Understood. We can just talk about space, regardless of what matter is occupying it.
I think for the most part, yes. I remember a long time ago reading Rothbard talking about miners’ associations and how in certain parts of the US certain associations had cropped up and helped miners settle disputes between each other and essentially acted as “specialist courts” … they were operated by miners who had detailed understanding of the technicalities of mining which are dominant considerations in setting convenient and harmonious rules. I think the same logic applies to radio frequency… the Amateur Radio Relay League, for example, has been active in setting radio practices and rules for use by amateur radio operators… the system requires a significant amount of specialized knowledge and has worked fairly well, despite the occasional interference of governments.
Clayton -
You’re telling me that I can (ought to be able to) get access to other people’s property in a very specific way: I can be the only one who transmitts radio waves of 95.5 FM frequency through it and prevents others from doing so. (Presumably including the owners themselves).
I want to get another kind of exclusive access: I want to make sure that if other people’s property contains a certain kind of information (which I have produced first), I can control whether or not they will sell that property to others or even give it for free. I cannot control anything else they do with that property (after all, it’s their property), but just this particular aspect.
You will say: in the second case, you’re controlling their property. I will answer: the same is true in the first case.
You will say: in the first case, there is a conflict, in the second there is not. I will answer: yes, there is. (Obviously, since we’re discussing something here.) The conflict in the IP case is that I want you to do X with your property, while you want to do Y with it. And for some consequentialist reasons, I want to be granted easement (or easement-like access) to your property in this specific aspect.
Or, there is the conflict over potential receipients of that information: I want to be the exclusive source of them receiving that information (in whatever form). If you give them the information before me, I won’t be the first source anymore. Herein lies the conflict. (If you wish, actually, this is the same problem with EM “interference”, except there it’s a continuous problem and the conflict is that they don’t receive my information at all.)
Do you see what I’m getting at?
(Btw, EM wave is still a wave. It’s a wave of the space, or electromagnetic field present in the space. So, the wave that goes through your property is not the same “thing” that originated at my property. I am basically saying that I want to dictate whether or not the space that your property occupies will vibrate at a certain frequency… which I have presumably homesteaded.)
@gotlucky: will answer your post soon.
You producing radio waves is not like you producing shoes. Me having the exclusive right to broadcast at X frequency in a certain region and thereby having the right to exclude you from doing the same is not analogous to me having a monopoly on shoe production and having the right to prevent you from making shoes. Strictly speaking, I don’t have the right to prevent you from producing radio waves at X frequency at all, I only have the right to prevent you from transmitting those waves across the medium which I own. By producing your radio waves and broadcasting them, you are in effect trespassing: sending your waves across space which I own - no different than if you were walking across my front lawn.
In the case of broadcasting, I am only controlling your property insofar as I am prohibiting you from sending it through my property. This is “control of other people’s property” in the same way as all prohibitions on trespassing are control over other people’s property. These are entirely legitimate controls, the kind of controls which are the essence of property rights in general: anyone can do what they like with their own property, provided this doesn’t violate someone else’s property rights.
This is entirely unlike IP - to make a copy of a book/cd/film does not violate anyone’s property rights unless one has already assumed that IP is property. Hence, you can’t make the argument for the necessity of IP being property on the basis that in the absence of it there are property rights violations - that’s circular. In other words, my right to prevent you from broadcasting derives from our normal conception of property: I own some particular thing (some region of space). Whereas, my alleged power to prevent you from copying my book does not derive from the normal concept of property as ownership of particulars - but already rests on the very different concept of IP, property in universals rather than particulars.
But you DON’T own that space.
I guess this is a nuance in homesteading. If I used a certain space for purpose X, but not Y, I have homesteaded it for that purpose. If you come and start using the same space for Y, you may do so, as long as Y doesn’t interfere with X. I may not use that space for Y, and you may not use it for X.
This suggests being able to homestead a view.
