Public Property Question

Economics Political Theory
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1

First, you must know that I subscribe to the property theory laid out in “The Ethics of Liberty” by Murray Rothbard. Once someone mixes their labor with material from nature, they own it, and may do what they want with it (provided it does not infringe on others’ property rights).

My question is simple. If you define property as I did above, who owns the air we breathe? Surely, if 5 people build a house, 4 of them can restrict one of the owners from burning down the house. Just the same, can’t we restrict the rights of one man from polluting the air if a consensus is reached?

The same goes for water. Sure, you should be able to dump as much oil as you’d like in your contained swimming pool, but what about off a dock you own in a lake? Or, do I have the right to dump toxic chemicals on my land, if the runoff will end up in a drinking source?

2

Without meaning to sound supersilious, these are not new questions - they have been addressed by libertarian authors (incl. Rothbard.) So those would be good areas to look into should you desire further guidance. Anyway, pollution directly harms you and in some cases your property. Nevermind the air - it damages you directly. There also runs the argument that we have easement rights to breathe, but this is a somewhat separate matter. I definitely agree with you on water.

3

Thanks. I knew the questions must have been asked before.I know it sounded trite, but I was just trying to be specific as possible. The reason I asked, though, is it seems most libertarians are very opposed to anyone who suggests an entity does not have the right to pump toxins into the air. Many libertarians advocate “free market” solutions to environmental issues, but do not acknowledge that pollution violates the property rights of others. Also, could you tell me where Rothbard wrote about the subject?

4

To my knowledge he reckons with the issue in For A New Liberty and in his seminal article Law, Property rights and air pollution (http://mises.org/rothbard/lawproperty.pdf). Austrians have dealt elsewhere with the topic of ownership over water etc., but I am not sure which specific articles, so if anyone else could answer that they could point you to sources.

Any libertarians who advocated such a thing BTW do not deserve to be called libertarians. The only argument for a firm to be allowed to pollute in spite of its victims’ consent is when it was there first and establishes a sort of “right” to pollute in a limited area. Then, if you go knowingly build a house next to it, you deserve what you get.

5

But exclusive use in an inelastic scarcity market where all land is legally owned does infringe on the self-ownership property rights of those being excluded. How can it logically not?

This is the problem with assuming the air is “unowned” prior to mixing labor which is a development from the neo-classical revolution in economics where they purposely conflated “land” (meaning land, water, air, etc) for “capital”.

Locke said that everything that pre-exists human labor is owned in common as an individual equal access right. So exclusive use beyond his “proviso” requires an obligation to those you exclude. Otherwise you end up with externalities not being able to be incorporated into the pricing mechanism. This violates the absolute right of self-ownership of those you subject costs to as third parties to a transaction.

6

Not if appropriation is allowed properly, it doesn’t. If land is appropriated by those who use it, the ability to exclude those who don’t use it is no externality. The appropriation done depends on the labor used. You cannot, for example, claim ownership of a lake’s fish because you swim in the lake. The lake can be fished without interfering with swimming, so a person who has homesteaded travel over the surface of a lake does not have property rights to the fish inside the lake. Similarly, a farmer who homesteads land does not own the air above his property, nor the earth beneath it (beyond what is necessary for his crops to grow).

I’ll agree that absolute “first-use” property rights can be hard to define in many situations, but they aren’t with most uses of land (e.g., farming, building, etc).

The purpose of property rights is to allow purposeful action by the property owners, which always requires some exclusivity over the environment. Any rights granted beyond what is necissary for this aren’t desirable, I’ll grant you that. Its not easy to establish property rights over some things, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do a good job of it.

You are talking about a positive right, which requires someone else to give up a negative right. Who should give up one of their rights to property? The government? The “people”? Those would be externalities. The parents of a child are the ones who have an obligation to provide this positive right to newly-created humans. They have created a person who is utterly unable to fend for themselves, and by doing so assume responsibility for that person. An article on Mises.org explained this pretty well, by likening having a child to pushing someone into a lake. The pusher has an obligation to save the drowning victim before his environment kills him.

7

How much labor is required? Does Neil Armstrong only own the footprints on the moon or the whole moon?

The externality is that costs are forced upon those being excluded in the form of higher land prices for them to occupy.

A positive right is requiring a good from someone else that is the result of their labor. Land pre-exists human labor and it’s occupancy while one is alive is not voluntary and can’t be separated.

When exactly does one have the absolute right to self-ownership then?

