. Does that mean it stops being his land? Or if I own a warehouse downtown and decide to empty it out and do nothing with it for five years does that make it no longer my property? That’s just stupid, irrational, irresponsible and immoral.
I would lay claim to land that I purchased.
There’s a difference between abandonment and non-use. If I abandon something that means I don’t really give damn who takes it. I’ve basically said “I don’t want it. Come and get it.” If I park a car in front of my house that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned it. I’m just not using it right now. I might be waiting to fix it up and sell it or it could be a back up car.
We can do this all day. You want something for nothing and I’m talking about PROPERTY RIGHTS and OWNERSHIP RIGHTS. It doesn’t matter what I do with MY LAND. Let’s use my previous example. John found some virgin land, untouched by human hands and settled it. He started a 50 acre goat ranch. John got sick and need money so he sold Bill 25 acres. Bill used it for hunting. Ten years later Bill decides to move to Des Moines and so sells his 25 acres to me. I don’t do anything other than live in the house that I built on the property. You see the progression here? From virgin land homesteaded by John which he ranched to Bills hunting ground and now to me who simply likes to admire the property or likes having all of this land around me so no one else bothers me. I have rightful claim to that property because I bought it, fair and square, from a previous owner, who bought it from the original settler of the land. Bill transfer title of that 25 acres of land to me because I paid him $2,000 an acre for it. That is my land and no one else has claim to it. Not Bill, not John, not you, not anyone.
Nope, he bought it from a guy who used it for hunting. Thus “pristine” forest. Oh, and the hunting guy was the first guy to ever use the land, thus homesteaded it. And I bought it from the guy who bought it from the hunter because he didn’t want the guy shooting Bambi anymore.
They wouldn’t. They’d only enforce legal claims.
It’s your land because the old man transferred his title to something he legitimately owned to you, not because you paid money for it. It isn’t a difficult concept for me to grasp, I understand trade perfectly. What you seem not to understand is that you don’t buy the land itself, you buy labor product in the land and/or easement of usage which involves the land; that is what a title represents. You don’t own the atoms of a thing except by usage of the atoms to make the thing you own, and when that thing ceases to be, so does your exclusive claim to those atoms. Quite similarly, you do not own the space that a thing occupies in itself, you only hold exclusive claim to a space as long as it is the space within which the thing you own exists, and your exclusive claim to it ends when the existence of the thing you own ends.
You’re right, it doesn’t matter, except you’re confusing land as labor product or land as being used with land as something unused and not a labor product, and in so doing you are confusing legitimate ownership with non-ownership.
If the land ceases to be used and ceases to constitute labor product, that to which you hold title also ceases to be, and so your claim on the land is no longer valid.
If I were to terraform all of Mars, then the whole of the planet’s surface would be mine, as it would constitute a product of my labor. Were it then to begin reverting to its current inhospitable state, it would at some point cease to be my labor product, by virtue of the fact that the product of my labor would cease to exist in it. At that point, it would cease to be my property and would be open to any other sapient being for homesteading. Were I instead to generate some massive exothermic chain reaction that shatters Mars into a trillion pieces, so it could be more easily mined for raw materials, it would again be entirely mine as a product of my labor. Were it to coalesce once again into a solid planet, a dead world bearing a close resemblance to its current form, it would be reasonable to assert that it no long represents my labor product and therefore ceases to be mine, though were it instead to become a vibrant changing world with tectonic activity and an active core, it would clearly be a result of my labor and so therefore still exclusively mine. Should pieces of the shattered planet reach sufficient velocity to break free from the gravity of their center of mass and head towards the Earth, at some point raining down destruction upon the Earth, I would be responsible for the damages. This responsibility would be the case whether I claimed to abandon my title to my labor product or not; abandonment of title alone is insufficient to displace my responsibility.
A typical vulgar libertarian response. Free markets are all well and good, until of course they get in the way of political class profits.
If you weren’t using the land and it didn’t constitute an existing product of your labor, or the labor product of another from whom you voluntarily acquired it, it is a coerced transaction because you would be using force to deny him use of land that you do not legitimately own, leaving him with a coerced set of options to either not use the land, or to pay you for it. It is an extortion, not a voluntary trade.
No, it was not a completely free and voluntary exchange. Like a feudal lord, you demand rent for land you do not legitimately own. If it is neither used nor a product of labor, it is not yours to do with as you please but rather an unowned natural resource that he may use if he pleases. Your threats against him should he attempt to homestead or otherwise make use of the land are an initiation of aggression.