Right, you have acquired partial ownership in the space. You have the right to use the space in way X (the way you used it), but not in any other ways (because you didn’t use it in any other way).
Right.
I don’t think so. At least by my definition, looking at something doesn’t count as use. I would define use as changing the physical nature or location of something. If the viewer isn’t using the view, strictly speaking, then he can’t homestead it.
Why couldn’t I homestead a space? It’s something which does not bear unlimited simultaneous use by multiple persons - so there’s the potential for conflict of the sort that assignment of property rights helps solve. It is a particular, not a universal (contra IP). It is intersubjectively knowable.
N.B. It sounds a bit odd talking about changing the physical nature/location of a space itself, but I would say that the way one does this (uses a space) is by occupying it with something. So, in this case, that would be radio waves. Or in other cases in might be airplanes, for example - an airline homesteads a route by filling that space with its airplanes, which then no other persons are permitted to occupy with their own airplanes.
Again, you’re obsessing on the material properties and ignoring the nature of the ether itself. We’re all splashing in the same pool all the time. In fact, if I can see your property from my property, it’s becuase electromagnetic waves (visible light) are emanating from it onto mine. David Friedman actually has a blurb on this in MoF (page 86):
But what counts as interfering? If I fire a thousand megawatt laser beam at your front door I am surely violating your
property rights, just as much as if I used a machine gun. But what if I reduce the intensity of the beam—say to the
brightness of a flashlight? If you have an absolute right to control your land, then the intensity of the laser beam
should not matter. Nobody has a right to use your property without your permission, so it is up to you to decide
whether you will or will not put up with any particular invasion.
So far many will find the argument convincing. The next step is to observe that whenever I turn on a light in my house,
or even strike a match, the result is to violate the property rights of my neighbors. Anyone who can see the light from
his own property, whether with the naked eye or a powerful telescope, demonstrates by doing so that at least some of
the photons I produced have trespassed onto his property. If everyone has an absolute right to the protection of his own
property then anyone within line of sight of me can enjoin me from doing anything at all which produces light. Under
those circumstances, my ‘ownership’ of my property is not worth very much.
Basically, things that are passing through you or your property that do not affect you or your property are no concern of yours and cannot fall within your property rights. The key issue here is that emborderment does not always correspond to Euclidean physical space. The real question is “where are the borders?” What are the boundaries? Where are the “property lines”? It turns out that - for the vast majority of things - we can say “right here” and point to a real physical location. But for other things, we cannot point to any place. This shouldn’t be too surprising as even rental agreements, for example, entitle one to property in time, that is, for a duration. Hence, the property lines not only extend in space but also in time. The idea of homesteading radio frequencies is that property lines may also be extended into electromagnetic frequencies.
Clayton -
Imagine that you have a dispute with someone who is also a libertarian today. He agrees to settle the dispute peacefully with you.
Also, note that the dispute is not over the facts, but over definitions. For example, he found a phone you recently lost. He claims that by losing it, you stopped owning it. You claim you still own it. (I don’t really care about the details of the case. This is just an example.)
So, what might happen? Again, I am talking about today, planet Earth, Feb. 4, 2013 CE.
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You guys can let the government decide. But, that’s basically the same as agreeing to use the violence or let some third part apply violence. Unless you guys believe that the government knows what the answer a priori is (hopefully you don’t).
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You guys can put together some sort of court. Maybe consisting of Stephan Kinsella, Walter Block, and Roderick Long. But, the question is: how do they know what the answer is?
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You can try to re-create the world that David Friedman is imagining and let different companies bid for different legal strategies, etc. (Somewhat unrealistic in the short run.)
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You can sit down and try to reason as to whom the phone belongs to really, a priori. (Note that the other guy is willing to agree to any of these solutions. He is also willing to reason with you, but you need to be able to use logic to convince him.) You might use natural rights, religious morality, argumentative ethics, or whatever else.
