Right to Roam?

Miscellaneous Newbies
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1

Hey, I’m new here, and I didn’t find a better place to post this, so here it goes.

I was talking to my cousins about my libertarian views and they were skeptical on a lot of the points I made. They also had some interesting questions for me, one of which sort of stuck.

They asked me what would happen if somoene decided to buy up a circle of land around a city and deicded to forbid travel across his property, effectively sieging the city. And it doesn’t have to be a city, it can be a village or even one person.

I realize that one answer could be “societal pressure would stop the attacker”, but what if it doesn’t? Furthermore, I believe that libertarianism is not about utilitarian arguments (does capitalism solve), but about moral and “inherent” ones (is capitalism inherent and natural).

Before clearly stating my question, a bit more about what I believe:

I subscribe to the ideas of “natural rights”, or, as I prefer to call them, “rights inherent to our humanity”. For example, right to contract, right to self-posession, and right to not be directly harmed (I have noticed that some of these exist already in the philosophical lingo of the forum, the non-agression axiom being an example).

So my question:

Do humans have some inherent right to roam the land, preventing or in some way deflecting the scenario described? I know this seems to clash with the right (?) to property…

This also brings up my unsettling question of whether we indeed have this inherent right to property and what dictates it, but I will leave that to another post.

2

Only governments have done anything like this. They are the only ones with the economic and military resources to enforce a claim of legitimacy over such an action. Israel springs immediately to mind as a perfect example of exactly what is described here.

I think that there must always be a right to exclude others from your lawful property. There may be a very good reason to exclude someone, might there not? It may be appropriate to do essentially what you describe to a dangerous criminal. You have to replace government with actual society and community. One must ask the question, what sort of person would be allowed by their family and neighbours to be put into such a position? And should such a decision be up to an imperial warlord/globalist bureaucrat in a far-off capitol rather than one’s family and neighbours?

There are certain social prerequisites for a free society. You can’t just vote it in tomorrow at the ballot box.

3

One could still tunnel under or bridge over the property in question.

Dr. Block covers a lot of hypotheticals like this in his book: The Privatization of Roads and Highways.

4

You have to replace government with actual society and community. One must ask the question, what sort of person would be allowed by their family and neighbours to be put into such a position? And should such a decision be up to an imperial warlord/globalist bureaucrat in a far-off capitol rather than one’s family and neighbours?

I don’t understand what you mean. I have heard that there are cases where private citizens have done this.

5

I have heard of private individuals imprisoning others, but that’s not quite the same thing… Imprisoning someone is preventing them from leaving your property, which is clearly coercive. It’s not the same as the hypothetical surrounding of their property with your property, and then denying them entry to your property, thereby effectively imprisoning them without violating the NAP. I think that’s a hypothetical which might technically be possible, but really, it’s so unlikely to be a problem for economic and social reasons that it’s far less of a threat to liberty than the state.

6

One could still tunnel under or bridge over the property in question.

That seems a bit excessive, especially if it is a small entity which is being encircled.

7

Unlikely hypotheticals can be resolved with unlikely solutions :wink:

8

QFT!! I owe you a beer. Let me know when you be in Lithuania.

9

Haha, I don’t have any plans to be in Europe in the near future, but I’ll hold you to that. Let me know if you’re ever in Africa :wink:

10

I don’t find that satisfactory :stuck_out_tongue:

There exist 2 scenarios:

  1. when you own land, you own the airspace above it as well

  2. you don’t own that airspace

If 2 is correct, than the encircled person can build said bridge. BUT the person doing the encircling is just as entitled to build a box around the man in the middle. This doesn’t seem right >.>

If 1 is correct, then the encircled person cannot build a bridge, effectively being imprisoned.

11

You have to ask yourself a lot of questions:

How did they guy get anywhere in the first place? Asssuming he didn’t own a path that got him to wherever, he must have had to go someone else’s property to do so. Maybe there was a contract that said “ya lets me cross yo property, and I pays ya a dollar.” The point is: We need more info; and assuming you speak of a real-world scenario, then there would be more info than what you have provided.