No, what I propose is the ending of theft and extortion of unowned land, and nothing more. You have a right to protect your legitimately owned land with whatever means are necessary to do so, but you have no right whatsoever to deny others use of land you do not legitimately own.
You’d apparently shoot Murray Rothbard as well, since he’d agree with me on this. What you’ve just described is nothing more than speculation. No one forced you to raise the capital after paying someone else for the land; you could’ve just as easily left it in their hands, assuming it was at that time legitimately owned by them, raised the capital to build your theme park, and then bought the land and began construction upon it.
Not alone, no, but if it also does not constitute a product of labor, then it indeed does mean non-ownership. You either make use of the land or otherwise transform it to make it yours, and to keep it yours. Otherwise it reverts to nature.
You bought labor product or easement of usage, nothing more. You’re responsible for your own action and inaction, and if that causes the land to cease being a product of labor over which you hold title, and if you cease to use it, it is no longer your property as that to which you actually held title has ceased to exist in the land.
You love arguing against strawmen, don’t you? If you go on a three month vacation, your backyard is still something you use; you don’t have to use it constantly for it to still be used, and if you’ve planted a garden or maintained the grass or built a pool or made some other apparent mixture of labor with it, it is most clearly yours to do with as you please until it ceases to be a product of labor. If you, on the other hand, leave for a three century vacation, and have made no arrangements for its maintenance, I highly doubt even your house, let alone your backyard, would show any signs of ever having been used or a product of labor. If a farmer ceases to maintain his claim in the acreage, and it returns to a state of nature, it ceases to be owned by him; if he has sense enough to sell it off before then, he transfers ownership, and if he continues to make use of it for other purposes, he maintains ownership for himself. If you own a warehouse, it is quite evidently a product of labor, and five years of disuse is unlikely to cause it to return to a natural state, however fifty or one hundred years of disuse will certainly return it to nature, and with that your claim ceases to exist.
Paying for it does not, alone, confer any right of ownership. You must obtain, and then maintain, legitimate title to it.
It’s not mere lack of use, it’s lack of use AND lack of product. If the car decays into a formless mass of rusted metal, it has returned to nature and is no longer your car, it’s just a bunch of rusted metal lying there unused and free for anyone to homestead. The absurdity of your notion of abandonment becomes apparent if, instead of a car, we examine the situation with a nuclear weapon. Let’s say you own a nuclear weapon, but leave it on the side of the road and “abandon” your claim to it. No one claims it, so by your reasoning it is unowned. After a time, the timer malfunctions and it goes off killing hundreds of thousands and contaminating the land for miles. By your reasoning, you would not be responsible for the loss of life and property, as you had abandoned your claim to it, but by my reasoning you would still be responsible for it as your labor product was the cause of the damage.
I certainly want what is unowned for nothing more than the cost of my own labor, and you are talking about claiming property in things which you do not legitimately own. You talk of property and ownership rights yet ignore the rational basis of those rights. A right of ownership arises from labor product and usage, it ends by lack of labor product and lack of usage. Why is this so hard for you to understand?
Unless of course you do nothing with it and, by virtue of your inaction, it reverts to a natural and thereby unowned state. No labor product? No usage? No property. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp.
If you aren’t using 20 of those acres in any respect, and they don’t in any way represent a product of labor, then they cease to be owned by anyone. I really don’t care how much you paid for them, if you abandon them and they decay to a natural and unowned state, it’s not my fault, it’s yours. You’re free to maintain your claim or not, but if you don’t that’s your own fault. Plant a garden, cut the grass, go for walks, do something, or don’t and lose the basis for your claim.
Then it was a hunting ground, not “pristine forest”. The word pristine implies that it is completely untouched, left to its completely natural state. Now you wish to retroactively change the subject of debate to argue against a strawman of my position. If he buys it and doesn’t use it for anything, and what claim did exist in the land was by virtue of it being a hunting ground, then it has ceased to be owned; it is no longer used, and no longer a product of labor. It is unused and untransformed, and therefore unowned.
Really? I figured private courts would find in favor of legitimate claims, but I guess I was wrong. rolls eyes
Property only belongs to someone once they’ve established an objective link to it that in part justifies their holding it. if this link should vanish over time, the justification for their holding it dissipates too.
And around and around we go. I’m done with this. I’ve better things to do. You’ve neither convinced me of your position nor proven me wrong and I likewise towards you. So you may now sit back and bask in your perceived victory because I’ve tired of this conversation but understand this, you haven’t won anything. Yeah, that’s probably the wrong word but oh well. Never claimed to be a wordsmith. One of these days we’ll find out who was right and who was wrong but I can guess who it will be.