Are you all really unable to see the injustice of this? If all land is available for ownership, and we can own the land just to keep it fallow or let ducks live, as has been suggested, than is there any doubt that all land will be privately owned in fairly short order? In the beginning, I imagine just about everyone will have some, but in a couple generations, land ownership will be more concentrated, and a person, say I, will have to have your or someone else’s permission just to occupy space, because of the decisions of our ancestors. I will be forced to pay you or someone rent, because you own the land and there is no unowned land for me to go to. You will be able to extort money from me by virtue of mere ownership. You need not necessarily work a day in your life.
Is this just? Do you think that I, and all the rest of the dispossessed, will just stand by and let you extort us because of your land title? Title which you may not have even gained by your own merit, but merely by inheritance? Such things as perpetual title tend to accumulate in a few hands. Land is an absolutely limited resource whose basic value was created by no one.
Even here in this small chunk of a country, there’s land to homestead. Even the ones with roads access and readily available water sources are affordable to any regular person. An apartment in the city is way more expensive than a lot of hectars. Very few young people want to live in the interior, and vertical construction allows the big majority of our population to live in the litoral. Agriculture and animal creation requires very much less land than it used to. Our region of “Alentejo” is 33% of the country, and has only 8% of population.
I’ve read that the entire world population can fit in middle class houses in Texas. If land ever gets scarce as you claim it is (are you from Japan or something?), then parents should be responsible about the number of kids they breed. If there’s abandoned land, take it, but you don’t have a claim on other people’s property.
By the way, do farmers actually place fences around their properties there? Around here, we use piles of rocks to delimit the perimiter of the property. At times, there have been disputes about the other guy moving the rocks, and they can get really nasty because besides being neighbords and having families related a lot of times, the courts are really, really slow (even criminal cases can last decades here), and both parties must annoy the biggest amount of people to serve as witnesses as you can, because that’s pretty much the only evidence they have.
I’m trying to figure out where you make the mental jump from owning land that makes the owner no money in return but is in fact a liability (except for the psychic profit of providing ducks a place to breed) and them being able to buy up the whole world. It really does not follow.
And where’s this beginning you refer to? The beginning of time or the beginning of some theoritical construct you dreamed up where property rights are determined by might makes right?
Is it really so hard to conceive that if you don’t own something that you have no right to take it by force?
Hell, before industrialized agriculture it was common practice to let the land lie fallow every few seasons so you didn’t strip all the nutrients out of the soil. Is this an acceptable practice or is this land ripe for squatting?
Look, man, when I examine a point of view, I take and try to argue for it, and see what I can do and how people respond. You’re all arch-capitalists here, right?
All ownership is established, so far as I can tell, by either creating something or gaining it in an honest, voluntary transaction. Except for land, that is. Unlike any other object which can rightfuly be homesteaded, no one gave up ownership rights or left it unowned by death where it had previously been owned. No, land, until it is claimed, is truly a commons, owned equally by all. No human created its value. Homesteading of land originates in something as silly as winning a race. Further, you can make no more of it, and all humans require at least a bit of it to even exist. You have no right to declare a commons property by a unilateral decision. The value you add to it is rightly yours, but not the value of the land itself.
As for those of you worried about land lying fallow; get real, will you? A reasonable person can agree that letting a field lie fallow for a season is a good thing. We are not talking about cyclical disuse for land regeneration here, we are talking about you keeping a couple extra acres for yourself so you can have the status or whatever of having that land.
No, a baby need not earn its milk. The milk is created by the mother, and she has every right (and indeed, an obligation) to give it. Land is created by no human, and no human has a right to claim it eternally and exclusively. Especially when there exists demand for land among those who have none and you don’t have any added value on it. Except a fence, of course. So take your GD fence, or I suppose we can just live around it.
Ah, I see what’s going on here. JCFolsom is a geolibertarian. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s an outright socialist, but his views on land could be considered a socialistic acception to the rule.
Maybe and maybe not but I do not think it helps to be concerned about labels because there is no universal concensus of what constitutes “capitalism” anyway – not even among this crowd.
For what it is worth JCFolsom, I suggest that you recognize that your last reply seems unduly focussed on the value of land. However, the value of anything is completely subjective.
Also, you say “No, land, until it is claimed, is truly a commons, owned equally by all.” which is also a completely subjective opinion. Do not that you are ascribing ownership rights to people who do not claim them – maybe even to people who do not even want them.
At its very finest, you can say that you can not make any more of any physical matter. Every piece of matter is the product of other transformed matter — that includes your own body too.
Also, how do you separate the value you add to land from the value of the land itself?
They’re pointless. That is all I can say of them. There will be no such thing as “squatters’ rights” on legitimately acquired property. I’m not sure what makes you think abandoned property is considered legitimate - on the other hand, property in disuse at the present is not necessarily abandoned. It’s also pointless to own large tracts of empty land that are costly to defend.