Another question is: how do you know whom the phone belongs to? Maybe he is right? Again, you can decide that you don’t really know and leave it up to Kinsella et al.'s decision, but how do they know?
My point in this thought experiment is that when we think about the world as it is today and decide whether something is ours or not, whether we would be stealing if we did X (e.g., kept to ourselves a found item, or did not pay the parking meter), whether a certain guy or an organization is an immoral thug or not, we are using some concepts of what is moral or legal a priori, and we are using some definitions for property which we must justify to ourselves.
Unless you think purely in terms of your interests (subjective morality; i.e., what’s good for you is good by definition). In that case:
- You will try to negotiate between using violence and coming to an agreement, depending on each other’s unique strengths and goals. (Something similar to what David Friedman describes here.) Each of you will weigh your desire to keep the phone and your risk of losing a physical fight (plus whatever long-term personal goals you may have in terms of how other people see you or how your character develops) and those of the other.
Clayton,
Yeah, that makes sense, thanks.
This is not the same as agreeing to use violence or let some third party apply violence. The point of going to a court of law is to avoid using violence as a means to resolve disputes. Certainly violence could be a part of the resolution, but that’s true of any system of law. If you agree to use government courts, then you are agreeing to use that particular system of law. If it is being settled in civil court, then it just means that you both are agreeing to use a government judge or possibly use a jury of people that are not experts in resolving disputes hear your case.
This isn’t actually all that different from the above, with the main (and important) exception being that you know the judges aren’t idiots and really do want to reach a fair conclusion. Ultimately, however, two of these people are not experts in dispute resolution and even Kinsella doesn’t have practice in a decentralized setting. He knows the current system very well, so that certainly puts him ahead of the curve because he at least has (hopefully relevant) experience in resolving disputes, though I don’t know how extensive it is (his law website says he has trial experience).
This also isn’t very different from the above scenarios. We just choose which court we want to go to? We’re going to do that anyway.
This is just us arguing between each other without seeking a mediator.
Here’s the main flaw with your scenario: all ownership requires claims. Basically, the scenario is this:
I claim to own a phone, and you respect that claim. I lose my phone, and you find it. I claim that it is still my phone, and you claim that I stopped claiming ownership over it when I lost it. Clearly I am still claiming ownership. You can choose to not respect my claims, but your argument against my claim of ownership over the phone is fundamentally flawed because you are claiming a fact that is clearly false. If you recognized the phone as mine before I lost it, then you must recognize my claim after it is recovered, unless you are okay with being inconsistent. But since you are stating that you will be logically consistent, then you recognize my claim over my phone.
There is a difference between morality and law. Maybe it is moral for you to not pay the parking meter, but it is illegal for you to not pay it at certain times. Maybe it is immoral to not pay the meter, but it is illegal either way.
The whole point of posturing and arguing is to avoid violence. I’m not really sure of what you are getting at here.
When you go to the government’s court, violence is not only a potential part of resolution/enforcement of decision, but also of the decision-making itself. I.e., how does the government know what the right answer in this situation is (whom the phone belongs to)? It knows because 51% voted for it. It knows because if you disagree, it will apply violence to you.
My point is that there should be a good reason for using a certain method for conflict resolution. There needs to be a reason for both parties to agree to. What is that reason in case of the government?
What does “fair conclusion” mean? Fair according to which principles? According to you, there is no a priori law, there is no way to know a priori what the right answer is, just by markets “figuring it out” through pitching different legal schemes (it’s also not clear where they would get the schemes from).
No. The only reason why I respect your claim is that I think the item belongs to you. I don’t respect your claim to moon or to my wallet. Or to a book you’ve written because I don’t believe a priori that information is property. If you sold me an item, I no longer respect your claim to it, even if you continue making it (for instance, if you’re a Gringotts goblin).
Now, when you lost your phone and I found it, the reason for me to respect your claim is not that you continue making it, but because I continue believing that the phone belongs to you.