12

I think the more general question is this: can a society devoid of a monopolist of law and force prevent the emergence of a monopolist of law and force? I think the answer is that no one would care to prevent the emergence of a monopolist of law and force except one which attempted to exert jurisdiction upon themselves. Before society can rid itself of the State, it must first stop believing in the State. When people no longer believe in the State, I think it will be really tough going for anybody wanting to start one again. “You can take your tax racket and shove it” would be the response of most people to the attempt to build a State. A slight variation of this question is whether the rules of private property can be “gamed” to build a State while not appearing to break any private property rules. If it is possible, then such a State would not actually be aggressive, then, would it?

Finally, to answer your question directly: since people would have to have been travelling in and out of the town all along, the town residents can easily argue that they have easements along the paths they have customarily used for travel and trade. Even if one individual were to encircle the town and buy up all the property surrounding it, he would not have property rights over the easements themselves and the townpersons could continue to travel over those routes unimpeded.

Clayton -

13

What gives people the property rights over easements?

14

The homesteading principle. The easement was being used before the land surrounding it was.

15

Ah, the utility argument to acquiring private property (which is what my other thread was about). But arguably nomads crisscrossed the land for a while. Do all of those easements still have to be respected? Is private property really holey like swiss cheese due to easements?

16

Of course the natives retained their rights to use the land in the ways in which the had long been using it prior to European invasion. Unfortunately, they had not invented the gunpowder rifle or the advanced military techniques in its use, so they were hopelessly behind technologically and vulnerable to criminal expropriation without recourse.

Clayton -

17

Apropos to Clayton’s posts, there’s also the notion of abandoment to be considered.

18

First of all I think it is prudent to address the issue of how unlikely this is to happen. It would be extremely impractical for a single individual or group of voluntarily associated individuals to to obtain and maintain such a ring of property expressly for the purpose of screwing over the people inside it, especially if it is one of the larger scale examples you gave like a city or town. A corporation couldn’t do it, there would be too many people within the company dissatisfied with the waste of resources and extremely negative PR rep. It would also be hard for a consumer class individual to accomplish this for the obvious reasons of the logistics of the matter. The main threat would be from rouge sadistic billionaires, looking for some entertainment. To this threat (however small it may be) I can think of two answers. Firstly: If the owner(s) of the land inside the ring were previously able to access their land it means one of two things a). they themselves own some land that leads out of the ring in which case this situation can be avoided, or b). they are paying one or more of the owners of the “ring land” for the privilege of traversing their property. If this is the case, I would suggest the owner(s) of the land inside the ring make part of their contract, the ring owner is not allowed to sell his property to anyone attempting to buy up the ring. If the ring owner is unwilling to provide this guarantee, the inside owner can take his business to other ring owners. Failing that, a somewhat less practical solution would be for him to find a way over/under the new ring owners monopoly. If there are other persons inhabiting the inside of the ring, he can then charge them to use his new method of traversing the ring, competing with the monopolizing ring owner. Another problem faced by any would be ring monopolizer is the issue that when the original owners of the ring find he is trying to buy them out, none of them will want to be first to sell because as other ring owners are bought out, there land becomes more valuable.

I hope I have answered your question as this same concept has been used against me by a minarchist friend of mine.

19

I would suggest the owner(s) of the land inside the ring make part of their contract, the ring owner is not allowed to sell his property to anyone attempting to buy up the ring

Well, this sort of relies on the belief of the existence of a ring. Instead, it could very well be some patchwork of properties, and someone happens to buy-up what appears to be a ring. You can’t really make contracts with all the people who could form said ring… Well, you can… This is interesting…

Another interesting question is what happens if all land is bought up and you have new people added to the equation and no one wants them on their land. Do they just disappear in a puff of smoke? I know that this scenario is statistically unlikely and the market would likely solve, but what if it doesn’t?

20

I don’t think using the line of, “but that would never happen!” is an adequate refutation of the scenario if you’re going to be dealing in an absolutist, rights-based defense of libertarianism. That would have more to do with a utilitarian/consequentialist evaluation of the scenario. I agree that such a case would be unlikely and I believe that society at-large would not respect this man’s private property because his ill-will is so evident.

On the other hand though, I don’t think finding loopholes in an ethical system necessarily demolishes it. If you follow the guideline as a rule of thumb, society could be better off. I think most ethical systems are kind of ad hoc because it just serves to justify sentiments that either evolved or were conditioned to us by society. Now that’s not to say I think ethical systems are necessarily arbitrary (because I think it hearkens back to human psychology which is often uniform and means that what is good for one person is often good for another), but it basically just reduces to utility or satisfaction or what have you.