Latecomers tend to reap all the benefits. Those lucky b*stards should be forced to compensate those who worked the land before them. [;)] Anyway, latecomer ethics are destructive of the very notion of ownership.
No, it isn’t. This is often assumed but never proven.
You have every right to declare unowned land yours if you homestead it, socialist “ethics” notwithstanding. Value does not create ownership anyway! I wonder when people will update themselves on this. Humans also require food to exist &c. Too bad. They have no right to it without first acting to gain it (the exception being children, whose parents are obliged to them.)
No, not except for land. All property is created. Unused land of no use to anyone - it is of potential use. When you commit a purposeful act that realizes that potential, you have created property where none existed before. It’s not owned by all, because ownership is individual, it can’t be collective no matter how much some socialists wish it was, and no matter what some law or philosophical system says. And claiming it is is conceding the very same premise you seem to be arguing against, that ownership can be declared by fiat rather than established by turning something from what just is to a thing that meets the objective criteria of the purpose of property. It’s not about the race, it’s not a game of tag. It’s about purpose, which is the basis for the need for property in the first place.
I think that reveals more about you, and your view of what wealth means than anything about property or property rights. Personal hang-ups are a bad basis for law, and even worse for philosophy.
So, I can’t go in with, say, 10 other people to buy a tractor? If I do, is that tractor not collectively owned? I am fully an individualist, but saying that more than 1 person cannot have ownership rights over the same piece of property seems a little bizarre.
Only in a sense, Brainpolice (by the way, are you that Brainpolice2 dude on youtube, too?). I do not believe in taxes at all, given that right now, I’m leaning anarchist. Georgists tend to be single-taxers, and that is not my emphasis. I have been inspired in this current line of thought first by Agorists (these fellows aren’t nearly so tied to capitalism as you might think, but rather free markets, which at least some distinguish between), and yes, by Geolibertarianism with a dash of left anarchism thrown in.
If y’all disagree with this, than correct me if I’m wrong, what we have here is a difference of definitions; rather one of the hardest sorts of differences to overcome, in my opinion. If I say “all land is commonly owned”, I can justify that statement to some degree in the same sense that property itself is justified, by an appeal to natural law via human nature.
I understand. You could be classified as a “geo-anarchist”.
I’m an agorist myself. However, I don’t buy into the geolibertarian premises and most agorists probably don’t either. The two definitely can overlap though.
The reason Locke snuck that premise into his natural-law ethic was belief in God. Very few geolibertarians have ever bothered to explain why land is initially owned, when ownership arises from human activity.
That, or, you just don’t like the conclusion. Did Locke ever say, “this bit is only there because of God”? In any case, unlike many here with their appeals to authority, “Rothbard said it here in the holy writ”, I was not referring specifically to Locke. Rothbard himself justifies homesteading via natural law, though I am not sure this is actually sound grounding. I only refer to it because I think many here use it as a philosophical justification.
It’s a well-known fact that several elements of Locke’s homesteading theory come from his theological presuppositions. That is why the theory has been nearly totally reworked in order to remain useful.
If unowned land was actually owned by all, then it could never be claimed by one.
A commons is a definite thing, it is not an abstraction that means the absence of ownership. A good example of commons is the Sun. The reflex reaction is say that since no one has been to the Sun the Sun must be unowned, but that is untrue. If the Sun was really unowned I could travel to the Sun, claim it, and then destroy it; but I can’t. Even if I were to claim the Sun, I can not possess the right to use it in a way that precludes others from continuing to use the sun as they did before my claim.
While mixing labor is a sufficient condition to gain ownership, it is not a necessary condition.
Now if I were to travel to a distinct Star no one would have a previous claim it and I could do to it what I liked; like experiment with turning it into a black hole.
An uninhabited island is like the distinct star and not like the sun. It is not owned by all, it is owned by none.
True that! Though, no one would deny a person a place to live, the space to build a house, even to grow crops or livestock. Use your land, as anyone might, to live on and support yourself, and no one would complain, or if they did, they would be ignored or condemned for it.
However, should land be scarce, so that in order to have any land to live on or work in an area, they must rent or buy unused land you claim from you, and you are in fact willing to do so, this is nonsense. What right have you to it? If you raise no crops or graze no animals there, if all you’ve done is, say, thrown a fence up around it, you have no exclusive right to it. You’ve added no value to the land that you could claim, only claimed the pre-existing value that is owned in common by all, and thus can have no exclusive right to. You are trying to steal it from the bulk of humanity, who by our very nature need space to live in and produce in.
If you build apartments and maintain them, you have a right to those, and I may find it worthwhile to rent from you to avoid the hassle myself. However, with all unused land potentially available, rents could hardly be so high as landlords have come to expect.