But how do I know whether it belongs to you or not? My general point is that to answer this question we need to have some kind of a priori reasoning. The answer cannot be: “let’ see what the markets decide in the future”. My decision to return the phone to you or not is not in the future, but today.
(One reason why I may no longer respect your claim to the lost phone is because I may argue that you abandoned it when you lost it. I.e., you were making a claim on the phone which I respected. Then you lost the phone. After you lost it and discovered the loss, you gave up on owning it – imagine that I can assume that because the phone got lost a long time ago, or because it fell into a sea to be washed out and discovered by me later. Because you abandoned it, you stopped claiming it as yours. Which gave me a legitimate reason to keep it once I found it. When you discovered that I found it, you renewed your claim on it, but I no longer have a reason to respect it, because I believe that my claim supersedes yours.
I am not saying I agree with this logic. I am giving an example of a kind of logic leading me to consider the phone no longer yours.)
What I care about is whether it’s fair for me not to pay the meter. (I don’t care about your answer as much as how you arrive to it.) Whether I am comitting injustice by not paying it.
I am not sure what you call by law. If it’s whatever the government said, why should I respect that? If it’s something else, then how do I know what that is if not through a priori reasoning? (I mean today, not in the an-cap future.)
Have you read Roderick Long’s essay on Lysander Spooner? Do you believe that the government’s law must correspond to some meta-concept? Is that concept morality in your opinion? Or some consequentialist principle?
The whole point of law is to resolve disputes through argumentation instead of open conflict, but everyone knows that if argumentation fails, open conflict is a very real possibility. There is no necessary reason why a dispute can’t have a resolution in which is there is violence (beatings, executions, etc.).
Good reason for whom? Answer that, and you can easily see why the government looks out for itself and not the disputants.
Fair as in just. I never said those three could reach a fair conclusion. I only said that we know that they are not idiots and want to reach a fair conclusion.
You are misunderstanding what I wrote. In this particular scenario, I claim to own the phone, and you respect that claim. This does not mean that you respect just any claim that I make, only that in this scenario you are respecting that particular claim. What you said was this:
So if you say that by losing it I stopped owning it, what you are actually saying is that you don’t respect my claim over it anymore. Since he is a libertarian, we know that he believes that possession is not equivalent to ownership. That is, you don’t have to currently be in possession of something in order to own it. So what we are left to conclude is that you are claiming that I abandoned the phone when I lost it, therefore you were then free to claim it as your own.
I am making the point that I never actually abandoned it, as I always maintained my claim. So if you recognized my claim beforehand, you would be inconsistent to not recognize my claim later. And you also said:
So, if logic is all that is required, it’s a simple case. You are being inconsistent if you recognize my claim beforehand but not later, as I never abandoned the phone.
My answer is not to let the markets decide in the future. A priori reasoning will not tell you who it belongs to, because homesteading must always be informed by norms. It will help in general, but it won’t help with the specifics, which I imagine you are interested in.
That’s for you to decide for yourself. It’s a government owned parking space, so if you think the government cannot justly own property, then it’s unjust property. So maybe you have a greater right to that spot than the government. But you will be fined by the government if they catch you, so I would recommend paying the meter.
Well I generally refer to law as a process, but I might refer to law as rules (but usually only because that’s what other people generally mean). The government is based on might makes right. It’s no different from thugs, organized or not. As far as I’m concerned, if the government can truly make laws, then those laws are almost always if not always unjust by virtue of the fact that the government can’t know what justice is. Some governments might be better or closer to what justice actually is, but none can ever know for sure.
So why should you respect what the government says? As Bastiat said, “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.” You are the only one who can ever truly know your own morality. You can’t know what the law ought to be from a priori reasoning anymore than you can know what the correct price of apples ought to be. You can have your own opinions based on your own values as to what the price of apples should be, but prices aren’t there for just you. Like prices, law is not there for just you. In fact, if it were just you, there would be no need for prices or law.
