Nihilistic rubbish. If it is yours by moral right, it is proven, and that is the end of it. If you’re too stupid/evil to care, you will be shot. This is practical and just. End of story.
As for abandonment, if you leave your car for 10 minutes, you’ve “abandoned” it, by your definition, and your title to it is “mere words”. A ridiculous, impractical “ethic” if there ever was one!
-Jon
Well folks, thank you for your responses. It mostly confirmed what I already knew, unfortunately, but thanks nonetheless.
See, recently, in my explorations of anarchy, I have come across the fairly large volume and, taking a deep breath to calm my right-wing background, plunged in to the strange world of various levels of anarchist socialism. Some of what I found there was disturbing, some of it sounded okay, but the point arose, as I compared the anarcho-socialists and anarcho-individualists: whatever happens without a government will not happen because it’s what you want.
Neither the capitalists nor the socialists will have a government in place to force people into being capitalists or socialists. There will be no system but that which naturally evolves. Thus, the question is not what we think should be in an anarchist society, but what we think will be. I’m still not convinced what the natural state of man is in this regard. A good argument can be made, however, that, under anarchism, what should be and what will naturally develop are the same. So, I think the burden is upon both sides to show that society would naturally gravitate towards their way of doing things.
I certainly think that Anarcho-communists are fooling themselves. To each according to need can only happen on a large scale with forced redistribution, requiring therefore an extensive government. However, I also think that without a universal set of laws, perpetual ownership based merely on getting somewhere first and putting a fence around will not be respected by most people. It can be demonstrably shown that all current property titles are the result of theft anyway. I don’t know how we’d redistribute them. If everybody had the same amount to start, but one makes foolish decisions and ends up renting from you on the land he once owned, why ought his children be condemned to rent from your children the same, and why do your children deserve to gain by the mere ownership they did not even acquire for themselves?
You don’t have to answer these questions for me. I can find my own answers. You have to answer to the rather largish groups of people who don’t spend large portions of their days seeking and analyzing truth and knowledge. Landlords are not a sympathetic class of people. You may want to consider that as the protections of government in enforcing our current, stolen land rights disappears.
That’s probably the first thing about any of the schools of thought related to anarcho capitalism that those first encountering it have trouble understanding.
The discussions of what should be are still useful, in that, should any of this ever come close to being realized, they will inform the actions of the participants, and therefore will play a role in determining what will be.
That’s pretty much the idea - except that they won’t and can’t ever be the same, they can only converge asymptotically. Anarchism is about bringing them as closely together as possible given the limits imposed by free will. Since coercion is at present the most significant impediment to the congruence of the two, it is seen as the primary factor to be mitigated and minimized.
I am an ethical egoist and I believe that what is your property is what you can defend. However, if you are asking what stops me, in Montana, from using Your property there, but you live in New York, is NOTHING. Some people ignore property, my grandfather challenged a claim that his neighbor owned some unruly land. Turns out he didn’t, but some guy in the far south of the state did. The state verified it, and the man sold it to him.
I am sure some network would work out to have universal recognition of property rights among the several deed companies/ PDAs. There would be branches in cities and towns to verify among different agencies. Sort of like a background check.
But the principal of claiming land and not using it, or letting it deteriorate, I have trouble with. I will respect someone’s property claim to certain extent, but after a while I would ignore it. That severely gets under my skin. I just want to sometimes start refurnishing abandoned apartments so drugs won’t start invading my neighborhood for crack houses. I would never use the State, like Kelo v. New London, but would just go about it on my own.
Maybe some deed/PDA agencies would require certain requirements of use of land in a certain time for your defense of ownership. Tucker also wanted use requirements for land and other property. This was debated among the early anarchists. I guess there would be a sort of first come, first serve basis recognition of property ownership if the contract criteria were not met. And the consideration of the amount of homesteading put into land would also very according to contract. If unruly, overgrown riverbanks are being used by a man, he would not know if this land was claimed or not, but the evidence of lack of care would imply no ownership. But a massive terrace cut into the land would be obvious. It would be left up to the owner of the property to decide what to do about the man’s use of it, considering his arbitration co. abandoned their defense of this land. Either the owner would have to move next to the property to be in his defensive range of ownership, or a fight would break out. And what amount of homesteading would be required for the invaders claim of ownership of land to be valid? I guess a PDA might have power of reverse eminent domain like status of your land, relinquishing defense of it after some criteria.
That is the only way I see for massive amounts land to not be owned and forcefully defended by one man, a fear I guess would be prevalent in an an-cap society. Given the criteria of contract, I would assume people would use all the land they own, instead of depriving others of use and ownership of it by some claim and letting it rot and become useless. Without real defense, that claim is ultimately useless, just as much my claim to own the entire world is. That is the only practical way I can think of.
Abandonment is a possibility, if the land falls into utter disuse. Of course, without the State to defend property titles at someone else’s expense, the cost of defending your holdings would fall squarely on you - making unused land a liability at best. As for what is necessary for homesteading, I think people should refer to Rothbard’s article on law, property rights and the air, where he discusses the relevant technological unit (RTU). It’s a great article and helps clarify much of this stuff.
-Jon
No you don’t.
You just asserted their position.
JonBostwick, you might have just strawmanned him.
Merely putting a fence around an area of land and then proclaiming to own everything inside of it without actually transforming or applying one’s labor to it does not mesh with Rothbardian property theory or the homesteading principle. Crusoe can’t just land on an island and declare the whole thing to be his own in perpetuity. Furthermore, land fuedalism is not justified by the homesteading principle either. When one has a perpetual and intergenerational title to ownership on stolen land that one makes no active use of and does not labor upon while there are a bunch of peasants who actually do actively use and labor upon it, this is not in accordance with libertarian property theory. In such a case it is actually the peasantry who legitimately owns the land and they deserve ownership, without compensation to the monopoly landlords.