8

I’d say NASA and the American people (who financed his whole journey, albiet through illegitimate means) own his footprints. Certainly not the whole moon.

Purchasing land does not reduce the supply of land, unless the purchased land is somehow rendered unusable (which would be a huge opportunity cost to the owner). Besides, the change in subjective valuations based on previous sales of a good are not externalities. They are only “external” to investors, and investing is inherently risky.

The expected appreciation of land value is already included in its price, along with the market’s time preference (i.e., interest rate). If a future buyer wishes more security, he can purchase a futures contract. Futures contracts can negate any “external” effects of the movement of market prices, and they of course come at a cost (security is not free).

All natural resources, indeed, the entire universe, preexist humans. Food, water, air and land cannot separated from human existence. To whom does it fall on to provide these things? True, food can be produced in larger quantities and so its supply is not fixed, but land can also be improved (multi-story buildings, etc) in order to provide larger quantities of living space.

The appropriation of land to someone is forceful and a positive right when that land is already owned, because owned land implies labor has been spent on it; the appropriation is of someone else’s labor. If the land is unowned then it is not, because unowned land implies it is not the product of someone’s labor, and so no labor is exploited. But then people are already free to appropriate unowned land under libertarianism.

I don’t think there is any clear-cut answer to that. But self-ownership isn’t at all incompatible with positive rights given by parents.

The only rational answer for the requirements of land, food, water and air are that the people responsible for the creation of a person (e.g., the parents) are responsible for providing the person with the necessary conditions for life. Otherwise, they may as well have placed a helpless person in a situation which will surely kill him. If a man and a woman toss a child into a lake and it drowns, they cannot truthfully say “its not our fault, the environment did it!”.

9

You missed the point. Exactly how much labor is required? A little or a lot? If I walk the perimter of a 10,000 acre, do I own the whole 10,00 acres? Or does it require a fence?

It reduces the freely inhabitable lands - no?

I can not exist without occupying land. I can not continue to exist without air (a few minutes), water ( a few days), food ( a few weeks).

Air and water are freely provided and some food is too.

Improved land is called capital.

Land is not produced via human labor - it pre-exists human labor. When labor is applied to land it creates capital. The exclusive use of land (a specific location) in a scarcity market forces costs upon those you excluded which violates their absolute right of self-ownership.

No land is the product of human labor. Labor upon land creates capital.

If it involves gifting of access to land then it can’t be because a right of self-ownership doesn’t have to be purcahsed or gifted - we are born with the right.

Yes, but again exactly when does the person reach majority and then get to exercise their absolute right of self-ownership that doesn’t have to be gifted or purcahsed?

10

Thats a rather complicated question, which I think is outside the scope of the issue. Armstrong’s footprint is more of a historical monument, so I don’t thinkjust walking around an area would normally count as ownership. Obviously the means of appropriation of unowned resources aren’t going to be universally agreed upon. There will be, and always have been, conflicts over them. We can hope all parties involved share a common ethic, but we can’t count on it.

It reduces the land that can be appriated by homesteading, though markets allow land to be traded so that labor can be turned into property ownership or rent. The cost of homesteading a farm or buying a farm (all things included, travel costs, etc) should be even in a functioning market. So no, I don’t think it does.

The survival time matters. Otherwise I could just say “well, you can always occupy volume in outer space, or the center of the sun, have a nice day”. For our purposes, the volume of the universe is infinite. What matters is the amount of it that people can actually live on.

Whatever you want to call it, space which a human can occupy and own can be created. No, we can’t create more of the Earth’s surface, but who cares? The vast majority of it is unused anyways. We can create inhabitable land in places which hundreds of years ago were deadly.

I wouldn’t say that. Parents clearly own their children in many ways, and violate any notion of absolute self-ownership (ever see a child try to keep from getting a flu shot?) relatively often.

I have no idea. But the general rule in today’s society is that while the kid lives under his parent’s roof, he obeys their rules. This has seemed to work well for the past few thousand years, and is consistent with libertarian ethics and common sense, so what exactly is the problem? Its the parent’s job to make the sure kid grows up to be a genuine human being, with self-ownership and all.

11

What is that? Just appropriation takes labor but we are not sure how much - it is arbitrary? Historically how much of the private ownership of land here in the US was justly aquired by mixing of labor…and how much labor would be called “just”?

Yeah but the absolute right of self-ownership is denied.

Not without laboring though, no? Whereas, in my natural state via gravity, if I am alive I am occupying the dry, inhabitable, 2D surface of the earth somewhere.

Well you want to call it land, but isn’t it capital if it is “created” by human labor?