I have not. Do you have a link? But as far as your questions go, as long as we have government law, of course I want its law to coincide with what I believe, which is necessarily informed by my morality. Just by virtue of the fact that I’m a human means that I want any law to coincide with my own beliefs. But so does everyone else. So the question isn’t “whose belief do we go with” but “what system do we go with?”
My answer to that is: “Decentralize!”
This is the essay I was referring to. I will answer your comment later, time permitting.
praxeology.net/Spooner-Krakow.doc
And what is just? Presumably, giving to someone what is his due. And what is his due? Well, whatever he owns (not controls, but possesses and ought to control). But what one owns depends on one’s view of the law.
I feel like you get bogged down in my examples, but you don’t see the reason I brought them. My point is that we have to have an a priori understanding of what fair/just/due/property is in order to decide how to resolve the conflicts today. (We can also use the government, but that it’s resorting to violence.)
I agree with you that a priori law may not give all the details. Local customs may matter. For instance, if I collide into a car head-on, and I was driving on the left side of the road, in the US I am clearly at fault (not from the government’s point of view, but from fairness/justness point of view), but in the UK not necessarily. But we must decide a priori that if I was driving on the “wrong” side of the street (that on which people customarily do not drive), I am at fault.
I think the same must be true about a priori economic reasoning: we can’t predict what will happen to the economy without knowing all the details. A priori reasoning will only provide the general principles.
By the way, going back to the original question of radiowave frequency homesteading, I talked about this with a friend, and he asked me: why, when someone homesteads the land, he doesn’t homestead it for all possible uses in the future?
I also think that people are simplifying conflict in this case. A conflict is disagreement of people over uses of some resource. The resource in question here is space of my farm (the farm I have homesteaded previously by plowing some earth). I should be able to determine what happens to it just 'cause I want to.
I’m not certain, but I think the etymology of the word “just” lies in justification (explanation) - what is just is what can be explained. So, if you can explain your reasons for doing X, and those reasons are morally compelling, then you have acted justly (justifiably). Someone once found this explanation I gave useful:
Clayton -
How does one know what is justifiable or morally compelling? Here is an excerpt of something I read elsewhere:
Why should someone get the right to control his money over a person who needs that money to survive? Note that I don’t care about the government here. I mean what is fair and moral: if someone takes someone else’s money by force because he needs it for medicine, should we let him keep it? Should he not have a moral problem himself stealing it, since he needs it more? I.e., why should we assign primacy of will based on homesteading rather urgency of use (determined in whatever way, possibly by a third party) or some societal purpose?
Some people may argue that this is a rather arbitrary way of determining the primacy of use. Who gets to be the judge? I am not convinced this is a good argument. First of all, a person may ask someone who he thinks is impartial to judge what is more urgent: e.g., to send one’s kids to a university or to pay off mortgage. Second, we will need to use third-party expertise to judge the evidence over first-come use (homesteading) as well. I need to have some evidence as to whether I used something first.
Admittedly, such evidence can be much clearer than arbitrary judgement of urgency. So, perhaps this is the answer: dividing property up based on who took possession first is less arbitrary than dividing property up based on urgency of use. After all, how do you determine what’s more important: to send kids to a university or to pay off mortgage?
But a bleeding-heart liberal (or libertarian) may argue that in all such dubious cases, rely on homesteading, but in the clear case of life-and-death (or health) vs. luxury, give precedence to that which maintains life…
Really? You have no opinions about someone’s behavior when they try to justify their actions to you? If your wife cheated on you and tried to explain, you wouldn’t know if it was justifiable or morally compelling one way or the other?
So, what are the rules that you use? Intuition?
If I was giving money as charity either someone trying to survive or someone trying to go to college, I’d give it to someone trying to survive. So, trying to survive is a good compelling reason for a thief to steal money that is luxury to someone else. Why not? (Saying because it’s the other person’s property would be begging the question. We are trying to assign property based on moral principles and justice here.)