I wander what happens to “public ownership” in an anarcho-capitalist society. Sometimes it’s difficult to individualize who owns certain things, because many people benefit simultaneously from it, before anyone claims its ownership. According to Rodering Long:
“Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it’s hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time the way is cleared and a path forms — not through any coordinated efforts, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking by that way day after day. The cleared path is the product of labor — not any individual’s labor, but all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.”
Now, given that those paths are somewhat public, their management should be of the same nature, public. The less evil solution to manage that property is, i think, democratically, by direct voting of every individual who directly benefits of it. Is it conceivable in an anarcho-capitalist society, where every property should have only one owner? Or am I missing something?
I thought about this question too when I was reading Atlas Shrugged and Midas Mulligan basically owns all of “Galt’s Gulch.” She (Rand) basically avoids talking about this problem by she implying that all the residents of the Gulch are always in total unanimous agreement and consent about questions of land ownership. It would have been interesting to see a dispute with Mulligan be taken to their only arbitrator, Judge Narrangansett.
For obvious economic reasons deriving from the division of labor, it is not possible for all of a city to be owned by a single owner. However one can own property that is within another property, such that the land can be owned by one owner but the different buildings by different owners.
This got me musing, and here is my musing, and I offer it as a speculative answer.
is homesteading an intenional act or is it not?.
if it is then any walkers who may have been said to ‘un-intentionally homestead’ the land as they contributed their snippet of 'so called-labour" to it perhaps did no such thing. the ‘labour’ would be an accidental by product, an externality outside of the consideration of the acting parties, as such the villagers that mindlessly constructed the path through unhomesteaded property whilst they went about their intentional business did none of them homestead it.
Rather the first person to homestead it,
homesteaded it.
Maybe this was the first person that left a marginal trail and asserted a property right over it. maybe he consented for a time to let other people use the path, until later choosing to change the terms of use for the property, this original may have bequethed property rights to his inheritor, or may have even abandoned it. thus leaving it for the next person who intentionally homesteaded it, to homestead it. if it moves privatize it, if it doesn’t move privatize it, as everything either moves or doesnt…
Why is it unlikely? Seems to me that such a region would be founded by one rich anarchist who would then invite all his friends to come live with him. Like in Atlas Shrugged.
I dunno maybe. Probably would just need to buy the land to have control. Because then you can always kick people out. I mean…wouldn’t you just rather own the land?
Ok whoa. So I buy this big chunk of land in the midwest. I call it the Bloom Anarchy Region. All you guys come live there. You rent the land from me. You build things on the land. Don’t I own everything you own because I can just take it whenever I want? I mean…you guys are just renting my property from me.
Essentially a contract would need to be formulated stating what will happen to the property if we were to leave it. It would probably include compensation for the value of the house.