Well isn’t that the point. If we by definition can’t create more land, all lands are legally occupied, and we have to occupy land inorder to exist - don’t we have conditions inwhich the landless have to pay someone or be gifted the right to occupy some location?

And if yes, how can we say we have an absolute right of self-ownership where a right doesn’t need to be purchased or gifted?

The exact problem is you have no idea when a person gets to exercise the absolute right of self-ownership that doesn’t require a gift of access to land from parents or the purchase of land.

12

You are overlooking something very simple. We advocate “free market” solutions because we acknowledge that pollution violates rights of others.

Only the market can protect your property from crime and taxation and only the market can protect your property from pollution. Governments never create, they only destroy!

Governments do not protect property. They ruin it. They create EPAs that let people pay the government to pollute at will.

You seem to be bringing up Global Warming. Libertarians don’t buy into the government financed lies used to justify ever more government control. I personally don’t believe global warming to be a problem, but even if it turns out to be, government won’t “fix” it. Atleast not any better than it has “fixed” drugs, poverty, illiteracy or terrorism.

13

Its a complex issue, and people are going to disagree over it, especially when all those people want some resource for themselves.

All travel is labor. If you’ve got to travel 100 miles to find unowned land, thats labor. The same goes for building skyscrapers. The fact is that the amount of volume inhabitable by people is not limited over time.

Well, land has to be gifted (or traded, or coerced) from someone. If the government takes land from someone else and gives it to a newborn just because he’s newly born, thats coercion and a serious externality. If the government provides “common” land for people to use, then those people are still in land under the ownership of the government, no different from private land. You can’t just snap your fingers and create more land for each person who’s born, and having landowners pay for their “privilege” still doesn’t give the newborn some land of his own to stand on.

Which is more logical, laying the responsibilty of protecting the negative rights of a newborn at the feet of the people who created it, or at the feet of many people with absolutely nothing to do with the kid?

14

Question has already been addressed. Neil Armstrong owns every milimeter of material man mixes his labour with to perpetuate his desires.

If he walks in the wild but has no real desire to claim the dirt that he transformed, then he will not object to any use of it. He has no claim to it.

If your next question is about, “well what happens when he just leaves it there, how do you know he didn’t claim it?” You don’t. But the proprietor fortunately has the burden of proof. Unless he can prove the property was his, he’ll lose it.

Nice red herring.

Fortunately, you have no claim to externalities or nice aesthetics. Cry about the high land prices if you like. Boo hoo hoo, I know, other people’s desires are frustratwing. [:'(]

Yes, unowned land is in fact unowned, thank you for your tautologies.

In any case, this is a straw man relying on the concept that man has claim to externalities. HE DOESN’T!

Oh now you’re going to cry about his “self-ownership” and “exclusion from land forever,” boo hoo.

Self-ownership is a nice right, but self-ownership does not trump self-ownership. [:|]

Hold on! Let me 'zplain! Because the ownership of property is just self-ownership given a few other variables (the concept of ownership is essentially an arithmatic problem) the ownership of property is the self-ownership principle. Your complaints and crys are all dependant on violating another man’s self-ownership in order to make the life of another man more comfortable. This in effect negates self-ownership entirely!

He didn’t say they didn’t. He said that parents take responsibility for their offspring and thus perpatuate their life until they feel the child is able.

But now I know you’re going to come up with “what if he has no parents.” Well, in all likelihood, he does… being a sexually-organic being afterall… but lets assume he’s abandoned. Well, give or take a few days, he’ll either perish or have responsibility taken over him again.

If its practicality thats the problem, I suggest you convert from Georgism.

15

Grant. You’re going about this all wrong.

You’re fighting on his ground, accepting his premises. Don’t accept those premises. They aren’t found in reason anyways.

16

I agree with Niccolo. As I have argued, self-ownership does not include a right to resources - just a right to attempt to appropriate them, and no more.

17

It is a right to self-ownership which doesn’t have to be gifted or purchased and because self can not be separated from physically occupy “land” then we have a conflict when all lands are legally owned and some do not own.

18

But ownership is not required for occupancy. Only permission is required for occupancy. All land is owned now isn’t it?

19

He used to own the footprints, but now he has abandoned them. I guess you can have them.

Yes. But it is not an invasion of anyones’s rights to cause the market price to rise through legitimate acquisition.

20

According to Locke it is only legitimate if enough and as good is left in common for others.

It is a claim on the labor of those who are excluded because they must occupy some location somewhere.