That’s the Rothbardian position as outlined in TEOL.
To make myself clear: this does not justify the geolibertarian position. It actually provides a counter to the geolibertarian position by showing how a strict adherance to the homesteading principle does not naturally lead to fuedalism or land monopoly.
Yep, them hippies was right…
There would be no such thing as nature preserves under this theory because someone possessing land for the sole purpose of letting nature exist without human interference goes against the homesteading principle.
I always invoke the ‘tragedy of the commons’ as the cause when some animal is harmed by human activities, if some environmentalist group would get together the funds to buy the natural habitat for this animal they could protect it through free market principals instead of using theft and coercion to force others to sacrifice for the benefit of the people who like having non-food animals around.
Turns out I was wrong.
Now I have to rethink this whole stateless society thing because I’m not really one who feels the need to justify my existence to others and if I wanted to buy up a fallow farm so ducks would have a place to hang out I would have to do exactly that to the invading anarchists who don’t accept that I have a valid claim to the land because my preferred usage of said land is unacceptable to them.
Y’all almost had me convinced that a stateless society would be viable.
A disingenous straw man.
Well noone has the legitimate right to forcibly block other people from homesteading land that is previously unused. To do so would violate the homesteading principle, not uphold it.
But…But… without the state, all the trees would die out! A plague of Locusts would run amok!
Well, yeah, a strawman indeed.
But it is a valid point, owning land for the sole purpose of keeping it fallow is a legitimate use no matter what the would be squatters believe is the proper usage of land to establish ownership.
I actually think you’re misinterpreting the homesteading principle because the private nature preserves bit is in the literature…somewhere.
Putting up a fence is transforming it through labor. Obviously, making black-box law that says doing so is always the only requirement would lead to an absurd thing like the validity of putting a fence around a one-square yard box and saying you’ve just fenced in the entire world except, and all that remains unclaimed is that square yard.
The danger really starts when people decide, hey, I could go put a fence around this land, so let’s just draw some lines on a map here and say I did. The fence is one possible way to concretely establish occupancy and willingness to defend. The priciple is that both are required, not that a fence is required.
To even speak of land ownership, there has to be a way to delineate the land that is being considered. Nobody can physically occupy more than the land they are standing on at the moment, and there are plenty of uses and transformations of land that I think most of us would agree were legitimate that don’t require physically walking across every square foot of it. Again, a fence is a clear and objective way to do this.
Many or even most transformations require extended periods of time to complete. They require that excusive right to use the land be established prior to beginning the transformation. Establishing an intent to do such a transformation on clearly delineated land is enough to establish an conditional ownership claim, subject to actually following through with the intent.
The fence in and of itself is not what establishes ownership, it is a marker that signifies that ownership has been established.
And even though the land my house is on might have been established through theft (though from whom would be impossible to establish), or through arbitrary line-drawing on a map, I have now homesteaded it. Homesteading is not limited to peasants and workers.
I couldn’t have committed a strawman as I never refuted an argument. You bringing up Rothbard’s view on ownership instead of addressing my accusation that his position is similar to anarch-socialism’s probably was a strawman.
Folsom’s logic is silly. An item on a shelf in a store waiting to be sold is not unowned. A house waiting to be sold or rented is no different. Using an item is not the same thing as consuming the item. Contrary to socialist thought, capital goods are legitimate form of property.
If renting is verboten for the reasons Folsom gave then warehousing is impossible for the same reason. And, big surprise, socialists hate that too!
Wouldn’t the appropriate strategy for the nature preserve be to bring in the RTU (if the term is inappropriate, then just say the appropriate standards for appropriation)? In this case I don’t think much development would be necessary. If, on the other hand, one wanted to homestead a mine, for instance, they’d need to fence it, prove their ability and willingness to make the necessary improvements to it (the RTU) and once this has been done title would be theirs. I think this is what Chernikov had in mind with his praxeological theory of homesteading.
-Jon
What is the big deal with a fence? How do I know, just because there is a fence, that land is or isn’t owned? How do I even know, from any particular point if it’s a long fence, which side I’m on? Who will certify that they had the ability and willingness to work the mine and issue the title, and why should I respect what they have to say?
Yup, if that’s what you want, I say you’re wrong. If land is in limited supply (as it clearly is) and I need land to grow crops and just live on, but you say to me, and all my friends, that no, this land is for the ducks and you got there first, I would say bleep you, then you and the ducks stop us. Mother ducker. Who do you think will get more support, the people who want land for people or the people who want land for ducks?
Who will build the roads!? [:O]
Seriously, this does get tedious. You’re looking for armchair solutions to concrete situations. Who will “certify” it? You will have to prove it in a mutually agreeable court of law if challenged. If your case is made, that is the end of it. All a fence does is visibly mark off some territory. I love it when these silly kind of questions are thrown at anarchists, as if they’re supposed to sketch out every single stupid minute detail, as if the common law has not been handling cases like these for centuries.
-Jon
The best part of it is how, by claiming vast swathes of land and keeping them fallow, you can use up all the arable land you get to first and force people to pay you extra money to rent, since unused land is taken out of competition with you. And, hell, the most measley shack is better than nothing, right?
Get rid of government and enforcing your fallow land will be prohibitively expensive. Others will have every economic incentive to “steal” the land you claimed by right of getting there first and putting up a GD fence. It’s so funny how people think temporal luck makes for permanent exclusive rights.
You are in error, or at least it seems so. You seem to be thinking that I’m arguing against anarchism. I am not. I am just saying that anarchism, should it arise, will not look like you wish it would look. Squatter’s rights, unless I’m mistaken, are part of common law too. These are not questions thrown at anarchists, but at capitalists.