The moon has not been homesteaded. The men who landed there pinned a flag in the lunar surface and took home some rocks. This is by no means bringing the land into productive use. Much like if the British found some new land, pinned the Union Jack in the ground, and took home some soil samples.
If I were to abandon my farm or my field then it would be unowned and up for grabs, no matter where it is. This is in contrast with what Rothbard writes in MES.
If we are delving into extremes, do you think that I can go about the forest, polishing each tree with my hankerchief, “mixing my labour” the forest, and declaring my ownership in perpetuity?
I don’t think you disproved anything in your last post. Or perhaps its me who can’t fathom what you’re trying to say. In my mind it’s crystal clear. If A doesn’t want his land he can either:
Sell it to someone
If nobody is willing to buy it he can bequeath it as a gift
abandon it
After abandonment he can re-homestead it if he likes, if nobody has done so in the meantime. The moment the property has been abandoned it ceases being property, and becomes unowned again.
It seems the same as if someone homesteaded an underground lair 300 feet under my house. If they decide to remove that lair and my house then collapses into the hole, is that not the same situation? Since this is a more normal question, maybe it has an answer already. Maybe we’ve already encountered this exact situation (e.g. subways, sewer systems, etc.).
It’s weird because everyone seems to be talking about homesteading like “it’s the rules; we just follow them.” The question we should be asking is, “Why should property rights be respected?” The answer to that question would seem to provide a lot of guidance for answering the question, “Given what we identified to be the point of property rights, how might we want to think about original appropriation and the persistence of property claims over time?” But the first question is foundational, and without it, no answer to the second will be possible.
Why would that be true? That is, what is the basis of the right to property (why ought people to respect property claims?), and why would the capacity to physically alter something be a necessary condition for ownership?
The basis of the right to property is that of first occupancy in order to establish exclusive control over objects in order to avoid conflict. The capacity to physically alter something would be a necessary condition for ownership because, if you physically alter something and then someone else comes along and physically alters it another way, then there would be a conflict as there would be more than one controller.
The conflicts are bad because, by appropriating resources, we demonstrate our preference for jurisdiction over certain physical quantity. If we did actually want someone to control our resources, we would transfer our jurisdiction over said physical quantity over to them. However, without this kind of transfer we continue to demonstrate our preference for jurisdiction over our property, and as such property rights exist to uphold our demonstrated preference for that which we have appropriated whether through initial homesteading or transfer from another person.
Well but demonstrating a preference for something doesn’t generate a duty in others to respect your preference. If I use some stuff you had been using before, I demonstrate a preference for having your stuff, much like the preference you demonstrated by using it before me. Why does your getting there first generate a duty in me to not use the object in question?
Two answers, both philosophical and subject to obvious violation from which people will not follow.
It is the inherent right of a person to possess and maintain control over his possessions without infringement by others. God affords this right for man giving it to him. God is the ultimate authority, ergo, if one does not respect rights in this life, the LORD will deal with them in the next.
As a rule, possession rights generate the best society for people to live in. If people want the best society to live in, they should generally accept and promote the right to possession.
I don’t think that appeal to God can really settle this issue, so I suppose I’d ask if we could avoid invoking divine authority, since it’ll either involve a debate over scripture which I’m not qualified to have, or a debate I’m really not excited to have over whether claims about God’s will are even relevant in discussing ethics. Hopefully we can appeal to a considerable tradition in theology which claims that although God is infallible and right, we should be able to understand what’s right and what’s wrong through reason. That way we can avoid getting side tracked in a religious debate.
With regard to your second point, I’d hesitantly identify that justification as rule utilitarian in nature. If we think about property rights in that way, I’m not sure that such a claim determines exactly what rule we should advocate with regard to star ownership. That is, it’s not clear why we’d want one rule over another in this arena, since I’m not sure whether any rule would make a difference to anyone’s life in a foreseeable way. Accordingly, we’d likely want to take the stance that in our current state of affairs, it’s not necessary to determine what rule would be best for star ownership. Once we develop to a point where stars are scarce, perhaps then we will be in a better position to evaluate the social desirability of one rule over another, but until then, it seems reasonable to say that we should have no rule at all.
I’d point out, however, that rule utilitarianism is not the only way to justify property rights, and also that it’s not entirely clear that a rule utilitarian would support a libertarian homesteading theory of property rights. It seems reasonable to me that if we are looking only at the overall consequences as viewed from some collective standpoint (e.g., from behind the veil of ignorance), we might want rules that are more flexible than the ones that libertarians generally advocate. A variant of mutualism, perhaps, or sufficientarianism – or perhaps a softer liberalism – might be more appealing, since those systems might systemically provide opportunities for net gains in wellbeing due to opportunities offered to the least well off. I’m not saying that those systems are in fact more consistent with rule utilitarianism – a libertarian private property structure might in fact produce the best overall outcomes – but if it were true that one of those other systems produced better social outcomes, the rule utilitarian would be compelled to accept that there is nothing wrong with rejecting the libertarian view.
On the other hand, the preceding has assumed that when you said “best” in your reply, you meant the sort of thing that a rule utilitarian means by “best,” which is more or less that people would generally be happiest in that society. It’s quite possible that you meant something else by “best,” in which case I’d ask you to clarify exactly what makes a society “good.”
Where did I say that it generates a “duty” for someone to respect your preferences, or that there are any “duties” in the first place? I mean simply that the only way to have a norm, which we establish to avoid conflict (if we did not want to establish norms to avoid conflict, we would simply engage in violence), is to have only one controller of each scarce object, of which control is necessarily exclusive (i.e. there can only be one controller at a time, and having another person come in to control it is conflict.)
Whether one should adopt this value is up to the valuer himself.
Are you saying that if people were behind a veil of ignorance they would agree to use rule-utilitarianism to decide the proper institutions to select? Why will people behind the veil of ignorance choose rule-utilitarianism instead of the minimax principle?