I live in an apartment complex. I have a nice car (>$30K value). The apartment complex employs a land maintenance company to blow the leaves off the parking lot and they come several times a week. They blow the leaves in the flower-beds in front of the vehicles, as well. When it’s raining, this blasts dirt and mud all around and it lands on my vehicle.
Now, if I were to sue in an “anarcho-capitalist” or “natural order” society, who do you think should win? After asking them in writing to stop blasting mud onto my property, should I be able to sue them for some monetary damages when they continue to do so? Propertarians seem to have this “sovereign landowner” mentality, so it seems that they’ll tend to side with the landowner… after all, I’m just a tenant and the car is parked on the landowner’s property. But property is property, right? Sure, the landowner has a right to blow whatever leaves he wants off his property and I have no right to obstruct that. But my car is my property and the parking space (it is assigned but that shouldn’t matter) is an implicit agreement that the car may be safely parked there without fear of damage from the landowner’s maintenance activities.
I believe that I should be able to sue the landowner for damage to the vehicle’s clear coat, costs of cleaning the vehicle after each blowing and any other costs associated with having to move the vehicle (time, gas, etc.) to avoid this mud-splattering. What do you think?
You don’t have to wait for an anarchist world to be able to sue. A suit, is just making a complaint and asking a third party to decide the outcome. Of course that remedy will be provided by the market. The question isn’t could you bring a suit, but would it be worth it. I really doubt it would be worth bringing suit. Your best option is going to be talking to the owners and clean up crew about it and seeing if you can find a resolution. If not, then really, you have to deal with it, use violence to try and get your way, or move.
Change it to a hypothetical where they break off your mirror, and it becomes a lot easier to understand who owes what to whom.
For just a little mud, and you feel like it’s ungood, you should contact your landlord and inform him of the problem, and you probably don’t need to threaten anything, because it would be your landlord who could threaten the cleaners, as the relationship between you and the landlord is much more valuable than that between the landlord and the cleaning company. Your landlord probably has no idea of this and immediately moving to damages against him seems an unwise thing to do.
What is your agreement with the landowner as to his or his agents damaging your car or other property? If nothing then you could bring suit for damages, you can always do that, it is just that courts or arbitrator will side with the land owner as your property is stored there at your risk. You could break your lease and if you prove that they damaged your property you may be able to exit that lease or update it to include damages to your car.
Your problem today and in the great future free market society is that you did not stipulate that the landower was responsible for damages to your car in the rental contract ahead of time. You could have a clause that if the owner damages your car then you could deduct charges for cleaning/repair out of the rent.
Any commercial relationship that people enter into will include a clause about not damaging person or property. It doesn’t make any sense to say that this wouldn’t be covered. In fact, it’s the most important thing a free market reputation and arbitration system would be instituted for.